“Everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class.” – Isaac Asimov

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• Why do students still pay study apps when ChatGPT makes courses for free?
• How did 2 college dropouts grow a study app to 5 million users?
• Where can you still charge for learning that ChatGPT gives away?
• Why did a flashcard app’s store rank fall 56 spots after AP exam week?
• What share of MOOC signups ever finish the course?
• How much can a general-topic course app earn in 12 months when adults won’t pay much?
• Why are publishers clipping library courses into 90-second lessons?
• How many points did Google’s adaptive reader beat a standard ebook on recall?
  

💎 Why It Matters

AI apps can make a personalized course on any topic, however niche, for free.

🔍 Problem

You want to learn a niche topic and all you have are scattered resources.

💡 Solution

AI apps turn any topic or your class notes into a short course, so you learn what you need when you need it.

🏁 Players

Course Generator Apps

• Oboe • Courses from one prompt, with podcast-style audio.
• BeFreed • Audio learning plans toward a personal goal.
• NerdSip • 5-minute courses on any topic.
• Wondering • 3-minute lessons from a topic, link or PDF.

AI Study Apps

• Turbo AI • Lessons and quizzes from lectures and uploads.
• Knowt • Flashcards and practice tests, plus school licenses.
• Gizmo • Gamified flashcards and quizzes from your notes.
• Quizlet • Study sets and practice tests from notes.
  

🔮 Predictions

• Course libraries will cut their courses into 90-second lessons.
  • Coursera tied its short feed to learners who drop courses they start.
  • Its Ollie app clips 90-second lessons from Coursera’s library and quizzes you after each.
• Textbooks will turn into lessons at each student’s level.
  • Students using Google’s Learn Your Way scored 11 points higher on a recall test than students with a standard digital reader.
  • ScrollEd turns textbooks into feeds of video, audio and quizzes.
• AI course apps will earn most of their money from one exam, like the NCLEX or the bar.
  • General course app NerdSip shows $16,733 in revenue over its last 12 months.
  • New apps keep launching for single exams, like Synaptiq AI NCLEX prep in September.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Launch a study app for one high-stakes exam that plans each day until test day.
  • Knowt’s daily revenue roughly doubled in AP exam week after it put practice features behind a paywall.
  • Oncourse AI builds separate study plans for each exam, from the USMLE to the bar.
• Charge for certificates at the end of AI-made courses.
  • Coursiv sells “AI Certificates” and drew 3,188 App Store ratings in 8 months.
  • Its site promises a certificate in 28 days.
• Make audio courses built around one goal, like negotiating a raise.
  • Nemonic turns goals into audio lessons of 5 to 60 minutes.
  • BeFreed raised a $2.5M seed for personalized audio plans.
• Launch an exam app for one profession in one country.
  • A Portuguese study app for Brazilian medical students made $147,600 in a year from 110,364 accounts.
  • Marrow sells NEET PG prep for India’s medical exam to doctors in one country.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Exam Cliff • Plan for students who cancel after test day, since Knowt fell 56 App Store spots after it added a paywall during exam week.
• Format Changes • Budget to rewrite your question bank when the test changes, since the SAT moved to a shorter format.
• Small Wallets • Check what adults pay for general courses before you build for them, since NerdSip shows $16,733 in revenue in a year.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Charge for the exam plan once the course turns free. Oboe made course generation free from one prompt. Students still pay for help passing their exams.
• Build for people who have to learn. Wondering counts 100+ paying users after 12,000 learners. People studying for exams, licenses and jobs spend more.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• The course is now the free sample. Students pay for the score.
• Curiosity gets the hobby budget. Exams get the real one.
  

😠 Haters

“ChatGPT teaches anything for free. Why would I pay for a course app?”
Build an app around one exam’s test date and syllabus. It drills the questions each student keeps missing. Turbo AI’s founders report 8-figure revenue at about $20 a month.

“Nobody finishes an online course.”
Keep lessons to a few minutes and tie them to a fixed deadline, like an exam date. Only 4% of people who signed up for Penn’s courses on Coursera finished them.

“Students will let the app study for them and remember nothing.”
Sell quizzes that bring back what each student missed, so the student does the work. In a Stockholm University study of 27,000 students, AI users saw higher homework scores, and students who kept similar homework time showed small losses on closed-book exams.

🔗 Links

1. TBPN Interview With Oboe’s Founders • Mignano and Zicherman on why they bet on prompt-made courses.
2. From Dorm Room to 10,000 Users in 24 Hours • How a study app hit 10,000 users in a day from one post.
3. Revolutionize Your Digital Products With AI Insights From Gemma Bonham-Carter • How a course creator pairs micro AI tools with lessons so students implement.
4. A 4 Part Framework for AI for Course Creators • How Heights Platform’s founder uses GPT assistants inside online courses.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0189: Instant Course Apps has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 36 Players (350% more)
• 8 Predictions (167% more)
• 8 Opportunities (100% more)
• 5 Risks (67% more)
• 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 9 Links (125% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which audio course app reached $100,000 in annual revenue 6 weeks after its paywall?
• (📈 Pro) Which exam-prep company sells to 2,000 firms, including the Big 4?
• (📈 Pro) Which 2 school districts banned most student AI this fall?
• (📈 Pro) Why will human-checked lessons become a selling point?
• (📈 Pro) What did the best-funded course app switch to 5 months after its launch page?
• (📈 Pro) Which publisher already pairs its videos with an AI tutor?
• And much more…

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This week’s Founder Finds includes:

💻 An agent orchestrator
🔀 A terminal multiplexer
🧲 Effective customer outreach
🐜 An AI-native company case study
💰 Help Scout’s growth to $35M ARR
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Your brand is more than a logo, it’s a promise.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

💻 T3 Code shared by Elie Steinbock
An open-source dashboard to orchestrate coding agents

🐜 How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World shared by Hitesh Kar
How Spawn uses a large fleet of permanent AI agents

🔀 Rex shared by Gabriel
A modern multiplexer to manage multiple terminals

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🇪🇸 Dru Riley published How I Learned Spanish While Running, on stacking a language onto a daily run

🤝 Shivam booked the first sponsor for Open Source Alternatives

⭐ Elie Steinbock reached 6,000 GitHub stars with Rakazo

📥 Knight re-launched HookFeed

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

More delivery and ride apps will pay their drivers to collect AI training data between jobs.

