Simran S.

Today, a YC startup asked to test a prompt for personalizing emails to 50+ daily Product Hunt launches - without manual testing. We set up the workflow in 3 min with our Lab feature: 1. Scraped today's Product Hunt launches into a CSV file 2. Created a prompt with "Company" and "Description" variables 3. Import the CSV file to Keywords AI (YC W24) 4. Tested the prompt across all 50+ cases with a single click, using various LLMs Check out our Lab feature here: https://lnkd.in/gqjXeaBT

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What a journey it has been. Just over a year and a half ago, we found ourselves in the heart of the bear market, reaching out to every investor who would listen to share our vision. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that OpenLayer has raised a $5 million seed round with the support of an incredible group of investors and angels. A huge shoutout to my co-founders, Yuchen J. and Chen Chen — the best partners I could ask for on this journey — and to the entire team for their relentless dedication. Together, we are reimagining data interoperability and working to change the status quo of today’s internet for a better future. This milestone is deeply meaningful because it represents the culmination of countless late nights, hard decisions, and unwavering perseverance. OpenLayer was built one step at a time, through moments of doubt and uncertainty, where we often questioned if we’d make it. But that’s what makes this journey so special — the challenges, the setbacks, and the grit it takes to push through. To my fellow founders and dreamers: Embrace the highs and the lows. Trust the process. Keep moving forward, even when the path isn’t clear. Surround yourself with people who inspire you, challenge you, and believe in your vision. Here’s to all of us daring to dream big and build something meaningful. The journey is worth it.

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Stripe recently released their Agent SDK — allowing developers to talk to Stripe's APIs with natural language. Now you can prompt models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude to handle financial tasks such as transactions, payments, and card authorizations. Here's an example of an agentic workflow for Payment Ops to handle tasks like creating one-time payment links for failed invoices—previously requiring multiple manual steps using Stripe with Vercel's AI SDK in Superblocks. Now, a simple prompt in English calls multiple APIs in Stripe to: 1. Generate the product in Stripe 2. Set the price of the product in Stripe 3. Create the one-time payment link in Stripe 4. Return that link to our app Of course, creating payment links is just one example. With direct access to Stripe’s full suite of APIs, developers can use natural language to handle refunds, subscription management, card authorizations, and more. In 2025 we'll see a lot more companies release Agent SDKs following Stripe's lead.

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It was great meeting Jordan Lehrer and the team of Paddle while visiting their booth at the recent SaaStr Conference. Paddle is a comprehensive payment platform designed for SaaS and digital product businesses. Paddle acts as a merchant of record, handling payments, taxes, and subscriptions for software companies. It offers a global checkout system supporting multiple currencies and payment methods, simplifying international sales. The platform provides tools for subscription management, invoicing, and revenue optimization. Paddle is an all-in-one payment and billing solution for software businesses. They act as a merchant of record, handling payments, taxes, and compliance so companies can focus on growth. Let's say, a small SaaS startup wants to sell their product globally but doesn't have the resources to manage complex international payments and tax compliance. By using Paddle, they can easily accept payments from customers worldwide without worrying about the legal and financial complexities. Paddle's automatic failed payment recovery feature is pretty cool. It helps reduce churn by automatically retrying failed payments, which can save a lot of headaches for subscription-based businesses. It's a "set it and forget it" kind of tool that works behind the scenes to keep your revenue flowing. #Paddle #PaddlePaddle #DeepLearning #MachineLearning #AI #DataScience #PaymentIntegration #SaaS #SubscriptionManagement #API #SoftwareDevelopment #BillingSolutions #Ecommerce #DigitalProducts Jimmy Fitzgerald Patrick Campbell Jessica Hutchinson Patrick Doran If you are interested, do check them out at: https://www.paddle.com/

