This week’s Founder Finds includes:
🧠 Critical thinking with AI
🎧 A podcast discovery tool
⛰️ Hill-making vs hill-climbing
📝 A collaborative markdown editor
💲 Direct sales for bootstrapped SaaS
➡️ And more…
🪶 REMEMBER THIS:
Use friction strategically – add friction to bad habits, remove friction from good ones.
🤓 FAV FINDS
Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members
🎧 HiddenPod shared by Elia Zane
A podcast discovery tool that scores and surfaces hidden gems
🧠 Critical Thinking When Agents Do the Work shared by Fausto Teles
How to verify AI-generated work without reviewing every detail yourself
📝 HackMD shared by Shushant Lakhyani
A real-time Markdown editor for collaborative work
🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS
🌱 Dru Riley published Which Business Model Suits Your Personality?, on picking the business your temperament will keep alive
🗂️ Jero Esguerra launched Index, a workspace for the creative process.
💻 Gabriel built oh-my-t3, an agent task management tool
🎮 Eddie Forson made a game set in Accra
🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK
More AI course apps will make the lesson free and charge for extra chapters and downloads.
Apps like Oboe write a short course on any topic from one typed request. In July 2025 ChatGPT added a study mode to its free plan. Google added a similar mode to Gemini a week later.
From then on, every paid course app competed with a free tutor. Oboe raised $16 million in December 2025 and made course generation unlimited and free. It charges $15/mo for more chapters and $40/mo for downloads.
Apps that still charge to make the course will have to match free or lose customers.
From Trends PRO #0189, Instant Course Apps. See the predictions on what course apps will charge for.
🔧 TRY THIS
How Did $2,400 MRR Become $50,000 in 1 Year?
Nathan Barry read how Customer.io went from $2,400 MRR in December 2012 to $50,000 MRR a year later. When he sold ConvertKit (now Kit), prospects kept saying switching was too much work.
- Help to switch for free. Kit includes migration in every paid plan.
- Watch the churn gap. Migrated accounts churn at 1.5% vs the usual 5.5%.
- Follow up each time. Nathan Barry admits he got interest and stopped replying. He lost deals because of 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
Run a paid hosting service for one popular open-source app.
Open-source apps are free to download. Running one takes a server, updates and backups, so many buyers pay someone else to do it.
Clawdi earns $2,015/mo hosting the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw for people who want it to run tasks for them. SetupClaw earns $1,432/mo setting it up for buyers. PikaPods hosts open-source apps from $1.80 /mo and pays each app’s authors 20% of the revenue.
The popular newsletter app Listmonk ships only as code its users must run themselves. So does the support inbox Libredesk. Pick one app like these and learn it deeply so its users pick you over a general host.
From Trends PRO #0188, Reverse-Engineered Apps. See the opportunities in hosting open-source apps.
🧠 MASTERMIND MOMENT
What will you understand only when it’s too late?
At a recent Trends Pro Mastermind, a member brought this question to the room.
Members said:
- The story you tell yourself. The host named separating what’s true from a story he tells himself. A new story has to be more plausible than his own to replace it, so he’s practicing a habit: ask “what does this mean?” instead of making one up. “Learning is changed behavior instead of just being able to recite something.”
- How much relationships matter. One member, an introvert, said they can devalue relationships and worries they’ll learn their value too late. The host, also an introvert, shared his Reach Out habit: contact at least 5 people a day. It works a bit like a sales pipeline, since replies stack up even when people don’t get back that day. The habit is still forming for him. The member said they’d do it.
- Raising money. Another member said they learned too late that they should have raised funding instead of going it alone. With money they’d probably go faster with less stress, though they’d give up some things too.
- Working in public. Another member keeps texting and DMing teammates privately and forgets to post progress in the team channels. Their feedback sessions keep coming back to it: put the work out where everyone can see it.
Bring your question to a Weekly Mastermind
❓ ASK YOURSELF
Are You Climbing the Hill or Making a New One?
There are 2 ways to improve. Climbing makes what works better, but each step gets harder. While making a new hill means getting worse before something better shows up.
- Know which mode pays now. Optimizing pays off early, then gets harder the closer you get.
- Budget for waste. Making a new hill means wasted time: dead ends, wrong turns and room to fail a lot.
- Ask what AI still can’t do. Kevin Kelly says AI and robots get better at what already works. He hopes they help people find new paths.
📈 REPORT FLASHBACK
Education platforms, called when Duolingo had 12M daily users.
In May 2022 we said learning apps would win by turning lessons into games. Duolingo, which keeps learners coming back with daily streaks, was on our list. It had 12M daily users in 2022 and passed 50 million in the 3rd quarter of 2025.
We also said income share agreements, where a student pays a slice of future salary instead of tuition, would help people reach high-paying jobs. In April 2024 a US regulator found coding school BloomTech had hidden that its agreements were loans. It banned BloomTech from consumer lending for good.
We were right about the games and wrong about paying with a share of salary.
That was Trends PRO #0086, Education Platforms. See the education predictions we made in 2022.
🔧 TRY THIS
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💻 Open-Source Control Plane for Coding Agents
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