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

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❓ 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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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

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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:
🎬 Video Editor for Agents

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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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💲 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:

🦾 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

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

See what you’ve been missing 👉 Try HeadsUp free

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

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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.

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Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.” – Nolan Bushnell

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• How does a game feed pay makers $100 per picked game?
• What does a game maker build that an app builder skips?
• Roblox just put a prompt box in its app. Where can a startup still win?
• Why did prompt-made games cost Rec Room money on every player?
• Which genres are small enough for one founder to own?
  

💎 Why It Matters

New game companies copied the prompt box from business app builders and added:

• Makers whose games get played
• A feed of players
  

🔍 Problem

You have a game in your head and no way to make it.

💡 Solution

You type a game into a prompt box, play it in minutes and publish it to a feed where other people play it.

🏁 Players

AI Game Generators

• Astrocade • Game feed that pays creators on plays.
• Roblox • Build tab turns a prompt into a Roblox game.
• Aippy • TikTok-style feed of playable mini-games.

Game Makers for Kids

• PromptBlox • Turns a game idea into a Roblox world.
• Makie • Kid-safe game maker for ages 7 to 15.
  

🔮 Predictions

• AI game generators will cap free game making or charge for it as hosting cost adds up.
  • Rec Room limited its prompt tool because wider use would leave it “financially upside down on each player”.
  • Google limits each Project Genie world to 60 seconds. 
• A rights holder will force an AI game generator to pull games built on its characters.
  • Astrocade featured “BEN 10 OPEN World” and “Blox Fruit” in September 2026, both built on characters their makers don’t own.
  • The Tetris Company got the White House to pull a “Build the Wall” game.
• An AI game generator will publish how much it has paid creators to recruit the next wave of makers.
  • Astrocade’s CEO says the company is “most inspired by YouTube, the way they nurture their creators”.
  • Roblox reports paying its creators $1.5 billion in 2025.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Run a small studio that ships a prompt-made game every week to the AI game generators that pay per play.
  • 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.
• Sell playable ads to online stores that just started buying ads on AppLovin.
  • Playables.ai builds playable ads from product photos for game studios.
  • Rosebud publishes a playable-ads guide for brands outside gaming and does not sell done-for-you playables.
• Sell sponsor slots inside 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

• Payout Changes • Expect the feed to cut your pay per play overnight.
• Fading Hits • Plan the next game before your viral hit’s traffic fades.
• Generation Costs • Host free game making and you pay for each abandoned draft. Rec Room’s prompt tool lost money on every player before the platform shut down in June 2026.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Copy the prompt box from the app builders. Then build everything after it yourself: genre templates, art and music in the tool, remixing and payouts.
• Look for one genre or one audience that needs its own design. A classroom or a brand needs parts that a general game maker will skip.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• A game generator is YouTube with a prompt box. The feed and the payout are the product.
• The app builders shipped the prompt box game makers use and stopped there.
  

😠 Haters

“Roblox just shipped a prompt-to-game tool free to the biggest game platform on earth. Why use a startup?”
Assume Roblox’s tool eventually works everywhere. Today it publishes Build games only to users 16 and up and runs in three countries. Sell to the buyers it leaves out: kids, brands and teachers.

“ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini make a game for free. Your app is a prompt with a paywall.”
The chatbot hands you a file and a link. Astrocade hands you a feed of 5 million monthly players and $100 when your game gets picked. Sell the audience and the payout; use the free chatbot as your engine.

“AI-made games are junk. Nobody plays one twice.”
Expect most to flop: Steam players recommend disclosed-AI games less. A feed needs only a few hits: Astrocade’s plays grew 23x in five months across 75,000 games. Build for repeat play with saves and progression.