AI labs need data they can’t find online, like first-person video of chores or speech in less common languages. Delivery and ride apps have millions of verified drivers with phones and spare minutes between jobs.

In March 2026 DoorDash launched Tasks, an app that pays couriers to film chores and record speech. DoorDash has more than 8 million couriers who can pick up these tasks. Uber tested paid data tasks inside its driver app in 12 Indian cities.

A data startup has to find and vet each contributor first, so its data costs more to collect than data from a gig app.

From Trends PRO #0187, Data-for-Cash Apps. See the predictions on who collects AI data next.

🔧 TRY THIS

Would You Mail a Potato to Reach a Customer?

Once a customer has your product working, they ignore emails from your team. Jake Sciotto gets replies by sending short, personal messages that don’t feel like corporate email.

• Show them their rank. 1 message tells a user they’re in the top 10 of all PostHog MCP users. Telling them they rank high gets a faster yes than “quick call?”
• Make the trade explicit. Jake Sciotto’s opener spells out the deal: 30 minutes of your time for PostHog merch, reply yes or no.
• Sound like a person. Jake Sciotto says replies came from sounding human, not from the merch. 1 silent account got a potato with his face on it.

🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK

📣 Boringlaunch — Boost your SEO and sales

🧿 HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors

💵 StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast

☁️ OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK

Launch a cheaper hosted copy of an app that just raised its prices.

Each customer gets the same email when an app raises its prices. Each of them could buy your cheaper copy. On October 1, 2026 beehiiv raised its Lite plan from $109 to $139 /mo at 10,000 subscribers.

Rebuild the features its customers use with an AI coding agent and run the copy on cheap servers. Charge close to what it costs to run. MailCheap rebuilt beehiiv this way. It charges $19 /mo for a weekly email to 4,000 readers, against $109 on beehiiv Lite.

The publishing platform Ghost gives its code away and sells the hosting. It earns $11.15M a year.

From Trends PRO #0188, Reverse-Engineered Apps. See the opportunities in rebuilding the apps that raise prices.

🎧 LISTEN TO

Would You Take the Money That Triples Your Company?

Techstars turned an $18,000 investment into $2.5M and Help Scout grew to over $35M in revenue. But founder Nick Francis still regrets taking outside funding and would skip raising investor money if he could do it over.

• Count the return before you judge it. $18,000 for 6% came back as roughly $2.5M. The company tripled between 2015 and 2018.
• Name what the money changed. Francis says he’d have done it differently and wouldn’t have raised. On growth: double the business and you look up needing to double it again.
• Watch where it lands. He stepped down as CEO in late 2025. On what comes next, his promise is that it’s bootstrapped, with no institutional capital.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Open-source copies of paid software, called when Cal.com was still Calendso.

In May 2021 we said free, open-source copies of paid software would keep coming. Our list paired each copy with the paid tool it competed with, like Calendso for Calendly and Supabase for Google’s Firebase.

Calendso renamed itself Cal.com that September and raised $25M in April 2022. Supabase raised money at a $5B valuation in October 2025.

Two others on our list stopped adding features. Papercups was an Intercom copy that went into maintenance mode. Athens was a copy of the note-taking app Roam that is no longer maintained. We were right that many copies would appear and wrong about how many would survive.

That was Trends PRO #0063, Micro-SaaS. See the open-source alternatives we listed in 2021.

🔧 TRY THIS

60 Seconds to Your First Competitive Insight

HeadsUp is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that watches your market 24/7.

It doesn’t just tell you what changed… It tells you what to do about it.

🏆 #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt

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• See what you’ve been missing (pricing, features, positioning)
• Know what to do about it, not just what happened
• Get weekly briefs summarizing what matters

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The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🖍️ Paper.design – Agentic Design Tool

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Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“The hottest new programming language is English.” – Andrej Karpathy

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• How did Marc Lou rebuild beehiiv in a few prompts?
• Which open-source scheduler reached $326,687 /mo by selling to AI agents?
• How can you earn from open-source apps?
• Why did a $31,000/mo tool spawn two free rebuilds in October?
• How does Ghost earn millions from hosting when anyone can run its code free?
• How did a viral decompiler’s lookalike repo ship a trojan?
• Why are coding agents starting to decompile desktop apps, not just websites?
  

💎 Why It Matters

Paid software tools now get rebuilt in days and sold for less.

🔍 Problem

You pay more each year for software that barely changes.

💡 Solution

Anyone can rebuild a paid tool with AI and sell the copy for less.

🏁 Players

Open-Source Alternatives

• Postiz • Buffer alternative that AI agents can drive.
• Ghost • Publishing platform that sells hosting of its free code.
• MailCheap • beehiiv rebuild billed per email sent.
• Plausible • Cookie-free analytics on one lightweight dashboard.
• Rybbit • Google Analytics alternative with a paid cloud.
• TryPost • Flat-priced scheduler for unlimited accounts and seats.
• Opencom • Intercom rebuild with live chat and tickets.
• Minilytics • Free DataFast rebuild on Cloudflare’s free plan.

App Cloning Tools

• Hex-Rays IDA MCP • The IDA disassembler’s official connector for AI agents.
• REA • Lets coding agents take apart compiled apps.
• ai-website-cloner-template • Claude Code template that rebuilds any site.
  

