Google’s AI Contribution Pilot is now live in Search Console, and it pays select publishers when their content feeds AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini answers. Invite only. Dozens of sites so far. One publisher inside the pilot told Digiday the payout formula is “quite black box.” Google calls it an early-stage learning pilot. Meanwhile, AI Overviews have cut clicks to top-ranking pages by 58%, according to Ahrefs research across 300,000 keywords. Rankings hold steady. Traffic falls anyway. So who actually gets paid for AI content? Reddit takes a reported $60M a year from Google and around $70M from OpenAI, because it owns millions of human conversations no model can copy. Your blog gets an invite-only widget. 4 levers founders control without an invitation from Google: 1. Refresh your top 10 pages monthly, not yearly 2. Publish expert-led content no one else can write 3. Own an audience outside of search: a newsletter, a Slack or Discord community, a podcast, a YouTube or LinkedIn following 4. Track your AI citations weekly, like you track rankings While Google decides who gets paid, you can start getting cited today. #AIContributionPilot #AISearch #AIOverviews #SEOforFounders #AIvisibility

Joel spent $1,000 to make $2.50, then built a studio around the lesson. Now Joel Diab makes custom games for content creators at no upfront cost, funding each one himself and earning only if it does. It points to something most creators are sitting on and few have used: games may be the most lucrative channel in the creator economy, and it is still wide open. Full story on BYVI, link in bio. #creatoreconomy #gamesforcreators #creatortips #mobilegames #customgames

Fares hadn’t touched code in 20 years. Then he turned his wife’s crochet hobby into a real business with AI, and shipped it in 5 months without quitting his day job. The lesson underneath the yarn is bigger than one app: the wall that used to stand between a good idea and a real product is gone. What’s left is finding a problem worth solving, and caring enough to solve it well. Full story on BYVI (link in bio) #vibecoding #agenticbuilders #startupstories #crochetpattern #crochetapp

Stripe’s Q2 2026 data: 63% of new startups are solo founders. An all-time high. Same data, second chart: the median solo founder’s first-six-month revenue is down 23%. The top 10% are up 19%. The gap between them is 61×, up from 34× in 2022. Here’s 5 things the founders pulling ahead do: 1. Ship before you’re ready 2. Go global on day one 3. Own a niche too small to fight over 4. Build the audience before the product 5. Obsess over retention Full story on byvi.co – link in bio. #solofounder #startups #buildinpublic #indiehackers #techfounders

Everyone tells early founders to chase the big city and the big round. Tom Pischel did the opposite: he stayed in Erin, Ontario (pop. 11,981) and built @localxp.ca a community map that shows you what’s actually going on in your town right now. His 4 lessons work in any market you actually live in: 1. Build for problems you inhabit 2. Let user behavior override your favorite feature 3. Target the market incumbents skip 4. Bootstrap for conviction The moat most startups miss is proximity. Read the full story on byvi.co (link in bio). #founderstory #bootstrapping #localbusinessmap #solofounder #startupstories

You can’t teach someone to start a startup. You learn it by doing. Paul Graham’s new essay makes a quietly radical case: the best prep for founders isn’t an “entrepreneurship” curriculum or a business plan competition. It’s getting genuinely good at building things, and building them out of real interest, not because you’re chasing a startup idea. #paulgraham #firsttimefounder #ycombinator #entrepreneurship #startupadvice

They told them to leave for San Francisco. They built it in Ottawa instead. Builders Collective started because a group of students kept watching sharp people get told the same thing: the opportunity is somewhere else. So instead of asking where to move, they asked why they couldn’t just build the community they wanted, right where they already were. Now it’s students shipping real products. An AI resume builder. A webring linking Ottawa’s builders. A farm robot with $225K in letters of intent. The advice isn’t wrong. 57% of U.S. venture dollars went to the Bay Area in 2024. Geography matters. But there’s a difference between “SF might be the best place to scale this” and “you can’t start until you’re in SF.” One is a strategy. The other keeps you in planning for years. Builders Collective proves that you don’t need an ecosystem’s permission to start. You can just build the ecosystem around you. Full story on byvi, link in bio #ottawatech #buildinpublic #studentfounders #startupcanada #builderscollective

A 2-month-old startup, with a garage for a factory, just reminded me how a company is actually supposed to start. Most founders build first and understand their customer later. This team at Tandem Robotics did the opposite. Take their farm robot away for maintenance, and farmers call asking how fast they can have it back. But the robot isn’t the story. It’s how these founders earned the right to build it, before they wrote a single line of code. There’s so much any early founder can steal here, no matter what you’re building. I broke it all down. Swipe to the end, the last slide is the part most founders learn too late. #robotics #organicfarming #startuplessons #farmrobotics #farmrobots

At @shopify Builder Sundays, we watched 8 builders demo what they made. The biggest takeaway? None of them waited for the perfect moment. They put something into the world before they had the answers. 👏👏👏 If you’re building in Ottawa, Montreal, or Toronto, this is a pretty powerful place to start. Full story on BYVI. Link in bio. #BuilderSundays #Shopify #OttawaTech #StartupLife #indiehackers