🔗 Links

1. Investing in Astrocade • Why Sequoia backed a game app that grew to 140 million plays a month.
2. What went wrong with Rec Room, an insider’s perspective • How a prompt tool cost a $3.5 billion platform its best creators.
3. Trends #0136: Indie Games • How solo game studios find their first players.
4. Trends #0155: Micro-App Portfolios • Ship many and keep the hits.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0184: AI Game Generators has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 20 Players (300% more)
• 6 Predictions (100% more)
• 7 Opportunities (133% more)
• 5 Risks (67% more)
• 3 Key Lessons (50% more)
• 3 Hot Takes (50% more)
• 8 Links (100% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which game app paying $100 per picked game will publish its total payouts?
• (📈 Pro) Which advertisers just got a new ad format on AppLovin?
• (📈 Pro) Which AI lab has half a billion user-made creations and no place to play them?
• (📈 Pro) What will the first prompt-made Steam hit need that the tool can’t give it?
• (📈 Pro) Which classroom game already imports AI-made question sets from a lesson?
• (📈 Pro) Where can a prompt-made hit keep its ownership and still earn ad revenue?
• (📈 Pro) Why is Roblox’s age 16 rule a market for someone else?
• (📈 Pro) What do you need before you collect data from kids under 13?
• And much more…

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This week’s Founder Finds includes:

🔀 In-browser Jev
🧰 A directory of Jev projects
📝 The state of AI code review
🛣️ An essay on major decisions
📣 A $1M ARR open-source SaaS
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Discomfort is the price of growth.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🧰 shipwithjev shared by Elia Zane
A directory of Jev use cases

📝 Vibes vs. Evidence shared by Ben Fisher
An analysis of AI code review setups

🔀 open-jev shared by Jd Fiscus
An open version of Jev running in-browser on WebGPU

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🏛️ Dru Riley published The Pattern Behind Every System Collapse, on reasonable additions

📊 Eddie Forson wrote about Jev

✏️ Shivam launched Report Card

👥 Alejandro Arango wrote Shadow Work

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Paid coding tools will stop charging markups for model usage.

Developers are plugging their AI provider accounts directly into editors to pay wholesale prices instead of marked-up subscriptions.

Both JetBrains and VS Code added direct key settings just 8 weeks apart, making it easy for engineers to bypass middleman tools. Standalone wrapper apps are shutting down because software teams refuse to pay extra margins on top of their OpenAI and Anthropic bills.

From Trends PRO #0177, Bring Your Own Key Apps. See what developers pay for AI access.

📘 READ THIS

How Did 4 People Reach $1M ARR With No Ad Spend?

Plausible took 324 days to earn its first $400 a month. The climb from there to $1M ARR ran on zero paid advertising.

• Expect the first year to crawl. 324 days to $400 MRR, then 9 months to go from $400 to $10,000. The slow part comes first.
• Fund it yourself until it works. The 2 founders were down more than $50,000 in personal savings before they paid themselves a salary.
• Skip the ad budget. They reached $83,637 MRR and 7,000+ paying subscribers on word of mouth.

🛠️ 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 English, as comics.

1. Copy the format that already worked. Tight Saju sells saju, the Korean birth chart read from your date and hour of birth. It’s sold as webtoons, the vertical comics Korea reads on phones. It went from about 10 million won a month in 2024 to about 1 billion won a month within a year.
2. Sell to the audience that already watches Korean drama and reads webtoons. “ai saju reading” is a live English search and no founder could name an English saju app.
3. Sell the full chart report first, then a daily reading. Korea’s fortune-telling business was worth 1.4 trillion won in 2024. 6 out of the top 10 fortune apps now run on AI.

From Trends PRO #0183, AI Fortune-Telling Apps. See the Korean apps that ran the transition first.

❔ ASK YOURSELF

Which Single Choice Would Decide the Next 100?

Derek Sivers wanted to live all over the world, so he made one decision and let it settle the rest. One big choice shapes a hundred little others.

Let one call settle 100 more. He knew only that the first big choice pointed him the right way. The details filled themselves in.

Start from the consequences. His question, in his words: knowing the consequences I want, what choice would create them?

Daydream backwards. Think through the implications first, then work back to the decision that produces them.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Virtual AI companions, called when Pi was the app to beat.

In August 2023 we listed Pi, a chatbot built for supportive conversation, first in a new category of AI companions. The call was that people would pay for a companion that is always there: the dead living on as chatbots, influencers renting out digital clones of themselves by the minute.