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This is the least-sexy thing to get excited about, but.... CFPB 1033 just dropped!! What this means: the US has finally adopted Open Banking rules. FINALLY. https://lnkd.in/gSKqAHQQ The PDF is far too long to read, so we handed it off to a helpful LLM to summarize, and here's the TL;DR: Key Objectives: - Empower consumers: Give consumers access to their own financial data and authorize third parties to access it securely and reliably. - Promote competition: Reduce barriers to entry for new market participants, encourage innovation, and prevent market dominance by incumbents. - Protect consumers: Ensure data sharing with third parties is transparent and for the consumer's benefit, not the third party's own. Coverage: - Data providers: Depository institutions (including credit unions) and non-depository institutions issuing credit cards, holding transaction accounts, providing payment facilitation, etc. - Small Depository Institutions: Depository institutions with total assets below the SBA size standard (currently $850 million) are excluded from coverage. - Covered Data: Primarily focuses on transaction information, account balances, payment initiation information, terms and conditions, upcoming bill information, and basic account verification data. Data providers must: - Maintain consumer and developer interfaces for data access. - Make covered data available upon request in electronic form. - Not charge fees for access. Key Provisions: - Prohibition on fees: Data providers cannot charge for providing access to covered data. - Prohibition on screen scraping: Data providers cannot use screen scraping to enable third party access. - Standardized format: Data providers must make covered data available in a standardized, machine-readable format. - Reasonable access caps: Data providers can impose limits on the frequency of third party requests, but they must be reasonable and non-discriminatory. - Third party obligations: Restrict the collection, use, and retention of covered data to what is reasonably necessary to provide the consumer's requested product or service. - Secondary uses: Prohibit secondary uses of data, such as targeted advertising, cross-selling, and data sales, unless authorized by the consumer as a separate product or service. - De-identification: The rule does not allow for the use of de-identified data for secondary purposes, but the CFPB will monitor the market and consider future rule-making on this issue. - Transparency and accountability: Requires public disclosures by data providers about interface specifications and performance metrics. Implementation Timelines: - Data provider compliance: Staggered over five years, starting April 1, 2026, for the largest data providers. - Third party compliance: Effective immediately upon the rule's effective date.

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We validated our idea for Clueso, landed our first customers, built an MVP, and started our $1.4m fundraise, all within a month. It was towards the end of our YC batch. Demo day was a month away, and we were still deep in pivot mode. The usual path of building, launching, and waiting for users to trickle in wasn’t an option. We needed to sell first—and build later. One of our ideas at the time was using AI to generate product documentation from screen recordings. While we were still figuring things out, we signed up for a SaaS platform we needed to use for our company formation. As we signed up, someone from their customer success team sent us an email with videos and documentation articles to get us onboarded. But we quickly noticed something: their documentation was outdated. The screenshots didn’t match their current UI. This gave us an idea. We emailed their team, telling them we were confused. Sure enough, their customer success rep jumped on a call to help us through the process. Once the issue was resolved, we casually brought up our idea: an AI tool that could keep help centers up-to-date automatically. He was instantly excited. The rep even connected us to his manager, who set up a follow-up meeting right away! Now, we didn’t actually have a product yet. So, I scrambled to create videos of Figma mockups to show them how it could work. Those videos went viral through their internal Slack channels, validating what we had suspected all along—this was a real problem, and we were onto something. Once we received confirmation that they intended to pay $300/mo for our product, we started building right away and created an MVP they could use within two weeks. As we soon came to learn, if one large company wants your product, it’s highly likely that many others would too. Today, over 230 companies trust Clueso (YC W23) to create their product videos and documentation articles! #sales #startups

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I don't know who needs to hear this... but, there’s a 99% chance that your startup doesn't need Redis, Memcached, or ElasticSearch to scale—yes, even if you're horizontally scaling your services. Traditional databases are often faster and more capable than you might think. The specifics depend on your infrastructure and requirements, but here are a few examples to consider before over-engineering your system. The biggest problem I see in startups is over-architecting, or assuming that a solution built for a trillion-dollar company is the only way to solve your problem. If you're a small or medium-sized startup (think less than 100,000 transactions/day or a catalog with fewer than 1M items), here are some common examples of over-engineering: *Text Search*: You don’t need an external search engine for your catalog. Learn how to implement effective text search directly in your database. Are your indexes optimized? Is the issue with data quality, or the database’s search algorithms? *Search Result Caching*: Instead of caching search results in Redis or Memcached for pagination, explore cursor-based pagination, which can resolve issues with offset-based navigation. *Logistics Matchmaking*: For matching and tracking in logistics, consider batch processing or using your database’s built-in GIS features rather than building a complex custom solution. *Shared Memory/Cache Across Services*: For horizontally scaled services, explore in-memory tables, unlogged tables, or shared disk storage rather than relying on an external cache like Redis. *High Volume of Read/Writes*: For reads, consider client-side cache, edge caching, database caching, or pre-processed data. For writes, think about batch inserts, async processing, or queuing tasks for later execution. *Takeaway*: Know the full capabilities of your tech stack before adding complexity. Just because a solution works for a massive company doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for you. Don’t choose technologies because they’re "cool," trendy, or look good on your CV—focus on what works best for your unique needs. #startup #engineering #redis #memcached #infrastructure #architecture

