The news dropped yesterday: OpenAI is shutting down Sora, their AI video app, six months after launch. The Disney $1B deal is off, and the API is going away, too.
The arc is fascinating if you zoom out. The app launched in September 2025, hit the top of the App Store within a day, and reached 1M downloads faster than ChatGPT did. By January, downloads had dropped 45%, and the whole thing had made roughly $2.1M in in-app purchases over its lifetime.
PLG was the backbone of some of the fastest-growing companies in history.
Slack grew by making team invites frictionless. Dropbox gave you free storage for every referral. Zoom let you host 40-minute meetings without a credit card. Those models worked because reducing friction was enough.
Been noticing how quickly vibe coding has become a real workflow lately.
A few months ago most of us were still writing everything manually or just using AI for small snippets. Now it feels like the process has shifted to describing what you want and iterating with the AI until the product behaves the way you imagine.
I didn't know no-shows waste 15-40% of every sales team's calendar until I met a stranger at Web Summit. I was standing by our booth when someone wandered over and started asking about what we're building at @Meet-Ting. I assumed he was just curious. Then he mentioned his company loses a lot of time to no-shows across his sales team. I asked how many. "We get 10,000 inbound demos a month." He walked off eventually, and someone came over to me and said: "Do you know who that was?".
Turns out he was the Head of Sales at a European unicorn.
We stayed in touch. And that conversation became a feature! We call it 'No Show Recovery'. Ting watches your calendar. If it notices the other person didn't show up, it asks if you want help rescheduling - automatically, inside the same thread. When you're running 10k sales calls a month and 15-40% don't show, recovering even 1-5% is hundreds of meetings saved and potential $$$s. Other lesson, talk to people as if you want and expect nothing in return.
We get very different answers depending on who we ask.
Some people are completely on board. They want the data, the analysis, the verdict, and they'll factor it in alongside everything else they know. For them, AI is just a faster, more rigorous way to get to the same place they were heading anyway.
While building JusRecruit, we kept hearing the same challenge from recruiting teams:
A single job posting can attract hundreds or even thousands of applicants, but recruiters still need to manually screen resumes, schedule calls, and filter candidates before the hiring manager sees them.
It slows down hiring and takes a huge amount of recruiter time.
We all have that one piece of content an article, a talk, a thread that genuinely changed how we think about something.
For me it was "1,000 True Fans" by Kevin Kelly. The idea that you don't need millions of followers to build a sustainable creative career completely shifted how I think about building audiences. It is also one of the core ideas behind Copus helping people build real, engaged communities around the content they care about.
We've been talking to hundreds of teams building with Cursor, Claude Code, and other agentic tools and the honest answer from most of them is: "We just run it and hope."
Some do a quick manual click-through. Some write a few spot checks. Some just ship and wait for users to find the bugs.
We built TestSprite to solve exactly this autonomous testing that runs from your PRD and codebase but I'm curious what your actual workflow looks like before you merge.
Early-stage founders often try to improve their product as much as possible and tend to take almost any feedback into account.
Sometimes they end up adding every feature users (even non-paying ones) ask for, even when those features are unnecessary. The product then becomes more complicated and harder to use.
And I m not even talking about the stage when the product is already established. At that point, there are more users, and their expectations start to differ.
If you followed Naoma a year ago, you knew us as a sales conversation analytics tool. We connected to your CRM, analyzed rep calls, and surfaced patterns from top performers so the rest of the team could learn from them.
It worked. Teams liked the insights.
But we kept noticing the same thing: the real bottleneck wasn't after the demo. It was getting to the demo in the first place and what happened in those first few minutes before a rep ever joined.
Qualified buyers were waiting 3 6 days for a demo slot. Many dropped off. The ones who showed up often hadn't been properly qualified. Sales reps were spending half their week running intro demos for people who were never a fit.
I'm Ion, turning 42 years old in just 5 days, and I've decided this is the year I stop just dreaming and start building. I'm a dad of two amazing kids, always full of ideas sometimes too many but I've finally learned that the real magic happens when you actually share them with the world!
So I'm launching on March 1, a fun browser game, perfect for competitive friends, family game nights, or anyone who loves head-to-head challenges.
A 2-player or 3-player game on the same device that brings people closer.
I m here to learn, support other makers, and meet good people.
TL;DR: Anthropic refused to sign a contract with the Pentagon that would have allowed the U.S. military to use all of its models without restrictions. Anthropic insisted on an exception, and brace yourself, that its models cannot be used: 1) for mass surveillance of citizens, 2) for autonomous killing. Now the administration is threatening that if the founder of Anthropic doesn't change his mind by a certain date, they will come after him.
Google, OpenAI, and Musk (Grok) have all signed the contract.
Following Sam Altman's announcement over the past few hours, people have been speaking out massively about cancelling their OpenAI subscriptions and subscribing to Claude.
I am a Computer Science student doing research into how solopreneurs and small startups create new apps and what their stack looks like. Particularly, I'm interested in how you handle things like authentication, billing, and permissions/authorization in your apps.
Let me know what you're working on below and how you're going about it -- I'd love to connect for some quick calls to learn about your product and talk about your process in building it!
Last year we hired a design agency to build our marketing site for @Basedash. They did an incredible job. The headline makes it sound like I'm dunking on them, but I'm not. The site was genuinely great. They built it in Framer so we could manage content ourselves, which was a completely reasonable bet at the time (and something we explicitly asked for).