7 months later Microsoft paid Inflection, the company behind Pi, $650 million for a license and hired most of its 70 staff. Its founder said Pi had never found a business model. Google did the same to Character.AI in August 2024, for $2.7 billion.

We were right about the demand and wrong about who got paid. The companions found the users and the labs bought their builders.

That was Trends PRO #0121, from August 2023. See the companions as they stood then.

🔧 TRY THIS

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• Know what to do about it, not just what happened
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The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🏰 The New Moats are the Same as the Old Moats

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“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” — Rumi, Masnavi, Book IV (13th century)

Get Full Access to Trends Pro

❓ What You’ll Learn

• Why does Project A clear $64,000 a month when nobody checks if a reading came true?
• Who runs AI readings at 90% margin against 45 to 55% for human astrologers?
• How did Tight Saju go from 10 million to 1 billion won a month in a year?
• Apple now refuses new fortune-telling apps and may remove old ones. Where do you launch instead?
• Which reading forms have search demand and no app founders name?
  

💎 Why It Matters

A personal reading once sold by the minute now costs one API call to generate.

Buyers rarely check if it came true.

🔍 Problem

You have a decision you can’t make at 2am and nobody is awake to make it with you.

A therapist is $150 an hour and 3 weeks out. You’d pay a few dollars for an answer now.

💡 Solution

AI fortune-telling apps generate a personal reading using AI.

They help you make decisions based on tarot, astrology, Korean saju, Chinese bazi charts, a photo of your coffee cup or palm.

🏁 Players

Astrology Apps

• Co-Star • Daily horoscopes from NASA planetary data.
• CHANI • Readings written and recorded by human astrologers.
• Nebula • AI reports beside per-minute human advisors.

Tarot Apps

• Labyrinthos • Tarot school with a free companion app.
• Raka • AI reading partner trained on tarot literature.
• Biddy Tarot • Human-authored tarot school.

Saju Apps

• Tight Saju • Saju readings delivered as webtoons.
• Jeomsin • Korea’s best-known saju app.
• Forceteller • Saju, tarot and Zi Wei on one engine.

Coffee Cup Reading Apps

• Faladdin • Turkey’s largest, 1 million AI readings a day.
• Kaave • AI reader personas beside one human reader.
• Fal Diyarı • Free readings from named reviewers.

Astrologer Apps

• Astrotalk • India’s largest per-minute marketplace, no AI yet.
• AstroSage • Kundli platform whose AI rates higher than its humans.

Psychic Apps

• Keen • The original US psychic marketplace, per minute.
• Sanctuary • Vetted human readers on live chat.
• Kasamba • Psychic chat, same owner as Keen.
  

🔮 Predictions

• Per-minute astrologer marketplaces will route first questions to models and sell the human as the upgrade.
  • AstroSage reports 90% margins on AI against 45 to 55% on human ones.
  • Astrotalk’s average consultation is Rs 210 and close to 65% from marriage questions, a question a model answers for cents.
• Apple will remove cookie-cutter fortune-telling apps it already lists, so a founder holding one has an app worth less every month.
  • Guideline 4.3(b) now names fortune telling and adds that Apple “may remove” existing ones.
  • The last public ranking had a template palmistry app as the top US earner.
• “No AI” will become a paid tier on top-grossing astrology apps, with the human reading priced as the premium.
  • CHANI, the highest-grossing US astrology app sells readings written by named human astrologers.
  • Sanctuary sells live chat with vetted human readers as its paid product beside a free AI chart.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Sell coffee-cup readings by credit to one language market outside Turkey, on the web first.
  • Faladdin was serving 1 million readings a day from 6,000 human-written fortunes, 200,000 in Arabic.
  • Starcrossed built a $60,000-a-month astrology app by reading for TikTok followers first.
• Ship English saju readings as webtoons, for the audience that already watches Korean drama.
  • Tight Saju sells saju as webtoons in Korea, the format to copy.
  • Google Play featured Hellobot globally, a Korean saju chatbot.
  • The K-culture press explains saju to Western readers and “ai saju reading” is a live English search.
• Launch a voice astrologer in Tamil (Telugu or Bengali next) and sell it by the minute.
  • InstaAstro raised $12 million Series A to build AI-led products on 12 million registered users.
  • Astrotalk reached a $1 billion unicorn valuation, serving Hindi first.
• Sell readings under your name, with the model drafting and you signing.
  • CHANI runs on Chani Nicholas’s name at $14 million a year, self-funded.
  • A CHI 2026 study found working tarot readers draft with AI privately.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Statute Risk • Check whether your market’s country bans professional fortune-telling before you launch: Turkey detained Faladdin’s founder under a 1925 law. 
• App Store Refusal • Expect Apple to refuse your submission and to remove listed apps it judges cookie-cutter. 
• Unreliable Sizing • Plan on disclosed company numbers only: 4 market reports put the same year between $1.26 billion and $8.28 billion.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Tell the buyer the reading settles a decision and charge per reading. The businesses the FTC sued sold the same reading as a $5 trial with a hidden $45 renewal. 
• Pick the form and the language before the feature list. Each winner owns one form in one language (coffee cups in Turkish, saju webtoons in Korean) and no English leader in 8 reading forms (tarot, astrology, saju, bazi, coffee cups, palmistry, dream journals, I Ching).
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• The photo is the moat against models. A birth date pastes into any chatbot. A cup does not. 
• The reading is graded on how the buyer felt, so a model that never met them can do the job.
  