🔮 Predictions

• Software price increases will push more customers to rebuild the subscription tool and sell cheaper copies.
  • Marc Lou rebuilt beehiiv with prompts after its 3rd price increase.
  • New GitHub repos calling themselves an “open source alternative” rose from 378 to 1,427 year over year.
• Most new open-source copies of paid tools will be built for AI agents to run.
  • Postiz grew from $45,000 /mo to $326,687 by October after selling to AI agents.
  • MailCheap lets agents run any action through one connector.
• Projects that sell hosting of their open-source code will bar rival hosts in their licences.
  • MinIO archived its community repo and steers users to its paid AIStor.
  • Redis switched to host-blocking licences that stop cloud providers reselling it.
  • HashiCorp moved Terraform to a licence that bars rival hosts.
  • Its users forked it as OpenTofu instead of paying for HashiCorp’s hosted version.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Launch a cheaper hosted rebuild of a tool that just raised its prices.
  • beehiiv raised Lite plan 30% to $139 /mo at 10,000 subscribers on October 1.
  • MailCheap showed $421 from 19 subscriptions 9 days after launch.
• Run managed hosting for one popular open-source app.
  • Clawdi shows $2,015 /mo hosting managed OpenClaw for buyers who do not want to run their own server.
  • SetupClaw shows $1,432 /mo setting OpenClaw up for buyers.
• Ship an open-source tool that AI agents can operate end-to-end.
  • TryPost ships a connector so Claude or Cursor can schedule posts.
  • Postbase lets Claude and ChatGPT post to social networks.
• Start a directory of open-source alternatives for one category.
  • OpenAlternative earns $6,183 /mo from its directory.
  • Google suggests “beehiiv open source alternative” as people type.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Lookalike Malware • Install clone tools from the official repo, since a REA lookalike shipped a trojan.
• Legal Claims • Rebuild from public docs and APIs, since an IP scholar doubts ArtCraft’s clean-room claim.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Raise prices and customers become competitors. Marc Lou launched a rebuild the month beehiiv’s new prices went live.
• Rebuild the tool you resent paying for. Other people resent it too.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• Software margins reflected how expensive it was to copy code. Emailing 10,000 people weekly costs about $4 /mo to send at SES list rates.
• The SaaS stock selloff was a pricing correction. Software was priced for a world where copying it took 1 team and 1 year before AI agents could rebuild apps in days.
  

😠 Haters

“You can build a mail server. Nobody will deliver your email.”
Self-hosted mail is hard to keep out of spam folders. Amazon’s email service puts an account under review when 5% of its emails bounce, so most rebuilds send through a managed provider like Amazon SES and remove subscribers who stopped opening.

“AI-written code is full of security holes.”
AI-generated code passes security checks 56% of the time. Read the code that touches money and logins first.

“Anyone can clone your clone of a paid tool.”
Marc Lou’s paid analytics tool DataFast made $31,114 in 30 days and still drew 2 free rebuilds in October. Nevo David asks people to launch Postiz alternatives on purpose, since each launch post mentions him and sends him buyers.

“Clones of clones make selling rebuilds a race to the bottom.”
Prices fall toward what an app costs to run. Nevo David saw rivals in his niche earning under $1,000 /mo, so he paused features for 2 months to make Postiz faster and more reliable. Compete on reliability and charge for it.

🔗 Links

1. The SaaSpocalypse Is Here • An engineer has Claude rebuild an email app on $250 of credits.
2. Beehiiv Creators Buzz About a Price Increase • Creator pushback on the hike that made rebuilds look cheaper.
3. Cal.com After a $25M Series A • How an open-source Calendly copy turned free code into paid seats.
4. Ghost 6.0 and $100M Publisher Earnings • Why open-source publishing still funds a growing hosted business.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0188: Reverse-Engineered Apps has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 50 Players (355% more)
• 8 Predictions (167% more)
• 8 Opportunities (100% more)
• 4 Risks (100% more)
• 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 9 Links (125% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which scheduler charges a flat $19 for unlimited accounts?
• (📈 Pro) Which help desk bundles $10 of AI usage into each seat?
• (📈 Pro) What share of teams already swapped a SaaS tool for an in-house build?
• (📈 Pro) Which scheduler sells its pro features for $299 once?
• (📈 Pro) Which host pays app authors 20% of what it earns?
• (📈 Pro) Which fast-growing mail server has had no commits since June?
• And much more…

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📖 160+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

🖍️ An agentic design tool
📄 Making sites agent ready
⚡ $50M ARR with under 50 people
🌙 Simple morning and evening rituals
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Tiny habits can change your life in a decade.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🖍️ Paper.design shared by Gabriel
A tool for designers and AI agents to work together on one canvas

📄 AgentReady shared by Elie Steinbock
A guide to making websites usable for AI agents

📸 Stillio shared by Hitesh Kar
A tool for taking scheduled screenshots of any website

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🎯 Dru Riley published Why “Systems Not Goals” Is a Trap, on picking the target before you build the system

⌨️ Shivam launched Open Source Alternatives

⏩ Eddie Forson wrote about the acceleration of AI

📱 Elie Steinbock launched the Inbox Zero Android app

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Large online stores will make shopping agents prove who they are before letting them buy.

Shopping agents are AI assistants that browse a store and check out for you. Meta’s Muse passed 730,000 downloads in its first 5 days.

Amazon blocked it from shopping there 12 days after launch. They said Muse’s orders look like a person placed them.

Visa and Cloudflare already built the fix. Their Trusted Agent Protocol, launched in October 2025 with Shopify, Stripe and Adyen among 12 partners, stamps a registered agent’s identity onto each request. The biggest stores will let in the agents that register and turn away the rest.

From Trends PRO #0185, Proactive AI Agents. See the players deciding which agents can buy.

👀 WATCH THIS

How Do You Reach $50M ARR With Fewer Than 50 People?

Gamma hit 50 million users and $50M in revenue with under 50 people. Grant Lee’s early lesson: friends are nice; strangers tell you what’s broken.

• Recruit the first 1,000 by hand. Grant Lee started with friends, then asked each early user for a call. 50 to 80 said yes.
• Be your own time cop. Without a fixed deadline you think you’re moving fast and lose track of how fast you’re really moving.
• Watch what a budget does. Give a team a budget and they spend every dollar. Same rule as deadlines: the money gets used up.

🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK

📣 Boringlaunch — Boost your SEO and sales

🧿 HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors

💵 StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast

☁️ OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK

Launch an agency that sells creators’ unused video to more than one AI lab.

Creators have unpublished footage and AI labs pay for it. OpenAI and Google pay up to $4 a minute for YouTubers’ unpublished videos. Troveo has paid content owners more than $20 million for unused footage.

Troveo takes exclusive AI-training rights, so its creators sell each clip through Troveo alone. A non-exclusive license lets them sell to every lab that wants the footage.

Take a cut of each sale. Start with footage labs ask for, like gaming or robotics.

From Trends PRO #0187, Data-for-Cash Apps. See the players paying creators for unused video.

🔧 TRY THIS

Why Should Your Devices Go Off 60 Minutes Before Bed?

Your day has 2 bookends: the first 45 to 90 minutes after waking and the last 45 to 90 before sleep. Patrick Buggy calls them Daily Bookends.

• Build an AM Bookend. The morning ritual gets you ready for the day. Pick how you want to feel, then pick the habits that get you there.
• Build a PM Bookend. The evening ritual helps you wind down. Turn off your devices 60 minutes before going to bed.
• Run the same recipe daily. Same results need the same routine: same goal, same habits, same cadence.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Freemium, called 4 weeks before Adobe bid $20 billion for Figma.