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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If your product incurs cost for every transaction (API hits for devTool, payment processing for fintech), then it's a transactional product or feature. Now, understanding this concept is very important for pricing. You can't be very generous in free tier for transactional products. So, one need to break their product into static and transactional features and keep static part as free tier or free forever while charging pay as you go for transactional feature. I have usually seen product with transactional feature giving a limited transaction as part of free tier to lure customers with free tier. But, in long run, it hurts the business even more. Free tier is meant to be generous and with transactional cost you can't be generous. As a result, customer feel cheated as they wanted to use for free but couldn't try properly with limited transactions. A better approach in this scenario is to give upfront credits and let the customer use the product to satisfaction and then let them decide if they want to pay for it or not. It is a better strategy in my opinion than appearing to be giving free tier. This question will be a constant headache for product managers as more and more products embrace generative AI which is transactional in nature. What are your thoughts on this topic? #product #productmanagers #llms #llumoai LLUMO AI #genAI #AI #pricing #sales #techproduct

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⌛ The deadline for YC’s S24 batch is April 22! I get a ton of requests for application feedback, so I’ve consolidated my advice here: 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦 > 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 + 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 Your idea will change; that’s what it means to be pre-product-market fit. A bet on an early-stage company is a bet on the team to iterate rapidly and figure it out; think of your idea and your progress as useful evidence. Don’t be discouraged if you feel like you haven’t made enough progress, because the amount of progress you’ve made is not nearly as important as how fast you made it. In other words: “slope, not intercept”. 𝐁𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞. 𝐁𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭. Explain your idea clearly in 1-2 sentences: who are your users and what problem do you solve? Avoid jargon, marketing-speak, technical intricacies, or an exhaustive list of features. Tacking on “...with AI” or “...with blockchain” is not any more helpful than “...with computers”. Bad: “We are transforming the global software development industry with a revolutionary AI platform that streamlines the SDLC for tremendous efficiency gains using cutting-edge LLMs.” Better: “We’re a developer tool that automatically reviews code and fixes bugs.” 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐬 You should feel like an expert on your users, and have some unique/contrarian insights about them. You’ve hopefully identified a “hair-on-fire” pain they have, and you’re building a product to fix their problem. It’s hard to spend too much time talking to your users. Interviewing 50-100 people seems like a good place to start. If you’ve talked to less than, say, 10-20, it might be hard to know you’re solving a real problem. 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 What’s your path to $1B in revenue? Keep it simple. You don’t need a 5-tier pricing strategy and a multi-year product roadmap, you need to know roughly how many potential customers you have and how much they’re likely to pay (bottom-up analysis), and how big the overall market is (top-down). Reasonable estimates are OK. Remember, the VC model is based on a power law of startup returns, where one huge exit makes up for all other investments going to zero. This makes a tiny chance at becoming a $10B company quite valuable, and a high chance at becoming a $50M company surprisingly useless. 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲? Emphatic yes! YC was an awesome experience for us and every YC alumnus I’ve asked so far - it changed the trajectory of our startup. Even if you don’t get in, we found the application process itself was valuable and forced us to think deeply. If you’d like some eyes on your application, send me a message - I’m happy to help!

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Another step forward for the (unbiasedly) best banking solution in the market 😤

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The birth of a $63B dollar idea. This is how DoorDash did their first public pitch ⤵ 1/ The Humble Beginnings ➠ A $63B Idea Started Small ➝ Tony Xu pitched DoorDash at YC demo day, August 2013. ➝ Back then, it wasn’t DoorDash; it was Palo Alto Delivery. ➝ Founders were the only Dashers. ↳ Office? School housing. ↳ Marketing? Dorm room flyers. 2/ The Leap Forward ➠ From Dorms to Domination ➝ Be ready to iterate. ➝ Listen to your customer. ➝ Be ready to pivot. ➝ Scrappy solutions can lead to scalable empires. ➝ Staying in the trenches sharpens your problem-solving skills. ➝ Investors care less about polish, more about potential. ↳ Even giants start scrappy. ↳ Relentless focus beats resources. 3/ Lessons for Fellow Founders ➠ Persistence Pays ➝ Stick with the grind—momentum compounds. ➝ Humble starts don’t limit massive outcomes. ➝ Small moves, smartly made, snowball into big wins. ↳ The only way out is through. What’s stopping you from launching that idea today? ▶ How much do beginnings really matter? ▶ Are we undervaluing grit over glamour? ▶ Could your “scrappy idea” be tomorrow’s billion-dollar breakthrough? // Repost this ⇄ // Source: via Kevin Jurovich 🙏 Follow me for daily posts on emerging tech and growth: https://lnkd.in/gqzS_9Tf