😠 Haters

“You’re selling snake oil to anxious people at 2am.”
Say on the page what the reading is and charge per reading. Pew found 20% of people who consult astrology or tarot do it for fun and 1% rely on it for big decisions. The version the FTC sued hid a $45 renewal behind a $5 reading.

“ChatGPT reads charts for free. You’re charging for a prompt.”
Sell what the chatbot lacks: the ritual (cup, cards, chart), last month’s reading and a voice from one tradition. AstroSage’s AI astrologer sits beside a free chatbot and its AI revenue grew 20% a month for 18 months. Build those 3 or the objection stands.

“The readers you replace are the ones who recommend you. Replace them and they stop sending you customers.”
Sell the drafting tool to the readers whose customers pay for their name. The CHI 2026 study found them already drafting with AI in private and their forums banning the topic. Kaave kept one human reader beside its AI personas.

🔗 Links

1. Tasseography: as big as Tinder • How Turkish coffee-cup reading became a national ritual and an app category.
2. Can AI change the fate of China’s fortune-tellers? • Young Chinese users turn to DeepSeek and ChatGPT for bazi readings.
3. Tinder’s Astrology Mode: engagement or gimmick? • The closest adjacency and the checkout a compatibility reading sells through.
4. What everyone’s getting wrong about astrology dating apps • The same buyer at the same 2am, in the unregulated version of the product.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0183: AI Fortune-Telling Apps has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 58 Players (241% 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 app will report a 2 billion won a month and what its playbook looks like from outside its home market?
• (📈 Pro) Which regulator’s settlement will cut paid conversion across US astrology apps?
• (📈 Pro) Why will the monthly subscription lose to a price shape that cannot auto-renew?
• (📈 Pro) Which frontier lab will ship a reading feature and eat the free tiers?
• (📈 Pro) Which one feature wins the reading form with 12 apps, no leader?
• (📈 Pro) Which chart math has no English API and each new entrant rebuilt by hand?
• (📈 Pro) Where does a founder start when Apple won’t accept the app?
• And much more…

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Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

😰 Fear-setting
🏰 AI software moats
🧮 SaaS unit economics
🪄 A Grok Bot optimizer
🧭 What you can do in a decade
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Better offer > better ads.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🧭 What You Can Do in a Decade shared by Eddie Forson
A retrospective on a decade of career changes, learning and personal growth

🪄 Not My Tempo shared by Elia Zane
A Grok Bot that audits and optimizes other Bots’ inefficient routines

🏰 The New Moats are the Same as the Old Moats shared by Mike Williams
An essay on durable advantages for AI products

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🧱 Dru Riley published I Got Everything I Wanted at 23 and Stopped Growing, on what happens after you win

🛡️ Yuyu built BadgeRelay

🎨 Wojtek Wozniak launched Supasito

🗂️ Shushant Lakhyani built a directory of productivity resources

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Most of the startups selling ads in a coding agent’s loading line will shut down before AI labs block them.