In August 2022 we said free plans would help challengers undercut paid rivals. Our example was Figma, which had reached a $10 billion valuation while competing with Adobe’s paid tool, XD.

In September 2022 Adobe agreed to buy Figma for $20 billion. After European and UK regulators objected, Adobe dropped the deal in December 2023 and paid Figma a $1 billion breakup fee.

We were right that a free plan could win customers from a paid rival. Adobe stopped adding features to XD. Figma ended its first day of trading in July 2025 worth about $68 billion.

That was Trends PRO #0093, Freemium. See the freemium predictions we made in 2022.

🔧 TRY THIS

60 Seconds to Your First Competitive Insight

HeadsUp is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that watches your market 24/7.

It doesn’t just tell you what changed… It tells you what to do about it.

🏆 #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt

Get 90 days of competitor intelligence in 60 seconds with HeadsUp:

• See what you’ve been missing (pricing, features, positioning)
• Know what to do about it, not just what happened
• Get weekly briefs summarizing what matters

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The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
⏱️ Screen-Time Data MCP

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Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“There’s nothing artificial about AI. It’s inspired by people, it’s created by people…” – Fei-Fei Li

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• How did a call-recording app hit #2 on the App Store and go dark the next day?
• How much can a dying startup get for its Slack messages and code?
• Who pays poets $150 an hour to grade AI?
• Why are labs paying for calls and chores they cannot scrape from the public web?
• Why did a robot company spend $15 million in one year on home chore video?
• Why can a delivery or ride app turn millions of couriers into data collectors overnight?
• Where are AI labs paying four dollars a minute for footage creators never published?
• Why are some data apps moving from one-time payouts to revenue sharing with contributors?
  

💎 Why It Matters

Apps now pay for data that AI labs can’t find.

🔍 Problem

Frontier labs have already trained on most of the public web.

The data they need next sits on your phone and inside private companies.

💡 Solution

Apps pay for your calls, photos and videos, then sell them to AI labs.

🏁 Players

Apps That Pay for Your Data

• Kled • Pays for photos, videos and lab-ordered tasks.
• Silencio • Pays for voice recordings in local languages.
• Neon • Dialer that pays you to record calls.

AI Trainer Platforms

• Mercor • Doctors, lawyers and bankers grading model output.
• DataAnnotation • Expert network for paid writing and coding tasks.
• micro1 • AI recruiter staffing lab and robot data work.

Company Data Marketplaces

• SimpleClosure • Sells closing startups’ code and workspace data.
• Mercor • Licenses companies’ Slack, email and code to labs.
• Sunset • Wind-down firm reselling client data through Replay.

Microtask Apps

• Figure Index • Pays people to film household chores.
• DoorDash Tasks • Couriers paid to film chores and record speech.
• Uber AI Solutions • Paid data tasks inside the Uber Driver app.
  

🔮 Predictions

• Robot makers will pay people to film chores at home.
  • Figure has paid $15M to people filming chores.
  • micro1 hired thousands of workers in 50+ countries to film laundry, dishes and cooking.
• Gig apps will pay workers to collect AI data between jobs.
  • DoorDash launched a Tasks app that pays couriers to film chores and record speech.
  • Uber piloted paid data tasks for drivers in 12 Indian cities.
• Voice apps will pay extra for recordings in languages AI models handle badly.
  • Indigenius pays a 50% bonus for under-represented languages.
  • Babel Audio focuses on English conversation, so rarer languages stay scarce.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Build a network of experts who grade AI answers for one profession.
  • Mercor passed $2B gross annualized revenue.
  • Mercor pays poets $150 an hour to grade verse.
  • Surge AI made $1.2B in 2024 with no outside funding.
• Start a review site that ranks which data apps and AI trainer gigs actually pay.
  • RemoWork publishes guides to chore-filming apps.
  • AI Training Jobs Finder reviews single AI-training platforms.
  • Test each app’s payouts yourself and update the rankings monthly.
• Help companies license their tickets, docs and code to AI labs each year.
  • micro1 pays $100,000+ for an enterprise data partnership with a company.
  • Turing’s Project Lazarus buys records up to $1M.
  • A company that shuts down sells its tickets, docs and code once. One that keeps running can license them each year.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Consent Lawsuits • Record only people who agreed, since one-sided recording already drew a class action.
• Store Removal • Expect app-store crackdowns on apps that pay for home bandwidth or sensitive recordings, since Google disables residential proxy apps that pay users that way.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Chase the rare data. People earn a few dollars a month sharing bandwidth and experts earn up to $150 an hour grading AI answers.
• Get proof of consent. Labs pay more for data they can show people agreed to share.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• The public web was the free sample. Labs now pay for what it lacked.
• Labs call it theft when someone copies them. Anthropic trained Claude on pirated books, then accused labs of copying Claude.
  

😠 Haters

“You’re selling your voice forever.”
Once a model trains on your voice, that sale is permanent. You can’t untrain a model on your voice; you only control what you sell next time. Sell only recordings you’d sell forever and prefer apps that keep paying. Indigenius shares 30% of model revenue with contributors.

“The pay is pennies.”
Thousands of people can supply common data, so apps pay the lowest price someone will accept. Sell the data few people can supply.

“Selling your old team’s Slack is selling your employees’ private lives.”
Leave out direct messages, HR, pay and client data, since the flight attendants’ union objected on privacy grounds when Spirit Airlines sold staff messages.

“Labs will switch to synthetic data and stop paying people.”
Synthetic data will cut what labs pay for easy-to-fake data. Robot simulators still learn from real footage, so sell that. Robot maker Figure paid $15M for chore videos in a year.

