Michael Wang’s piano students have homework they can’t do alone. Every RCM exam includes ear tests, and practicing them usually takes 2 people: one to play, one to name what they hear. So Michael, a piano teacher and first-year CS student at Carleton, started building an app that lets students drill on their own. 3 weeks in, he pitched it at Shopify’s Builder Sundays and asked the room one question: free app or paid subscription? 4 lessons from his first 3 weeks: 1. Build for people you already see every week 2. Separate who pays from who uses the product 3. Treat user data as a risk before you treat it as revenue 4. Ask for feedback while it’s still cheap to change course Full story on byvi.co, link in bio. #startupstories #edtech #studentfounders #ottawatech #buildersundays

If you run more than one AI coding agent at a time, this is for you. When you’ve got Claude Code, Codex, and a few terminals all going at once, the hard part isn’t the code. It’s keeping track of which agent needs you. One is waiting for you to approve a command. One wants you to check its plan. One finished 10 minutes ago and you didn’t notice. So you spend your day clicking between windows just to see what’s happening. CrewTower fixes that. It’s a Mac app that shows all your agents in one small bar at the top of your screen (the Apple notch). From there you can: 1. Approve or deny a command without switching apps 2. Review an agent’s plan before it writes any code 3. See how much usage you have left before you hit a limit 4. Jump straight to the session that needs you Everything stays on your Mac, nothing gets uploaded. For the full review follow the link in our bio. #tokenmaxxing #claudecode #codex #vibecoding #devtools

In 2023, 260,000 women died from pregnancy or childbirth. That’s one every 2 minutes, and most of those deaths are preventable with screening that already exists. Laila Mahmoudi and Ariadna Lozano Sanchez built DayOne at Montréal’s Coopérathon on a simple belief: the tools to save mothers already exist. Getting them to the women who need them is the hard part. The kit gets them through the door. The company is everything behind it: training, workflows, referral logic, and a data layer that grows with every screening. Founders, the lesson: find your $5 kit, then build the system behind it. Full story on byvi.co. Link in bio. #startupstories #healthtech #maternalhealth #womeninspiringwomen #montrealstartup

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