Since June 2026 a developer waiting on Claude Code can earn from the wait. An extension replaces the loading line with a sponsored message, auctions that slot to advertisers and pays the developer half the winning bid. Kickbacks pays its average user about $25 a month.

6 networks launched within weeks to sell that same line. By September, 2 of them (Idlepay and IdleAds) had shut down before Anthropic blocked anything. The survivors sell a line they patch into a tool they do not own and their prices overlap: $2 per 1,000 views at Kickbacks, $2 to $5 at Codebacks, $0.5 to $1.67 at IdleDev.

From Trends PRO #0182, AI Ad Networks. See the networks that are still paying developers to wait.

🔧 TRY THIS

What’s The Exercise Tim Ferriss Uses When Making His Biggest Life Decisions?

What if defining your fears is actually the key to making bold moves and avoiding inaction?

Here’s how to use fear-setting to make better decisions:

• Detail your specific fears, not vague anxieties.
• Realize that initial terror often lowers with action.
• Compare the small cost of failure to the big cost of inaction.

🛠️ 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 finished deliverables at human prices and subcontract the pieces to AI agent job boards.

Agent job boards are marketplaces where AI agents bid on posted tasks and get paid from escrow on acceptance. They price labor below what a business pays a freelancer. Winning bids on Toku land at $4.50 on jobs listed at $15 to $20.

The profit is in the review step. In Upwork’s 2025 experiments, pairing an agent with a human raised completion by 70%. Sell the outcome on Upwork, split it into scoped tasks with acceptance criteria, post those with the budget in escrow and keep the review. Start with test coverage or data cleaning.

From Trends PRO #0181, Agent Job Boards. See what the boards already pay per task.

📘 READ THIS

How Do You Measure The Economics Of A SaaS Customer?

Unit economics help you measure efficiency and profitability.

This guide will teach you the types, metrics and ways to calculate unit economics.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

SMS marketing, called when a text from a brand was still a novelty.

In December 2020 we said commerce run entirely over text messages would thrive and that people would pay to receive texts from the brands and creators they loved. 

Brands moved to texting. Attentive, an SMS marketing platform, reported $500 million in annual recurring revenue for 2024.

Nobody paid to receive the texts. Ashton Kutcher’s texting startup, Community, is still running on $115 million of funding. Brands pay for texts while their customers read them for free.

We were right about the channel. We were wrong about who would pay for it.

That was Trends PRO #0046, SMS Marketing. See which text-message tools we listed in 2020.

🔧 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

See what you’ve been missing 👉 Try HeadsUp free

The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🚀 $300/m to $17,000/m in a Month

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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.

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Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp

“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” – Swahili proverb

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• Why does a 1-person extension pay developers $25 a month to watch a loading line?
• Which 2 of 6 networks selling ads in a coding agent’s loading line died within a quarter?
• What is Amazon buying inside ChatGPT that caps every third-party network?
• What does a free coding extension report about you for $75 a year?
• Where does a solo operator earn once the loading line is gone: auditing AI brand answers, running ChatGPT campaigns or feeding shopping agents?
  

💎 Why It Matters

The time a developer spends waiting on an AI agent is now ad space.

🔍 Problem

While a developer waits on a coding agent or a user waits for an AI answer, the ad slot on that screen often sits empty.

💡 Solution

AI ad networks sell a sponsored message in the loading line or a labeled ad inside an AI app’s answer.

The network splits the money with the app that shows the ad.

🏁 Players

AI Ad Networks

• Kickbacks • Auctions the Claude Code status line and pays the developer half the winning bid.
• Codebacks • The one wait-time network showing its sponsors and bids in the open.
• Koah • A labeled ad inside a third-party app’s answer, paid per query, like AdSense but for chat apps.
• Gravity • Fills chat apps with retail advertisers and is testing ads only a shopping agent reads.
• Taboola • Opened its ad demand to any chatbot, bringing a public company’s scale to a field of startups.
  