🔗 Links

1. Will We Run Out of Data? • When the public text AI trains on runs out.
2. Would You Share Your Phone Calls With a Company to Make Money? This Startup Is Banking on It • How Neon’s founder rebuilt the app after the breach and what experts think of paying for call data.
3. Meta Enters AI Licensing Fray, Striking Deals With People Inc., USA Today Co. and More • Why labs and platforms still pay publishers for training access when the free-web era ends.
4. Subterranean Moderators • The pay-per-task labor model data-for-cash apps inherit from older crowdsourcing.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0187: Data-for-Cash Apps has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 45 Players (275% more)
• 8 Predictions (167% more)
• 10 Opportunities (233% more)
• 4 Risks (100% more)
• 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 8 Links (100% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which camera maker offered owners $2 per video?
• (📈 Pro) Which app paid $0.30 a minute for calls between 2 of its users?
• (📈 Pro) Which voice app pays a 50% bonus for some languages?
• (📈 Pro) Which payout route costs bandwidth sharers 15% of each withdrawal?
• (📈 Pro) Which data pool drew 1.3M users before it launched?
• (📈 Pro) Why did customers leave a data vendor after Meta bought nearly half of it?
• And much more…

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💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

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Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

⚖️ A Jev alternative
💡 Ideas vs. execution
🛡️ 8 durable SaaS moats
⏱️ A screen-time data MCP
📈 A $1M MRR SaaS portfolio
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Progress equals happiness.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

⏱️ RescueTime MCP shared by Elia Zane
An unofficial MCP that lets Claude dig through years of your screen-time data

🛡️ Will Your SaaS Survive AI? shared by Elie Steinbock
A talk on the SaaS moats left in 2026

⚖️ Clef shared by Hitesh Kar
Cloudflare’s open-weight answer to Jev, a cheap model for quick yes-or-no calls

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

♟️ Dru Riley published How I Play Aggressive But Safe, on why aggression tends to win

📨 Elie Steinbock launched Inbox Zero Mail on Product Hunt

🗣️ Matt Spear launched Stash

🖼️ Farid built imgwrangler

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Most companies will only let their team AI agents install pre-approved add-ons.

A team AI agent is one assistant a team hands tasks to in a shared chat like Slack. Add-ons called skills teach it new jobs. A skill one teammate installs runs for everyone, with the team’s passwords and keys.

A security firm checked all 2,857 skills on the public store for the open-source agent OpenClaw. It found 341 malicious ones. Most came from one campaign that installed a password stealer on Macs.

GitHub already blocks any agent tool missing from a company’s approved list. ChatGPT blocks new plugins until an admin approves them.

From Trends PRO #0186, Multiplayer Agents. See the risks of one bad plugin holding your team’s keys.

📘 READ THIS

What Turns a $20 Idea Into a $20 Million Business?

Founders guard ideas like secrets. Derek Sivers says ideas only multiply execution. Execution is what turns a great idea into money.

• Score the idea from -1 to 20. An awful idea scores -1, a so-so idea 5, a brilliant one 20.
• Score the execution in dollars. No execution is $1. So-so execution is $10,000 and brilliant execution $10 million.
• Multiply the two. A brilliant idea with great execution reaches $20 million. Evaluate the execution first.

🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK

🎞️ Multi — Grow on YouTube on autopilot

🧿 HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors

💵 StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast

☁️ OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK

Sell marketing teams a monthly audit of what AI assistants say about their brand.

Customers ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude which product to buy. A study of 750 brands by Mobian, an ad network for AI agents, found that 17% of the sources AI assistants cite conflict with the brand’s own facts. Ally Bank reports that visitors arriving from AI assistants open accounts at 3.5 times the rate of search visitors.

The audit needs no ad space. Put the brand’s 50 most-asked buying questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Perplexity each month, mark every answer that is wrong, stale or names a competitor. Deliver the wrong answers ranked by how much revenue each question affects. Sell it first to banks, insurers and pharmacies, where a wrong answer has a compliance owner.

From Trends PRO #0182, AI Ad Networks. See the other opportunities in the report.

🎧 LISTEN TO

How Do You Go From €250,000 in Debt to $1M a Month?

2 failed startups cost Tibo Louis-Lucas €700,000 and left him €250,000 in personal debt. He rebuilt on a bet: distribution beats product when AI makes building cheap.

• Ship until something sticks. 1 product per week, judged only on whether people paid.
• Trade equity for distribution. Giving creator JK Molina 25% of Tweet Hunter tripled revenue to $20,000 MRR in 3 weeks.
• Bet on the channel. The portfolio now crosses $1M MRR. Tibo Louis-Lucas says distribution is the whole game.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Virtual events, called when Clubhouse was invite-only.

In October 2020 we published a report on virtual events, the conferences and meetups that moved online during the pandemic. We said audio-only apps like Clubhouse would multiply. Hopin, a platform for running conferences online, was among the tools we listed.

Clubhouse raised money at a $4 billion valuation in April 2021. In April 2023 it cut more than half its staff after downloads fell.

Hopin peaked at $7.75 billion in 2021. In August 2023 it sold its events business to RingCentral for $15 million upfront.

We were right that online events would boom and wrong about how long the boom would last.

That was Trends PRO #0037, Virtual Events. See the other predictions on online events from 2020.

🔧 TRY THIS

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It doesn’t just tell you what changed… It tells you what to do about it.

🏆 #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt

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• See what you’ve been missing (pricing, features, positioning)
• Know what to do about it, not just what happened
• Get weekly briefs summarizing what matters

See what you’ve been missing 👉 Try HeadsUp free

The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
📱 Manage Multiple Coding Agents In One App

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“Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” – Hannah Arendt

Get Full Access to Trends Pro

❓ What You’ll Learn

• Why are teams giving tasks to one shared AI agent?
• Whose permissions should a shared agent use when anyone can ask it to act?
• Which companies outside tech already pay for a shared agent?
• Where can a small team still win once Slack bundles a shared agent in?
  

💎 Why It Matters

AI agents are moving out of private chats into team channels.

🔍 Problem

Your team has more work than people.

Each task waits in line until someone is free to do it.

💡 Solution

Teams tag a shared AI agent that starts tasks right away.

🏁 Players

AI Coworkers

• Viktor • AI coworker a whole workspace shares.
• Dust • Company agents any member calls in Slack.
• Lindy • One teammate shared across the team.

Workspace Agents

• Slackbot • Slack’s own agent, piloting in channels.
• Microsoft Teams channel agent • Copilot agent for one Teams channel.
• Atlassian Rovo • Answers help channels as a bot account.

Coding Agents in Slack

• Slack Code • Code channels where teams steer agents.
• GitHub Copilot • Shared coding sessions started from Slack.
• Devin • Coding agent teammates tag in threads.

Self-Hosted Agents

• OpenClaw • Open-source agent for your team’s chats.
• qm • YC’s open-source multiplayer agent for work.
• Hermes Agent • Nous Research’s agent for chat apps.