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Three things I didn't know about launching on Product Hunt. ⤵⤵⤵ Shameless plug: If you like the following, Ubicloud is LIVE on Product Hunt (PH) now. Please support our launch: https://lnkd.in/eFZyy_tb 1/ When the PH day starts (one minute past midnight PST), your launch either gets featured or not. We didn't know ahead of time if Ubicloud would be featured. They say that reaching out Product Hunt and asking for feedback helps. So does creating a product teaser and building an audience ahead of the launch. 2/ The first hours (midnight to 4am PST) are crucial. If you're featured, everyone gets an equal amount of air time on the front page until 4:01am PST. After that, launches get sorted by popularity. I'm guessing launches that are above the fold get higher visibility. 3/ You can pick any day of the week (or month) for your launch. If you do well on a Monday, then you have a higher chance of winning the product of the week (because you're live for the entire week). We ran an analysis and found that surprisingly, Monday isn't the most competitive day. Competitiveness by day (lowest to highest): Sunday / Saturday, Friday / Monday, Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday. Again, if you like this, please support us on Product Hunt. Ubicloud + Kamal lets you deploy web apps anywhere using a completely open source stack.

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When we started Payhippo in 2019, a friend gave me a simple piece of advice he learned at Y Combinator: send monthly update emails. 5+ years and two startups later, I can tell you: that this was one of the most powerful ways to build trust and keep people engaged. Eric Bahn (General Partner at Hustle Fund) once told me, "You are one of the best founders at update emails! Thank you for always sending!" 🙏 Yes update emails are a good fundraising tool. But they're also a way to engage talent, and a way to stay top of mind with a broad community. Think about who you want to be on your list of supporters. If it's just investors, that's fine. With Payhippo, we took a broader approach of adding any supporters we met. With Archer I tend to focus on fintech-oriented people. 🤓 A simple monthly email, even without sensitive data, lets people know you're still pushing forward. It's a way to keep your story moving, so when you do need support, people are already in the loop. Better yet, it gets people excited because they can see how much progress you keep making. Start sending update emails. Don't overthink it. Just share something regularly. Next post: Building your update email list.

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Trying to figure out how to maximize the value of the hackathon track at Code Remix Summit. I'm very keenly interested in finding a way for developers that attend to go back home with some concrete ROI delivered on their employer's (or their own) source code. We'll of course be ready to help them apply out of the box OpenRewrite recipes and develop custom net new ones as well, accelerating this with Moderne tooling. What other devex type products though could we make sure we have license to to deliver ROI in a few day period? Thinking Develocity from Gradle Inc., Azul's new cloud solution for monitoring runtime reachability of source code, but what else? What could we add to a toolbox of licensed stuff to maximize 3 days? If you're shy about commenting below feel free to send a DM!

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They say startups die from self-destruction, not competition. I didn't realize how personal that battle is—I'm not just focusing on my startup. I'm fighting against my cognitive fatigue. 🧠 Cognitive fatigue is mental exhaustion from periods of demanding cognitive activity. We often focus on burnout, which shows up after weeks or months of overexertion, but cognitive fatigue, like muscle fatigue, can appear in hours. As a technical founder, I've been thinking about this lately. Why? Because I've recently been spending my time on many different non-engineering tasks. The learning and frequent context-switching have led me to finish days mentally exhausted but still lamenting that I didn't get enough done. I keep wondering, "Am I burned out?" But then I think, "I've only been at this for a few weeks; stop being soft." Ironically, as someone working to reduce the cognitive load on engineers deciphering code and building mental models of multiple complex systems simultaneously, I failed to see how this was paralleled in my non-engineering work. Signs I've noticed in myself: - Subconscious avoidance of challenging tasks - Increased tendency to switch tasks, resulting in few getting finished - Slower information processing and having to "think harder" to produce the same output - Increased irritability What's worked for me: ✅ Morning exercise: even when I wake up exhausted, going to the gym improves my energy and mood. ✅ Recognizing my limits: still WIP, but things like taking an entire day off over the weekend. What hasn't worked: ❌ Pomodoro-like techniques: I have tried timers, but I find myself setting increasingly ambitious goals, only to miss them and get discouraged. ❌ Stress eating: The 5 minutes of joy scarfing down some Cheetos is not a good ROI They also say that building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint. This doesn't just apply to 100-hour weeks; you also need to structure your working hours very intentionally. How do you manage this internal battle against cognitive fatigue? What strategies have worked (or haven't worked) for you? #CognitiveFatigue #SoftwareEngineering #ProductivityTips #MentalHealth

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One key lesson we internalized through our Y Combinator journey was the constant emphasis on product-market fit. It drove home the importance of rapid iteration based on customer feedback. As YC (W18) alumni, we hope to accelerate your road to YC through personalized feedback on your applications from my co-founders Andrea Baronchelli, Joel Leong and I. Submit your applications today: https://lnkd.in/gAJxNMMa #FoundersXchange #AspireForStartups #ByEntrepreneursForEntrepreneurs #YCombinator

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Hiring and working with excellent people is what makes starting a company so fun

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