🔮 Predictions

• The average payout on the largest wait-time network, the kind that sells ads in a coding agent’s loading line, will fall below $10.
  • Kickbacks paid about $25 in July and an impression needs 10 watched seconds.
  • Claude Code runs tasks in the cloud and developers do other work while the agent runs.
• Anthropic will block outside companies from inserting ads into the Claude Code spinner.
  • Its Super Bowl ad said “But not to Claude.” 4 months before a third party auctioned that line.
  • Claude Code shipped a spinner-tips override, so it already treats the line as its own surface.
• OpenAI will sell ads inside apps, the way it already sells them inside ChatGPT.
  • OpenAI has tens of thousands of advertisers its app builders cannot reach.
  • Koah calls itself “AdSense for AI” — the format a major AI lab could copy into one SDK.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Run managed ChatGPT Ads campaigns for small advertisers who cannot run self-serve.
  • OpenAI removed the $50,000 minimum on 2026-05-05 and opened self-serve in Europe in August.
  • Kone.vc sells as an OpenAI SMB channel partner.
• Turn a Shopify catalog into agent feeds, sold to brands too small for Amazon DSP.
  • ZeroClick relaunched as machine-readable storefront agents find and pay through.
  • IAB’s roadmap standardizes agent buying and most brands with 200 SKUs still have no feed shopping agents can read.
• Publish a CPM index for AI ads that advertisers and networks pay for.
  • Idlen targets a €35 CPM for advertisers and promises €20 to €50 to developers.
  • ChatGPT ads launched at $60 CPM.
• Sell banks and insurers audits of what AI apps say about them, since a wrong answer there triggers compliance review.
  • 17% conflict with brand facts and Ally reports AI-referred visitors 3.5 times more likely to open an account.
  • The audit runs on public AI prompts and needs no ad slot in the app.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Rented Surface • Build your exit before the platform blocks the integration, because a patched-in ad line only lasts as long as that company allows.
• Data Sale • Read what data your extension collects before you install it, because Kickbacks’ own policy treats it as a data sale under California law.
• Zero Fill • Check a network’s live campaign counter before you integrate, because IdleDev’s counter showed zero active campaigns in September.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Move into what survivors pivoted to: brand audits, shopping-agent catalogs and attribution, since each changed what it sold within a year.
• Treat every payout claim as what the network pays to win you and ask what you give up in return.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• The most watched line on Earth is a loading spinner and its owner never sold it.
• Wait-time ads depend on idle seconds, and the AI company building faster models is cutting those seconds.
  

😠 Haters

“Faster models kill the inventory before anyone builds a business on it.”
Expect the developer to stop watching before the seconds run out: 2 of 6 wait-time networks are already gone and the runs are moving to the cloud. Sell ads to the agent that keeps running after the developer stops watching, as Gravity already does.

“Ad networks get eaten by platforms. Why is this different?”
Expect the platforms to buy the networks or bypass them, so build to be acquired. Google bought AdMob to reach apps it did not own and Amazon now buys ChatGPT with no network between. AdMob’s founders sold to Google.

“$25 is pocket change and the extension sells your data to get it.”
Ask whether you are better off with the $25 or without it. Read it as a rebate on the agent subscription you pay, priced using the data the extension collects about you. Read that policy before you install and take the rebate if it beats the telemetry for you.

🔗 Links

1. Kickbacks.ai: get paid for waiting • The launch thread, with a first-session earnings report.
2. AI coding ads: the privacy cost of Kickbacks.ai • What the extension reports about you.
3. WTF are GEO and AEO? • The organic side of the AI-answer surface.
4. Inside x402: 100M Agentic Payments on Base • The rails ZeroClick and Gitlawb Ads settled on.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0182: AI Ad Networks has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 17 Players (240% more)
• 7 Predictions (133% more)
• 8 Opportunities (100% more)
• 3 Key Lessons (50% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 9 Links (125% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which 2 buyers went straight to OpenAI and skipped all 17 networks?
• (📈 Pro) Which sponsored answers will Perplexity, Google and ChatGPT filter out first?
• (📈 Pro) Who will sell an ad no human ever sees?
• (📈 Pro) How many wait-time networks shut down before any lab moved against them?
• (📈 Pro) How do you report which conversation sold it when the platform will not?
• (📈 Pro) Which surface your agents already call has no network on it?
• (📈 Pro) What does a direct sponsor on your own loading line pay against a network’s split?
• And much more…