Agent Chat Apps

• Buzz • Block’s workspace where agents are members.
• Macro • Workspace where agents inherit asker permissions.
• Mantle Chat • Team channels where you tag any model.

Group Chat Agents

• Shapes • Group chats where AI joins friends.
• Jarvie • iMessage sidekick that remembers the group.
• ChatGPT group chats • ChatGPT inside a chat with friends.
  

🔮 Predictions

• Most team agents will bill one company credit pool with a spending cap per person.
  • ChatGPT Business sets per-person credit limits on one shared workspace balance.
  • Notion lets admins cap member credit spend.
  • Lindy moved to per-person shared credits.
• Friend and family group chats will increasingly add AI as a member.
  • Instinct added agents to group chats for carpools and trip plans.
  • Shapes reported 400,000+ monthly users for AI group chats.
• Non-engineers will ship more product fixes by tagging an agent in the team chat.
  • epilot’s product managers, designers and support staff merged 40 PRs in 60 days by tagging Claude in Slack.
  • Slack built Slack Code so product managers and designers can steer coding agents in a channel.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Sell agencies an AI assistant that answers clients in shared Slack channels.
  • Pylon answers customers in shared channels and reported 158% net revenue retention.
  • Microsoft’s channel agent stops answering when guests join.
• Set up a shared agent that keeps a small company’s data and passwords on computers the company owns.
  • Installers charge $1,200 to $2,600 to set up the free agent OpenClaw plus about $200 a month to maintain it.
  • Viktor starts at $50 a month. OpenClaw keeps memory on hardware, so the agent keeps what it learned when the team switches AI models.
• Launch a shared agent that answers from course material in paid Discord communities.
  • Paid Discord operators need course-grounded answers: Discord community engagement.
  • AstrBot runs one group-chat agent.
  • No lab ships a shared agent on Discord.
• Launch a group-chat agent for one kind of group, like parents sharing school carpools or friends planning a trip.
  • Jarvie raised $8.3M for an agent in iMessage groups.
  • Series raised a $5.1M pre-seed for an AI social network in iMessage.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Poisoned Plugins • Vet each plugin, since a ClawHavoc skill runs with the team’s keys.
• Model Lock-In • Pick a shared agent that can switch AI models when one company raises prices.
• Runaway Spend • Cap each person so one heavy user can’t drain the team’s credits.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Decide whose permissions the agent uses before you pick a vendor. Claude Tag uses its own permissions and OpenTag uses the asker’s.
• Keep the team’s memory in files you hold, so switching vendors costs 1 week.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• Slack is the new prompt box. Teams learn AI by watching each other tag it.
• The org chart now has a bot handle. Shared agents get their own name in Slack.
  

😠 Haters

“Anyone in the channel could ask the bot for files they shouldn’t see.”
Since an agent with its own login can show people files they aren’t allowed to open, pick one that uses the asker’s permissions, like OpenTag or WorkOS’s Atlas.

“We tried Slack bots in 2016. Nobody used them.”
Those bots posted alerts and teams muted them. Today’s agents finish the work: the Slack coworker Viktor hit a $15M yearly revenue rate3 months after launch.

🔗 Links

1. The Multiplayer AI Manifesto • 5 principles for team agents.
2. AI Agents in Action: Brex • How Brex shipped a named customer agent and cut answer time 90%.
3. Introducing Buzz: Where Humans and Agents Work Together • Block’s case for agents as channel members, not one person’s assistant.

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0186: Multiplayer Agents has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 56 Players (211% more)
• 8 Predictions (167% more)
• 8 Opportunities (100% more)
• 5 Risks (67% more)
• 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 9 Links (200% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Who raised $5.1M to build an AI social network in iMessage?
• (📈 Pro) Who raised $60M to decide what an agent may do for each person?
• (📈 Pro) Which startup joined Meta 8 months after launching a multiplayer agent?
• (📈 Pro) Which developer platform now blocks any agent tool missing from a company’s allowlist?
• (📈 Pro) Which startup turns construction crews’ WhatsApp chats into a daily site report?
• (📈 Pro) Which AI lab warns its team bot can use any teammate’s secrets?
• And much more…

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📖 160+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

📱 An agent manager app
🎞️ A product video prompt
🏭 A software factory system
💰 A breakdown of a SaaS exit 
🚀 A $3.5M ARR SaaS case study
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Keep control of your attention.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🏭 I Run an AI Civilization in Herdr shared by Gabriel
A system for working with large fleets of coding agents

🎞️ Product Video Prompt shared by Elie Steinbock
A comprehensive prompt for making product videos with AI

📱 Happy.engineering shared by Knight
A tool for managing multiple coding agents in one app

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🦁 Dru Riley published Every Type of Courage Explained | Which One Do You Have?, on why a marathon runner can still dodge a hard talk

⛵ Elie Steinbock interviewed the founder of Boat.dev

🖥️ Rich Tank launched Barrava

🪙 Paul Martin launched X402 Git

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

The large AI answer engines will penalize ads written for their crawlers instead of their readers.

In July 2026 Time magazine started selling a new ad: 1 sponsored answer per page, written in plain text for the AI crawlers, with Ally Bank as the first buyer. Time’s chief operating officer says the site sees more bot traffic than human traffic most days, so the ads reach bot traffic no sales team could bill directly.

Perplexity, an AI answer engine, blocked those ads from its results within 2 weeks and called the practice deceptive. An ad written to change what an AI pulls from a page is the first thing the AI companies will filter out. Publishers who sell that ad lose the traffic when Google or OpenAI follow Perplexity.

From Trends PRO #0182, AI Ad Networks. See the players selling ads to crawlers.

❔ ASK YOURSELF

What Turns a 5X Offer Into a 10X Exit?

One expert told Eran Galperin that 5X was his cap. He sold a majority stake to Five Elms at 10X, taking $32.5 million in cash for his share.

• Treat churn as the ceiling. Under 1% a month is what buyers pay premiums for. It arrived alongside 3 straight years of more than doubling.
• Let the slow years finish the product. 4 years of nights and weekends while he worked as a CTO. Organic SEO still drives over half of new leads.
• Buy the expertise that closes the gap. A $60K legal bill and a good M&A broker fixed the information asymmetry with private equity.

🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK

🎞️ Multi — Grow on YouTube on autopilot

🧿 HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors

💵 StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast

☁️ OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK

Launch an AI coach that texts people about one goal, like marathon training or staying sober.

