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
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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)
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