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This week’s Founder Finds includes:

🌎 An SEO checklist
🚀 An indie growth story
🧘 Instant stress management 
💵 The effects of AI on the economy
🌱 Growth with zero marketing budget
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Prioritization should sting. If you’re not cutting something valuable, you’re probably not prioritizing.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🌎 SEO Checklist shared by Hitesh Kar
A list of SEO tactics that lead to 1M clicks

💵 AI Economic Scenarios shared by Elia Zane
A study on how AI is reshaping the economy 

🚀 $300/m to $17,000/m in a Month shared by Farid
Lessons and strategies behind an indie founder’s rapid SaaS growth

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🌅 Dru Riley published The 150-Year Art of Delayed Gratification, on finishing a 15-year book goal before lunch

🔧 Elie Steinbock wrote about building a Grok Bot alternative in a day

📊 Knight launched the beta for BarPeek

💻 Alexandre Kantjas is hosting a workshop on Claude Cowork

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Upwork will let its clients hire AI agents the way they hire freelancers.

Upwork, the largest freelance marketplace, spent a year blocking AI agents that tried to log in and hire. On its August 2026 earnings call the CEO said the company is building toward hiring “specialized AI agents and human agent teams” and on August 10 it opened a way for any AI tool to post a job.

Upwork’s 763,000 active clients spent $966.4 million in one quarter, more than all of those boards combined. The day Upwork lets agents take those jobs, the agent boards lose their biggest source of buyers.

From Trends PRO #0181, Agent Job Boards. See what Upwork’s clients already spend.

🔧 TRY THIS

How Did a 3-Person Team Hit $358,000 With Zero Marketing Budget?

You can hit $358,000 at 70% margins with 3 people and no paid ads if you test every channel and cut what doesn’t convert.

• Test every free channel, then cut what doesn’t convert.
• Track 3 numbers in Google Analytics: traffic source, conversion rate and sales source.
• Start affiliate outreach before SEO so promoters send free backlinks. Pay 20-30% only after they convert.

🛠️ 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

Catch WhatsApp message errors before Meta charges for them.

Meta frequently rejects marketing message templates on variable formatting, parameter counts and category mismatches, returning error codes merchants cannot decipher. Starting October 1, 2026, Meta begins charging for utility templates inside open customer service windows, turning small formatting errors into surprise marketing bills.

A simple web tool that checks message copy against Meta’s rules before submission gives merchants instant validation. Give the basic tool away as a free lead magnet with zero server costs, then charge a $29 monthly team tier to manage approved template libraries across multiple client accounts.

From Trends PRO #0175, WhatsApp Commerce Tools. See what merchants pay per template message.

👀 WATCH THIS

How to Deal With Stress and Still Think Clearly?

Here’s how to increase your mental toughness to handle stress better:

1. Stress is unavoidable and you need to be able to think clearly during stressful times to make good decisions and perform well.
2. You can increase your stress tolerance by practicing “mindful breathing” when you are not feeling stressed.
3. Take 25 deep breaths in and out – one inhale and one exhale is one breath. This will boost adrenaline, which helps you become more resilient to stress.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Crowdsourcing, called when Mechanical Turk was thriving.

In November 2020 we said networks built from strangers’ spare hardware would spread. Helium paid people in tokens to run a wireless hotspot at home. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where companies paid a crowd pennies per task, was on our list of companies to watch.

The hotspot prediction was right: Helium grew from 14,000 hotspots to over 450,000 in 2021 and peaked near a million. The revenue stayed tiny: $6,651 of data sold in June 2022 and $92,000 across the 14 months before.

Mechanical Turk fared worse. Amazon closes it on September 30, 2026.

We were right that strangers would build the network. We were wrong that anyone would pay to use it.

That was Trends PRO #0042, Crowdsourcing. See what the crowd was paid to build in 2020.

🔧 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

See what you’ve been missing 👉 Try HeadsUp free

The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🕸️ 10 SEO Claude Automations

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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.

💲 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