Tomo is an AI assistant inside iMessage that texts you first about meals, budgets and reminders, so the coaching arrives with your other texts. It signed tens of thousands of paying subscribers in just over 3 months at $19.99 a month and up.

The build is cheap. Iris is a free iMessage assistant built on Hermes, an open-source agent anyone can use.

Pick a goal Tomo treats as a side feature and sell a monthly subscription where that community already gathers, like a running club’s newsletter. Then let the coach text first every day.

From Trends PRO #0185, Proactive AI Agents. See the players texting their users first.

🎧 LISTEN TO

How Did a $200 Customer Turn Into $3.5M ARR?

Joel Griffith’s first customer paid $200 a month against $50 of infrastructure, so Browserless was profitable on day one. It now runs at $3.5 million ARR.

• Win the first 10 by answering questions. His first 10 customers came from GitHub issues and Stack Overflow questions about browser automation. Almost all growth traces to content.
• See what funding buys a rival. Google Cloud shipped a competitor and another entrant raised over $60 million. Growth stayed on the same line.
• Keep the team small. Under 10 people at roughly $3.5 million ARR, taking 250 to 300 signups a day.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

ChatGPT, called when it was 11 weeks old.

In February 2023 we said ChatGPT would change customer support, with bots trained on a company’s help docs and past conversations answering customers faster.

In February 2024 Klarna, a payments company, reported that its OpenAI-powered assistant handled 2/3 of its support chats in its first month. Klarna said that equaled the work of 700 full-time agents.

In May 2025 Klarna started hiring human agents again. Its CEO told Bloomberg the bots were cheaper and the service was lower quality.

We were right that AI would answer the support chat. We missed how many customers would still want a person.

That was Trends PRO #0105, ChatGPT. See the ChatGPT tools we listed in 2023.

🔧 TRY THIS

60 Seconds to Your First Competitive Insight

HeadsUp is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that watches your market 24/7.

It doesn’t just tell you what changed… It tells you what to do about it.

🏆 #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt

Get 90 days of competitor intelligence in 60 seconds with HeadsUp:

• See what you’ve been missing (pricing, features, positioning)
• Know what to do about it, not just what happened
• Get weekly briefs summarizing what matters

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The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🎬 Video Editor for Agents

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💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.

Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.” – Charles Eames

Get Full Access to Trends Pro

❓ What You’ll Learn

• Why are agents that text you first signing users fast?
• Which stores will win agent-placed orders?
• How do proactive agents charge for unprompted work?
• Who pays when agents suggest purchases?
  

💎 Why It Matters

When an agent suggests what you need before you search, it picks which store gets the order.

🔍 Problem

You have more to track than you can remember: the renewal that charges next week, the reply you owe a client.

💡 Solution

AI agents that know what you want and act before you ask.

🏁 Players

Proactive AI Agents

• Muse • Meta’s agent that sends suggestions without you asking.
• Dots • ChatGPT agents that research on their own.
• Gemini Spark • Google’s agent that flags hidden fees.

Texting Agents

• Instinct • Texts or calls you first.
• Poke • Assistant inside Apple’s Messages for Business.
• Tomo • iMessage coach for food and budgets.

Email Assistants

• Fyxer • Drafts email replies before you open them.
• Superhuman • Grammarly’s assistant that drafts replies anywhere.
• Town • Suggests automations from how you work.

Family Assistants

• Skylight • Wall calendar that reads school flyers.
• Ollie • Books appointments without your passwords.
• Norton Family Assistant • Gen Digital’s agent for parents.

Agent Verification Tools

• Cloudflare • Lets sites allow or block signed agents.
• HUMAN Security • Shows merchants every agent session.
• Akamai • Ties each agent to a real person.

Agentic Commerce Tools

• ReFiBuy • Fixes product data for shopping agents.
• Azoma • Tracks which agents recommend a brand.
  

🔮 Predictions

• Brands will pay to appear in suggestions an agent makes on its own.
  • OpenAI’s ads hit a $1B ads run rate in under 200 days.
  • Meta is exploring commerce revenue for its ad-free agent.
• Apple will ship a Messages agent first.
  • Its rebuilt Siri already reads Messages, Mail and Notes, so only the first move is missing.
  • Apple approved Poke on Messages on Messages for Business, so people already take texts from an agent there.
• Consumer agent plans will charge for unprompted work.
  • Martin sells proactive action tiers as separate plans.
  • OpenAI’s always-on agents bill against plan allowances.
  • Salesforce paid $3.6B for Fin, a business agent that charges $0.99 per resolution.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Launch a coach for one goal, like marathon training or sobriety.
  • Astrocade pays $100 when a game is picked for its feed and some creators earned over $700 in a month.
  • Creators get play analytics from launch day, so you can see what lands and remake it.
• Fix Shopify brands’ product data so shopping agents pick their products.
  • OpenAI shut in-chat checkout after about 30 Shopify merchants went live, with bad product data a major cause.
  • ReFiBuy serves Steve Madden and Azoma serves L’Oréal and Unilever, so smaller brands go unserved.
• Run a morning texting agent for realtors that names which past clients to call.
  • Structurely charges about $500 monthly for an AI that texts new leads.
  • Compass is building for 83,000 agents, leaving independent agents out.
• Offer founders an assistant with human backup for the tasks the agent can’t finish.side a free browser game built with AI.
  • Pieter Levels built a browser flight game with AI coding tools and reported $1 million in annualized revenue 17 days later.
  • The money came from brands buying planes and billboards in the game and fell to $0 a month by mid-2026, so build for an audience that returns weekly.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Rogue Actions • One email or purchase your agent sends without approval can lose you a user.
• Store Blocks • Expect big stores to block your shopping agent: Amazon blocked Muse 12 days after launch.
• Channel Lockout • Expect your chat app to ship its own agent: Meta put Muse inside WhatsApp.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• The agent that spots a need first picks which store gets the sale, so fix agent-readable product data before rivals do.
• Ship the finished task: ChatGPT Pulse shut after 9 months while Fyxer drafts replies before open.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• The group chat is the app store. Agents join like a friend.
• The next Google is the agent that suggests first.
  

😠 Haters

“I’m not handing an AI my email, card and passwords.”
Then pick an agent that uses its own accounts, not yours. Wajo gives its agent its own email, phone number and a single-use card and Ollie books through its own secure browser, so your passwords stay with you.

