This week’s Founder Finds includes:
🛠️ Limits of vibe coding
📐 UX patterns for AI agents
📋 An async onboarding system
🍀 Increasing your luck surface area
⏳ Lessons from reaching $25K MRR in 8 years
➡️ And more…
🪶 Remember This
Each new feature is another thing that can break, confuse or distract.
🤓 Fav Finds
Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members
🛠️ Vibe Coding Won’t Kill SaaS shared by Elia Zane
A podcast episode on separating software projects from real businesses
📐 Interfaces for AI Agents shared by Jd Fiscus
A video on how AI agents are reshaping software interfaces and SaaS strategy
📋 Remote Onboarding Program shared by Kevin Galang
How to build a deliberate remote first onboarding system
🏆 Trends Pro Member Wins
🧿 Dru Riley improved competitor recommended responses in HeadsUp
🗓️ Mike Williams posted a yearly recap of Everything Marketplaces
👨💻 Joel Pickin launched a 7-day coding challenge
🤖 Elie Steinbock hosted an AI event
🔧 Try This
What Is Luck Surface Area and Why Does It Matter?
You can make your own luck through a powerful principle of passion and communication.
- Pour energy into your passion: when you’re excited about something, you naturally pull others into your orbit
- Tell more people: people will capture that value in ways you’d never predict – hiring you, partnering with you or investing in you
- Luck is ‘doing’ multiplied by ‘telling’: the more you do and the more people you tell about it, the larger your Luck Surface Area becomes
🛠️ Tools of the Week
👁️ LookAway — Relax your eyes and mind
🎨 UX Pilot — Build UI designs and wireframes with AI
⚡ M1-Project — Build your marketing strategy 10x cheaper
💬 Join the Conversation
Here’s what Trends Pro Members are talking about…
- (📈 Pro) Best blogging platforms
- (📈 Pro) Building LLM chatbot apps
- (📈 Pro) Best prompt engineering courses
🎧 Listen To
Why Did It Take 8 Years for This SaaS to Reach $25K MRR?
StatusGator’s journey from $10/month side project to 7-figure ARR proves that persistence beats perfection. But only when you finally decide to focus.
The 10-year lessons you should know:
- Talk to as many people as possible about your product idea and beg for feedback from real customers
- Charge more in general, especially to existing customers. Going from $10 to $79/mo was a game changer for StatusGator
- Find your unique positioning angle. StatusGator evolved from “status page aggregator” to “early outage alerts” which turned a vitamin into a painkiller
🔧 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
🍢 Trends Tribe
1-on-1 live meetups for Trends Pro Members.
- Make real connections
- Solve problems faster
- Help each other grow
Next meetup: January 19
👋 New Trends Pro Members
- Adel Kadyrov
- Abdulmecid Dündar
- Ramin Amighi
The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
🎧 ElevenReader Text-to-Speech App
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