This week’s Founder Finds includes:
💻 An agent orchestrator
🔀 A terminal multiplexer
🧲 Effective customer outreach
🐜 An AI-native company case study
💰 Help Scout’s growth to $35M ARR
➡️ And more…
🪶 REMEMBER THIS:
Your brand is more than a logo, it’s a promise.
🤓 FAV FINDS
Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members
💻 T3 Code shared by Elie Steinbock
An open-source dashboard to orchestrate coding agents
🐜 How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World shared by Hitesh Kar
How Spawn uses a large fleet of permanent AI agents
🔀 Rex shared by Gabriel
A modern multiplexer to manage multiple terminals
🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS
🇪🇸 Dru Riley published How I Learned Spanish While Running, on stacking a language onto a daily run
🤝 Shivam booked the first sponsor for Open Source Alternatives
⭐ Elie Steinbock reached 6,000 GitHub stars with Rakazo
🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK
More delivery and ride apps will pay their drivers to collect AI training data between jobs.
AI labs need data they can’t find online, like first-person video of chores or speech in less common languages. Delivery and ride apps have millions of verified drivers with phones and spare minutes between jobs.
In March 2026 DoorDash launched Tasks, an app that pays couriers to film chores and record speech. DoorDash has more than 8 million couriers who can pick up these tasks. Uber tested paid data tasks inside its driver app in 12 Indian cities.
A data startup has to find and vet each contributor first, so its data costs more to collect than data from a gig app.
From Trends PRO #0187, Data-for-Cash Apps. See the predictions on who collects AI data next.
🔧 TRY THIS
Would You Mail a Potato to Reach a Customer?
Once a customer has your product working, they ignore emails from your team. Jake Sciotto gets replies by sending short, personal messages that don’t feel like corporate email.
- Show them their rank. 1 message tells a user they’re in the top 10 of all PostHog MCP users. Telling them they rank high gets a faster yes than “quick call?”
- Make the trade explicit. Jake Sciotto’s opener spells out the deal: 30 minutes of your time for PostHog merch, reply yes or no.
- Sound like a person. Jake Sciotto says replies came from sounding human, not from the merch. 1 silent account got a potato with his face on it.
🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK
📣 Boringlaunch — Boost your SEO and sales
🧿 HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors
💵 StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast
☁️ OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK
Launch a cheaper hosted copy of an app that just raised its prices.
Each customer gets the same email when an app raises its prices. Each of them could buy your cheaper copy. On October 1, 2026 beehiiv raised its Lite plan from $109 to $139 /mo at 10,000 subscribers.
Rebuild the features its customers use with an AI coding agent and run the copy on cheap servers. Charge close to what it costs to run. MailCheap rebuilt beehiiv this way. It charges $19 /mo for a weekly email to 4,000 readers, against $109 on beehiiv Lite.
The publishing platform Ghost gives its code away and sells the hosting. It earns $11.15M a year.
From Trends PRO #0188, Reverse-Engineered Apps. See the opportunities in rebuilding the apps that raise prices.
🎧 LISTEN TO
Would You Take the Money That Triples Your Company?
Techstars turned an $18,000 investment into $2.5M and Help Scout grew to over $35M in revenue. But founder Nick Francis still regrets taking outside funding and would skip raising investor money if he could do it over.
- Count the return before you judge it. $18,000 for 6% came back as roughly $2.5M. The company tripled between 2015 and 2018.
- Name what the money changed. Francis says he’d have done it differently and wouldn’t have raised. On growth: double the business and you look up needing to double it again.
- Watch where it lands. He stepped down as CEO in late 2025. On what comes next, his promise is that it’s bootstrapped, with no institutional capital.
📈 REPORT FLASHBACK
Open-source copies of paid software, called when Cal.com was still Calendso.
In May 2021 we said free, open-source copies of paid software would keep coming. Our list paired each copy with the paid tool it competed with, like Calendso for Calendly and Supabase for Google’s Firebase.
Calendso renamed itself Cal.com that September and raised $25M in April 2022. Supabase raised money at a $5B valuation in October 2025.
Two others on our list stopped adding features. Papercups was an Intercom copy that went into maintenance mode. Athens was a copy of the note-taking app Roam that is no longer maintained. We were right that many copies would appear and wrong about how many would survive.
That was Trends PRO #0063, Micro-SaaS. See the open-source alternatives we listed in 2021.
🔧 TRY THIS
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The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🖍️ Paper.design – Agentic Design Tool
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