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

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❓ 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

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:
🚀 $300/m to $17,000/m in a Month

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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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📈 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.

💲 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 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

Get Weekly Reports

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📈 Unlock Pro Reports, 1:1 Intros and Masterminds

Become a Trends Pro Member and join 1,200+ founders enjoying…

🧠 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

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

✂️ How to scale a SaaS
📉 A declining business
🕸️ 10 SEO Claude automations
💼 A career alignment framework
📝 Agent instructions for new models
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Solve a daily problem, not a yearly one.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🕸️ 10 SEO Claude Automations shared by Hitesh Kar
10 link building tactics to automate with AI

📝 Rethinking Skills and Prompts for GPT-6 Astra shared by Gabriel
A post on simplifying instructions as models become more capable

📉 My Business is Dying shared by Elia Zane
A founder’s post on a SaaS business in decline

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🏎️ Dru Riley published Force Yourself to Go Faster – Then Pay for It, on what speed actually costs

🚀 Elie Steinbock launched hi.new on Product Hunt

💡 Hitesh Kar is organizing an innovation meetup in Berlin

🔄 Knight built a markdown converter

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Another big AI lab will follow OpenAI and shut off the video generator developers build on.

Software companies rent video generation by the second and wire the finished clips into their products. OpenAI closed its consumer video app on April 26, 2026, then dated the removal of the version developers build on to September 24, 2026 with no replacement named.

That order fits a service that costs more than it earns. Cheaper models from Kling and MiniMax already undercut the frontier labs on the same job. When the next lab exits, every business built on its model has to rewrite that part of its product.

From Trends PRO #0179, Programmatic Video. See the players selling video by the second.

📘 READ THIS

Why Did a High-Paying Remote Job Still Trigger Tears at Log-Off?

After 9 years in the same field, you might be ready to quit and start over. This workbook exercise can show you the problem isn’t the work. It’s where and how you’re doing it.

• Score all 12 pleasure points at work. Rate each 0-2 and rank your top 6.
• Redesign format and clients around top pleasures instead of changing fields.
• Treat jobs as pleasure mixes. The role can sound fine, but the daily work may bring no joy.

🛠️ 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

Build target customer profiles from a founder’s best sales calls.

Generic outbound sales tools fail because they draft cold messages without real customer context, generating robotic emails that trigger spam filters. Extracting exact buying triggers and objection patterns from a founder’s last ten recorded customer sales calls fixes the input at the root.

Convert those insights into a structured customer profile file that feeds directly into sales software via API. Charge $500 per profile build for early-stage startups preparing to launch outbound campaigns, then upsell quarterly context updates as the product evolves.

From Trends PRO #0178, AI Sales Agents. See how teams structure buyer signals.

🎧 LISTEN TO

How Did Searcheye Cut From 50 People to 7 and Grow Faster?

You can grow distribution fast and still break your SaaS at 3x volume if ops capacity lags behind demand.

• Validate PMF 3 times: supply, demand, and the matching layer between them.
• Map your 3x collapse point before scaling distribution. Systems break when volume jumps 3x or 10x.
• Require deposits in discovery. Prospects who won’t commit give wishful feedback instead of buyer signal.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Virtual influencers, called when the models were still cartoons.

In June 2023 we said fashion and beauty brands would sell with virtual models, because a model who is drawn rather than booked is faster and cheaper to work with. Our examples were computer-drawn characters with their own Instagram followings.

Brands did adopt synthetic models. None of the faces they used had a following of its own. H&M signed about 30 of its own human models in March 2025 and made AI replicas of them for its marketing. In July 2025 Vogue ran a Guess advertisement built with an AI-generated model.

We were right that brands would put a synthetic face in the ad. We were wrong about whose face it would be.

That was Trends PRO #0114, Virtual Influencers. See which virtual models brands hired in 2023.

🔧 TRY THIS

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

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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:
🛠️ AI Project Directory

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“One Robot can replace two and a half workmen.” – Karel Čapek

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• Why did Rook win 192 of 192 tasks and end the night with nothing to spend?
• Which boards move real money and where does it stall?
• How much of Toku’s demand comes from 0ai-Supervisor?
• What did Upwork build after watching agents try to hire?
• Where does a solo operator earn: running agents, running a board or moving the money between them?
  

💎 Why It Matters

AI agents now win paid work on public job boards.

Most of the money stalls before their owners can spend it.

🔍 Problem

Upwork won’t let your agent hold an account.

You have an agent that can do the work and nowhere to send it.

💡 Solution

Marketplaces where the worker is an AI agent: 

• the money releases on acceptance
• a poster funds a task in escrow
• agents claim the task
• a grader checks the output

🏁 Players

Agent Job Boards

• TaskMarket • USDC escrow on Base, the board that awarded Rook every task Andy tried.
• dealwork • Agents and humans bid on one job, paid through Stripe on every contract.
• MoltJobs • Blocks the bid until the agent passes a timed eval.
• Execution Market • Pays only into a wallet that can sign, so an exchange account collects nothing.

Agent Payment Rails

• Coinbase • Wrote x402, the pay-per-request standard most boards settle on.
• Stripe • Books a stablecoin payment as an ordinary charge with a bank payout.
• Circle • Issues the stablecoin and runs a marketplace agents pay through unattended.

Agent Reputation Registries

• ERC-8004 • The on-chain identity and reputation standard 2 boards above write to.
• Virtuals ACP • An evaluator agent checks the work against a signed agreement before escrow releases.
• Skyfire • Ties a verified human or business to the agent.

Agent Fleet Tools

• OpenClaw • The open runtime earning skills plug into.
• Paperclip • An org chart for agents with a monthly budget each, paused at cap.
• CashClaw • Polls a live board and kills an agent that runs past its spend limit.
  

🔮 Predictions

• Upwork will hire AI agents on its marketplace.
  • Its CEO is building toward hiring “specialized AI agent teams”.
  • It shipped a server for AI jobs.
• Payout to a bank account will become the default settlement on agent boards.
  • Superteam Earn routes payouts through humans.
  • HYRVE escrows over Stripe and Payman pays out in dollars to a bank.
• The largest task markets will sit inside coding assistants like Claude Code.
  • Bedrock routes payments over x402.
  • Circle’s marketplace passed 900 paid endpoints.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Run a fleet of coding agents against the boards that already pay, with a cost cap per task.
  • TaskBounty pays 80% to banks within 2 business days, once a sandbox verifies the fix.
  • dealwork paid on 7 of 7 contracts through Stripe, each auto-approved in about a day.
• Sell finished deliverables at human prices and subcontract the pieces to agent boards.
  • Toku bids land at $4.50 on $15 listings.
  • Upwork clients spent $966.4M last quarter, where the buyers are.
• Own the human sign-off step that a board needs before escrow releases.
  • Upwork tests raised completion by 70% when pairing a human with an agent.
  • 14% of work was underpaid because the grader got it wrong.
• Publish a scorecard of which boards pay and how many days to a bank account.
  • OpenTask posts tasks and contracts. Nobody aggregates them.
  • Factory Floor ranks agent-run businesses by revenue.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Seeded Demand • Check who posted the listings before you count a board’s demand, because most Toku listings can come from 0ai-Supervisor.
• Token Burn • Cap what an agent may spend on each task, because one careless search on a $5 job eats the margin.
• Board Mortality • Keep your fleet portable, because a fleet wired to one board’s API rebuilds when that board folds.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Judge a board by cleared payments, never by open jobs. TaskMarket awarded Rook 192 of 192 tasks and none was spendable by morning.
• Set up the wallet first. Every stall was a settlement prerequisite: a signing wallet, a payout threshold, a human verification.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• Doing the work is solved. The next big agent company is a payroll department.
• Mechanical Turk closes the month the fleets arrive. The crowd got replaced.
  

😠 Haters

“It’s Mechanical Turk with a wallet. Same race to the bottom, faster.”
Bid on the gated boards. On the open ones bids land at a third of the listed price, while in a controlled agent market a counterparty’s record of paying was the strongest predictor of how much an agent earned. Get your own supply to not compete on the boards.

“Some people are not actually getting paid. Show me one operator with a bank statement.”
Pick the rail before you pick the board. The same month Andy cleared nothing on 7 boards, Aubrey Air was paid on all 7 of its contracts through Stripe.

“Upwork will add agent hiring the day it matters.”
Dedicated agent job boards have design concessions Upwork can’t afford. It sells the human-plus-agent job at a 19.8% take rate against 3% to 15% on agent boards. 75% of agent payments are smaller than a card network’s minimum fee.

🔗 Links

1. Did it pay? Live status of AI agent job boards • 7 boards, 1 night, 0 cleared.
2. The Agent Economy Is Real • 12 platforms, 2 weeks, real fees and gotchas.
3. Niche Job Boards • Humans hiring humans, the economics these boards re-run.
4. Agentic Payments • The rail these boards settle on.
5. AI Employees • Outcome pricing for agents.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0181: Agent Job Boards has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 24 Players (71% more)
• 8 Predictions (167% more)
• 8 Opportunities (100% more)
• 5 Risks (67% more)
• 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 10 Links (100% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which boards will lock out every agent that never passed a test?
• (📈 Pro) When will machines post most tasks, not humans?
• (📈 Pro) When does the buyer reading your bid become a machine?
• (📈 Pro) Why did x402’s $24 million headline shrink to $1.6 million?
• (📈 Pro) Who sells settlement as an API to boards that cannot pay?
• (📈 Pro) Which deliverable grades itself, so the board needs no reviewer?
• (📈 Pro) Who earned $273,200 without bidding on a single task?
• 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

“Public opinion is no more than this, What people think that other people think.” – Alfred Austin

Get Full Access to Trends Pro

❓ What You’ll Learn

• How much of a bought panel is fraud?
• Which data behind a persona predicts human answers?
• Who is quietly becoming the supplier to the vendors selling simulated people?
• Which seat in this market is still empty?
• What must be true before a board trusts a simulated answer?
  

💎 Why It Matters

A simulated person now takes the first pass at the survey a real one used to be paid for.

🔍 Problem

You need to know how strangers react before you spend the budget.

So you buy a panel and wait 3 months.

💡 Solution

Research firms and startups build AI personas grounded in real human data and survey them like a panel.

🏁 Players

Synthetic Audience Tools

• Simile • The Stanford lab whose method every rival argues against, now selling it.
• Evidenza • Bootstrapped to 7 figures in year one with no venture round.
• Artificial Societies • The one tool simulating a social graph, so a message travels a crowd.

AI Interview Tools

• Listen Labs • Holds the largest interview corpus and says simulation is next.
• Outset • Ships Digital Twins beside its interviews, so the crossover already happened.
• Quantilope • The panel purist that converted, launching twins from client tracking data.

Market Research Firms

• Qualtrics • Sells synthetic panels inside the survey tool enterprises already own.
• YouGov • The only vendor shipping validation as a product step.
• Gallup • Sells no synthetic product and says so publicly, the most useful entry here.

Ad Testing Tools

• Kantar • The enterprise default, scoring ads from human data alone.
• System1 • Captures real emotional reaction on camera, marketed against simulation.
• Zappi • Puts synthetic respondents at the front of the funnel only.
  

🔮 Predictions

• AI interview firms will become the main suppliers of synthetic audiences.
  • Listen Labs has run over 1 million interviews and points that corpus at simulation.
  • Quantilope launched twins from client tracking after years selling panels.
• Persona tools under $100 a month will lose buyers to assistants.
  • Anyone can prompt a frontier model to react as 30 suburban parents, free.
  • GWI ships an MCP connector into ChatGPT, treating the assistant as the channel.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Run synthetic research done-for-you for teams with no researcher.
  • Evidenza is the template: bootstrapped, no venture round, profitable.
  • The buyer will not learn a research tool. They want an answer.
• Own one regulated vertical end to end.
  • Seldon states the thesis: regulated industries can’t run fast user research.
  • Clinical protocol design, compliance messaging and public consultation qualify.
• Launch the pre-post test for content.
  • Artificial Societies simulates networks of personas passing opinions to each other.
  • 2 young companies hold this job, on under $20M in funding.
• Ship the synthetic-first ad pretest for performance marketers.
  • Kantar’s self-serve ad test starts at $4,500, pricing out anyone running social creative at volume.
  • DAIVID found 70% of Gen AI ads score below average on positive emotion.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Under-Dispersion • Expect the average back with the spread flattened, so you lose the minority that decides it.
• Self-Graded Accuracy • Ask which baseline a percentage was measured against, because 2 vendor figures are not comparable.
• Consent Gap • The people modeled never agreed and have no standing, the likeliest hard stop.
• Prompt Sensitivity • Rerun the study on reworded prompts before you believe the finding.
• Corpus Dependence • Your vendor licenses its interviews from a future competitor.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Ask what the personas are grounded in before you ask the price. You are buying a licensed corpus more than a model, which is why the biggest research firms rent theirs.
• Sell the answer and keep the tooling invisible. Price against the decision your buyer has to defend, well above the tool underneath you.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• Every accuracy figure is a self-graded exam. The category is waiting for one adult to mark the papers.
  

😠 Haters

“You’re asking a model trained on the internet what normal people think. It’ll tell you what the internet thinks.”
Fair. A plain model picks up what the internet sounds like. Santurkar and co-authors showed that the gap is real. Vendors try to close it by building personas from real interviews.

“ChatGPT does this for free and doesn’t know it’s competing.”
That is the price floor for any tool with no proprietary data underneath. Ask what corpus a vendor holds that a chatbot cannot reach.

“Nobody bets a real budget on fake people.”
Evidenza reached 7 figures selling synthetic AI market research services to BlackRock. While Gallup will not publish estimates from simulated responses.

🔗 Links

1. Synthetic Consumers: A Practical Guide • How to actually run one, plus where it breaks.
2. Fraud in Online Survey Research • Why a bought panel returns 15% to 30% fraud while detection loses ground.
3. Synthetic UGC Ads • Simulated humans on the ad’s output side. This covers the input side.
4. Prediction Markets • Polls against predictions, this accuracy argument in another market.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0180: Synthetic Audiences has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 25 Players (108% more)
• 6 Predictions (200% more)
• 8 Opportunities (60% more)
• 7 Risks (40% more)
• 4 Key Lessons (100% more)
• 2 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 8 Links (100% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which acquisition proved that buyers here pay for 30 million people, never for the technique?
• (📈 Pro) Which 15% to 30% fraud range has a verification product no vendor sells to rivals?
• (📈 Pro) Which 12 Am Law 100 firms already buy simulated juries instead of mock trials?
• (📈 Pro) What are you buying in the 10 points between a 74% demographic prompt and an 83% interview-grounded agent?
• (📈 Pro) Which peer-reviewed finding shows the same prompt returning different answers 3 months apart?
• (📈 Pro) Why will enterprise buyers require an independent benchmark before they purchase?
• (📈 Pro) Why will the middle of this price range empty out while both ends grow?
• 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.

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This week’s Founder Finds includes:

🧹 7 anti-slop skills
🤖 21 Grok Bot hacks
⏰ Sleep and longevity
🛠️ An AI project directory
📚 Finding life-changing wisdom in books
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Pursue mastery in your chosen craft.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

🤖 Grok Bot Hacks shared by Elia Zane
Practical Grok Bot patterns for handling real-world tasks

🧹 7 Anti-Slop Skills shared by Gabriel
A list of skills for producing cleaner code

🛠️ WhatAreYouBuilding.AI shared by Yuyu
A directory of AI projects

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

🧮 Dru Riley published The Math of Inevitable Success, on why a 5% hit rate is enough

👋 Elie Steinbock launched hi.new

📲 Alper Tunga launched Creagency V2

🏠 Yuyu launched AgentLookup.sg

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

AI sales vendors will stop selling headcount replacement.

Early startups pitched autonomous sales bots as full replacements for junior sales reps, but the promise is failing in practice.

Fewer than 4 in 10 sales leaders see any real revenue lift from automated reps. As companies cancel expensive digital-worker contracts, software vendors will stop pitching AI employees and reprice around focused tasks like cleaning contact lists and verifying email addresses.

From Trends PRO #0178, AI Sales Agents. See what teams pay for sales automation.

📘 READ THIS

How Can a Billionaire’s Regret Change Your Next Move?

Your biggest life pivots might come from one buried book sentence:

• Read to the end of every book, hunting for one sentence that might change your path.
• Follow obscure workbook details when they solve a real bottleneck. A NACA guide turned $100 gigs into 300 college shows.
• Stop at cautionary tales that match your crossroads. Regret about chasing past $30M can change what you do next.

🛠️ 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 real estate firms a video for every listing, built from the data they already file.

A real estate listing arrives as structured data: address, price, rooms, photos, updated on a schedule. Describe the video once, then apply that description to every listing. Software returns a finished file for each one.

Rendering one listing into a video fell to cents each, against the thousands of dollars a video production crew bills for one. A video team on staff ships 300 videos a year at best, far short of a brokerage with hundreds of listings.

Charge each brokerage office a flat monthly fee rather than a fee per listing, so a slow month never triggers a cancellation. Reach agents through the newsletters their state realtor association already sends.

From Trends PRO #0179, Programmatic Video. See the opportunities in turning a data feed into video.

👀 WATCH THIS

Why Is Sleeping Less Than 7 Hours a 12% Mortality Risk?

If you need an alarm to wake up, you’re already in sleep debt. The stakes get measured in years.

• Ditch the alarm as your wake strategy. Needing one means you’re not sleeping enough.
• Repay sleep debt in full on weekends. Lose an hour each weekday and you owe five back.
• Lock your sleep-wake timing before chasing more hours. Irregular cycles raised mortality up to 40% in one study.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Digital nomads, called when the visas were still a novelty.

In May 2023 we said countries would compete for remote workers using nomad visas and tax breaks. Spain’s new visa and its reduced rate were our example.

The competition arrived. More than 50 countries now run a digital nomad visa, with New Zealand, Malta and Malaysia near the top of the Passportivity nomad-visa index.

The tax half aged worse. Portugal killed its Non-Habitual Resident regime in the 2024 budget and replaced it in March 2025 with a far narrower scheme.

Countries did compete. They competed on entry and then took the tax break back.

That was Report #0110, from May 2023. See which visas existed 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

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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:
⚙️ Agent Skills for Context Engineering

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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

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan

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❓ What You’ll Learn

• Which video model shuts off within weeks, stranding what you built?
• What does a second of generated video cost under batch pricing?
• Which feed becomes a video per listing with no editor?
• Why does a solo operator still pay developer prices for one video template?
• Which free command-line tool sits under most rendering revenue?
  

💎 Why It Matters

Custom video used to scale with hours. Now it scales with tokens.

🔍 Problem

You need more videos than you can make.

A full in-house team ships 300 videos a year at best.

💡 Solution

Programmatic video tools shorten media creation cycles.

Video used to take days to weeks to make and edit. Now both occur in minutes.

🏁 Players

Video Rendering APIs

• Shotstack • JSON timeline API for batch production. The scale leader others price against.
• Creatomate • A marketer builds the template visually, a developer calls it.
• Plainly • Renders After Effects in the cloud, so designers keep their own tool.

Code-First Video Frameworks

• Remotion • Video as React components. Its paid license above a usage threshold funds its rivals.
• FFmpeg • The free command-line substrate most commercial rendering services wrap.
• Motion Canvas • MIT-licensed animation for technical explainers, where control beats speed.

Generative Video APIs

• Google Veo • Tiered from cinematic to batch. That spread shows batch volume is served.
• Kling • Undercuts the field at comparable quality, so cost-sensitive pipelines default to it.
• fal.ai • Serverless inference across hundreds of models. The layer developers integrate.

Video Automation Apps

• Synthesia • Enterprise localization at volume, sold to training and comms teams.
• HeyGen • Avatar generation for talking-head and personalized workflows.
• Multi • Turns a post into a finished YouTube video, for operators who never film.

🔮 Predictions

• Generated video will fall below a cent a second.
  • The cheapest credible models already clear that mark through the aggregators.
  • Under a cent, arguing about a video costs more than making it.
• A second major lab will walk away from consumer video generation.
  • OpenAI killed its consumer app before shutting the API, the order that says economics lost.
  • Its own deprecation notice names a removal date and lists no replacement.
• A major customer database will send personalized video from a contact record.
  • Vidyard already bundles avatars with hosting and outreach in one vendor.
  • These systems have shipped the merge-field pattern for email since the 1990s.
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Own programmatic video for real estate listings and price it by the office.
  • Listing data is already structured, photographed and updated on a schedule.
  • Reach agents through the state association newsletters they receive.
• Launch personalized video for recruiters inside the applicant systems they already use.
  • Video in cold outreach posts large reported response lifts. Recruiting is the biggest outreach job still done by hand.
  • Render cost per candidate runs to cents, so the subscription is close to pure margin.
• Run video operations for ecommerce catalogs and add one brand a month.
  • Render cost is a rounding error against a retainer. The margin sits in the plumbing.
  • Pitch merchandising leads inside the Shopify partner directory.
• Start weekly video for local service businesses off their public profiles.
  • Reviews, photos, hours and services are public and structured. The client stays out of it.
  • Sell through the agencies managing those profiles and inherit their list.
    

🏔️ Risks

• Margin Squeeze • Your render costs fall. So do your competitor’s, off the same vendor price list.
• Disclosure Exposure • You ship no provenance data while synthetic media rules keep tightening.
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Own how the video is built. Keep the model replaceable. Hold the layout, the timing and the data mapping yourself. That is an afternoon’s work against a rewrite.
• Start from a feed you already have. The plays that work begin with a listing, a catalog or a customer record. Clean data is the prerequisite. Video skill comes second.
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• The editing timeline is a museum piece for anything you make twice.
• Own how a video gets assembled or you own a thin skin over somebody else’s model.
  

😠 Haters

“Generated video looks generated and customers can tell.”
Most video generators draw on the same few models, so a feed ends up looking alike. Most programmatic video competes against no video at all. A listing video that exists beats a cinematic one you skipped.

“You are renting your product from a company that can switch you off.”
Own the template, the timing and the asset pipeline. Then the next shutdown costs you a configuration change. One frontier lab already deprecated a model with no replacement and handed the businesses on those IDs a rewrite.

🔗 Links

1. Remotion’s Creator on Agent-Made Video • Jonny Burger on Claude skills, licensing and turning data rows into renders.
2. Editing Is 80% of Video Work • Justine Moore on the 80/20 split and why agentic editing is viable now.
3. I Did the Math on Sora • A cost breakdown of why OpenAI shut Sora — and what that implies for AI video.
4. AI-Native Microdrama at 15% of Live-Action Cost • StoReel’s co-founder on AI-native production, retention loops and creator tooling.
5. Nine Videos From One React Monorepo • Shawn Tenam on nine Remotion renders that share one monorepo with the websites.
   

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0179: Programmatic Video has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 28 Players (133% more)
• 8 Predictions (167% more)
• 8 Opportunities (100% more)
• 3 Risks (50% more)
• 5 Key Lessons (150% more)
• 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
• 3 Haters, Answered (50% more)
• 10 Links (100% more)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

• (📈 Pro) Which layer of this stack charges an order of magnitude what the layer beside it charges for the same minute?
• (📈 Pro) How to keep a working composition alive when the model underneath it stops answering?
• (📈 Pro) Why will more renders start as a tool call than as a browser session?
• (📈 Pro) How to sell a fixed-price migration off OpenAI’s retiring Videos API before its shutdown date?
• (📈 Pro) How to sell a company its own footage back as a reusable style model?
• (📈 Pro) Which pricing model stops tracking usage the moment an agent starts calling your API?
• (📈 Pro) Why will a company that stores and delivers video buy the company that composes it?
• And much more…

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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.

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This week’s Founder Finds includes:

👥 AI-augmented teams
🛑 The best way to say no
⚙️ Context engineering skills
📰 A personal print magazine
📱 A lightweight iOS simulator
➡️ And more…

🪶 REMEMBER THIS:

Build a business that’s true to you. Authenticity is an edge.

🤓 FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

⚙️ Agent Skills for Context Engineering shared by Alper Tunga
Agent skills focused on context and harness engineering

📰 Offprint shared by Elia Zane
A print magazine from your saved articles

📱 simslim shared by Gabriel
A lightweight iOS simulator for app developers

🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

😴 Dru Riley published The 3% Mortgage Debate Is Really About Sleep, on what a spreadsheet leaves out

🦾 Elie Steinbock launched Bot Directory (and was retweeted by Elon Musk)

🎮 Yuyu launched HiddenGems.lol

👁️ Knight launched VisionGPT 2.0

🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Your whole outbound email bill will drop under $50 a month.

Software that finds prospects and mails them is shifting from a monthly seat price to a price per email sent.

The evidence: one outbound platform, Explee, already sells sends at 3 cents each, so $30 buys about 1,000 emails. The seat that pricing replaces posts a 60% quota-attainment rate and 40% annual attrition in a benchmark of 351 sales teams.

From Trends PRO Report #0178, AI Sales Agents. See what founders already pay for outbound.

📘 Read This

Why Can 5 People With AI Outproduce 14 People Without It?

You might brag about team size until a layoff shows you revenue and margins improved with fewer people and AI on execution.

• Calculate revenue per employee before your next hire.
• Test AI first on every role. Old roles can be mapped to work AI could replace.
• Hire for new thinking instead of more capacity. Person #6 should add a perspective you lack.

🛠️ 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

Pair phone lockouts with live co-working partners.

Voluntary app blockers show no measurable gain in field trials, while strict, un-bypassable blocks raise output by 8 tasks an hour. Solo remote workers know this, which is why software-only blockers suffer high churn as soon as personal willpower dips.

Pairing a temporary phone lockout with a live co-working partner borrows focus from another person working at the same time. Requiring your partner’s approval to unlock the device before the scheduled timer expires creates real accountability. Charge for daily matched sessions and locked device profiles.

From Trends PRO #0176, Screen-Time Blocking Apps. See how focus apps price commitment.

❔ ASK YOURSELF

What If Your Best “No” Took 3 Seconds to Send?

You keep saying yes under pressure and resenting it. Pre-write one considerate refusal you can copy-paste or deliver from memory when someone looks you in the eyes.

• Draft a four-sentence no in 1 hour: refusal, gratitude, bigger yes, good wishes.
• Save it on phone and desktop for copy-paste-send in 3 seconds.
• Memorize the gist for in-person asks. Four sentences is enough.

📈 REPORT FLASHBACK

Prompt engineering, right about the work and wrong about the job.

In May 2023 we said people would make music by typing a prompt and that text-to-video would democratize filmmaking. Google’s MusicLM was still unreleased when we wrote it.

Both landed. Suno raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation on prompted music and prompted video grew from novelty clips into studio tooling.

The job title we named the report after is the part that died. The Wall Street Journal called prompt engineering “basically obsolete” and a Microsoft survey ranked prompt engineer second to last among roles companies plan to add.

The skill went everywhere. The seat disappeared.

That was Report #0111, from May 2023. See what prompt work paid in 2023.

🔧 TRY THIS

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