“Meta and OpenAI give these agents away for free. Why would anyone pay a startup?”
People pay for one job a free agent does worse, like drafting email replies for professionals. Fyxer grew to $35M a year doing that.

“A free agent works for its advertisers. It’ll buy whatever pays Meta most.”
Meta may earn from shopping through its Muse agent, so it has reason to favor sellers who pay. Pay for an agent that works for you, like Tomo, Howie or Fyxer.

🔗 Links

1. Noah Shinn: Building Instinct, the Personal Agent • Instinct’s founder on an agent that texts you first.
2. Introducing Ambient Agents • Why an agent should act on events and only ping you to notify, ask or review.
3. How Ollie AI Is Using AI to Solve the Mental Load • Ollie’s co-founder on a family agent that texts shared morning plans.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0185: Proactive AI Agents has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 50 Players (194% more)
• 8 Predictions (167% more)
• 8 Opportunities (100% more)
• 5 Risks (67% more)
• 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 8 Links (167% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which store hands checkout to its own agent inside ChatGPT?
• (📈 Pro) Which kind of agent will be the first startup to pass $100M a year?
• (📈 Pro) Which free agent you text raised $1 billion?
• (📈 Pro) Which texting agent startup was bought by a coding company?
• (📈 Pro) Why do merchants let over 90% of AI bot traffic through without knowing what it buys?
• (📈 Pro) Which 3.5 million-user WhatsApp agent shows the opening in Latin America?
• (📈 Pro) Where can an inbox agent sell while US agents stay out?
• And much more…

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This week’s Founder Finds includes:

🦾 A set of agent skills
🚚 A data-migration tool
🎬 A video editor for agents
💳 The economics of annual billing
🖥️ A case study on building a durable SaaS
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Starting demands discipline. Habits make it automatic.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🎬 HyperFrames shared by Shivam
An open-source framework that turns a prompt into a launch or demo video

🚚 Import2 shared by Rich Tank
A data-migration tool that shows your records in the new system before you pay

🦾 decent-skills shared by Gabriel
A set of skills for optimizing AI workflows

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🛢️ Dru Riley published The 1 Area I Ignored Across 20 Businesses, on skipping leg day in your life

🐜 Vesh Thakker opened a 50-spot alpha cohort for 50 Ants

📱 Jason A Erickson released a new version of Idea Baby Daycare on iOS and Android 

⭐ Elie Steinbock reached 3,000 GitHub stars with Rakazo

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

AI game generators will cap free game making or start charging for it.

AI game generators are apps where you type a game idea into a box, play it minutes later and publish it for strangers to play. Astrocade and Roblox let you make games free while they pay for the computing behind every draft.

Rec Room, a social game platform once valued at $3.5 billion, kept its prompt tool inside each user’s room because wider use would leave it “financially upside down on each player.” It shut down in June 2026.

Google caps each world made in its Project Genie at 60 seconds. Makers who draft dozens of games and publish none will hit the limit first.

From Trends PRO #0184, AI Game Generators. See the risks of paying for every free draft.

🔧 TRY THIS

How Does Annual Billing Hand You an Infinite Ad Budget?

Spend $80 to win $10 of MRR at a 67% margin and you wait 12 months to break even. Collect the year up front and the $80 arrives first.

• Work out your payback period. CAC divided by MRR x Gross Margin. At $80, $10 and 67%, that’s 12 months of waiting.
• Collect the year today. The same customer pays $120 now. That’s an infinite marketing budget, because the ad is funded before it runs.
• Expect churn to hold steady. Annual plans leave the cancellation rate where it was. They sort the customers likely to stay from the ones likely to leave.

🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK

🎞️ Multi — Grow on YouTube on autopilot

🧿 HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors

💵 StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast

☁️ OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK

Ship Korean birth-chart readings in EnRun ChatGPT ad campaigns for the small advertisers who cannot run them alone.

OpenAI opened self-serve ChatGPT ads to US businesses on May 5, 2026, removed its $50,000 minimum and reached Europe in August. Tens of thousands of advertisers signed up and the big agency groups, WPP and Omnicom, are partnered for the large accounts. Small advertisers face a new platform, new bidding rules and no benchmark. No one is there to help them.

One firm, Kone.vc, already sells itself as an OpenAI channel partner for small businesses, so the agency form exists. Pick one vertical, build one landing page template and publish a cost-per-click benchmark the client can check against OpenAI’s own case studies. Charge a flat monthly fee tied to spend, starting with 10 clients.

From Trends PRO #0182, AI Ad Networks. See what advertisers are already paying inside ChatGPT.

❔ ASK YOURSELF

What Did $20,000 and 1 Server Turn Into?

Cliff Sentell and two partners put in $20,000 each and bought a single server in 2005.

They started by charging patients a monthly fee to look up hidden healthcare costs, then pivoted to selling that price-finding service directly to employers.

• Sell to whoever holds the budget. The consumer version flopped. Compass reached about $1 million in revenue in 3-4 years.
• Keep the equity when growth shows up. They turned down growth equity investors to keep control. The company scaled to roughly $30 to $40 million with 200 employees.
• Treat what you know as the moat. Sentell’s claim: add AI to domain expertise others can’t match and the moat gets wider.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Play-and-earn games, called the month after Axie Infinity peaked.

In December 2021 we said games that pay players in crypto tokens would bring millions, then billions, of people into crypto. Axie Infinity, a battle game whose tokens players sold for cash, led our list.

It had peaked at 2.7 million daily players that November. In March 2022 hackers stole $625 million from the network that players used to move money in and out of the game. By April 2023 daily players were down to about 250,000.

We were right that people would earn from games. We were wrong that a crypto token would pay them. Roblox paid its creators $1.5 billion in cash in 2025.

That was Trends PRO #0077, Play-and-Earn. See the games we listed in 2021.

🔧 TRY THIS

60 Seconds to Your First Competitive Insight

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It doesn’t just tell you what changed… It tells you what to do about it.

🏆 #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt

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• See what you’ve been missing (pricing, features, positioning)
• Know what to do about it, not just what happened
• Get weekly briefs summarizing what matters

See what you’ve been missing 👉 Try HeadsUp free

The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🧰 Directory of Jev Projects

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📈 Unlock Pro Reports, 1:1 Intros and Masterminds

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🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.

📖 160+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

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Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp