One rural says it all: “Road grooming ran past our driveway and nobody told us when. We found out when we heard the plow.” That line sits on the LocalXP homepage, and if you’ve ever lived somewhere small you already know how this feels. The closure, the detour, the farmers market that moved: the information existed, it just lived somewhere in a Facebook group, in a thread you weren’t in.

Tom Pischel lives in that reality. Erin is a town of 11,981 people in Wellington County, rural, about 80 kilometres northwest of Toronto and close enough to the Kitchener-Waterloo tech corridor to feel the pull of it.

When a December storm hit, Pischel watched his neighbours coordinate across scattered posts and group chats, and he decided the scatter itself was the problem. As he told the Wellington Advertiser in January 2026, important local information “is often scattered and difficult to follow in real time.”

Most founders would file that under “annoying” and move on. Pischel filed it under “build.”

The web designer who kept building for his neighbours

Watch this founder for the lesson in his track record: LocalXP is his third swing at this problem, and each one got sharper.

Tom Pischel is a front-end designer with about 6 years of product experience. His first project, Dwellcome was an app that helped newcomers to Canada find community resources like halal butchers and daycares.

Then in May 2024 he launched AltGrocery, a free map of thousands of independent food businesses across Canada: farmers markets, local grocers, distilleries. He built it in two weeks after watching the “Loblaws Is Out Of Control” boycott flood Reddit and noticing there were, in his words, “no directories for those looking for alternatives to well-known grocery chains.” He kept it completely free, both for the businesses listed and the people using it.

Notice the through-line:

Same founder, same instinct, 3 angles on one problem: community information is real, valuable, and badly organized.

AltGrocery even lives on inside LocalXP now, as one of the example map layers in the product. Tom absorbed the earlier work rather than abandoning it.

And that is the true signature of a founder who keeps returning to the same problem because he can’t ignore it.

The pivot from points to notice

The most instructive part of the LocalXP story is what changed between that January write-up and the product today.

The early version leaned hard into gamification. You’d earn points for visiting a business, attending an event, or helping a neighbour, redeemable for rewards like a free coffee.

Fun, sticky, and the kind of thing a designer loves to build.

But somewhere between the storm and the current site, Pischel demoted it. The homepage now says: “XP is a single feature, not the platform,” and verified check-ins are “not the default experience.”

What moved to the center instead? Notice. Scheduled closures, grooming windows, market days, trail status, detours. The stuff residents need before they leave the house, rather than the stuff that makes an app feel like a game.

That kind of restraint is rare, and it’s worth crediting. Pischel had a feature he clearly loved, the points and the rewards, and the maturity to set it aside the moment his community showed him what they really needed.

He shipped, he listened, and he let real use rewrite his plan. What the town wanted was simpler than a game: to be told what’s happening on its own streets.

Pischel had the clarity to hear that over his own clever idea, and the confidence to rebuild around it. Choosing the quieter, harder job over the fun one is the instinct that separates founders who serve a community from founders who just launch at it.

Why the small town is the moat

The instinct in startup land is to build for the biggest market you can describe on a slide. Pischel did the opposite, and it works in his favour.

Living in Erin means his feedback loop is literally at his front door. The municipal clerk who says “we post closures on Facebook, half the town never sees them” could be someone down the road from him. He can watch a program run, see what confuses people, and fix it by the weekend.

It also gives him a wedge the giants ignore. A town of 12,000 is too small for enterprise GIS pricing and too real to be served by a generic Facebook group. LocalXP is explicitly built to be “affordable for small communities and BIAs, not enterprise GIS pricing,” and it’s designed so a municipality, a utility, a business district, and a tourism group can each run their own layer on one shared map.

The design carries the same local logic. On LocalXP, one business keeps a single profile that can surface on the downtown map, the weekend market, a festival overlay, and a trail program at once, instead of rebuilding four separate listings. A bakery updates its hours once and stays current everywhere.

For a small main-street shop with no marketing budget, that’s the difference between showing up and staying invisible, and it’s the kind of unglamorous work you only think to build when the shop owners are people you actually know.

Bootstrapping this company also keeps him honest. Pischel funds LocalXP with rental income and paused his paid design work to build it, so there’s no investor clock pushing him to overstate the market or rush a launch. He can afford to get it right for one community before offering it to a hundred, and that patience is its own advantage.

The gap Tom is building into

The market case here rests on a documented collapse. Between 2008 and October 2025, 603 local news outlets closed across 388 communities in Canada, and only 264 new ones launched and survived. The local newspaper that used to run the closures, the market times, and the road work is, in hundreds of towns, simply gone.

Something has to hold that civic information, and right now the answer is “a dozen Facebook groups and a PDF.” That’s the vacuum LocalXP is walking into.

Rural towns like Erin sit right in the blast radius of that decline. When the shared source of “what’s happening here” disappears, the town doesn’t stop needing one. It just makes do with worse until someone builds a better one. Pischel is betting the better one is a map the community can trust and, crucially, own.

What this means for your startup

You don’t need a rural town or a mapping product to use what Pischel is doing. The moves are portable.

Start closer than you think

Tom’s whole approach fits in one sentence: live where the problem lives, ship to your neighbours, and let their real needs shape what you build. LocalXP is still early, with guided pilots running now and subscriptions opening soon, and whatever comes next, the way he got here is a playbook any founder can run. He turned a place most founders would drive right past into the one advantage nobody can take from him.

The best market research is a life lived close to the problem. You can’t outspend that, and you don’t have to. You just have to start where you already are.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Why a Solo Founder Bet on His Town Instead of the Big City appeared first on BYVI.

Somewhere in Ottawa tonight, a student is walking into a room with a half-finished idea and absolutely nothing to prove it. No co-founder. No funding. No clue what the first step is. They sit down next to a total stranger who is elbow-deep in their own project, flip open a laptop, and start building. Three hours later the thing is real in a way it wasn’t when they walked in. That is the entire event. We call it a co-hack, and it’s the engine room of Builders Collective, our community for “student founders, engineers, and designers who actually build.”

That phrase, “actually build,” is doing a lot of work. Half the tech world right now is tokenmaxxing, competing to burn the most AI tokens and climb internal usage leaderboards as if activity were the same thing as output. “Actually build” is the opposite instinct: put a real thing in front of real people. It’s also a reaction against a mindset that keeps talented people stuck for years, the belief that you need everything lined up before you begin. The right network. The right technical skills. The right co-founder. And, most stubbornly, the right city.

The advice you’re exhausted by

You know the line. If you’re serious about startups, you’ll eventually have to leave. Go to Toronto. Go to New York. Go to San Francisco. It gets handed to you like settled fact, usually by people who mean well and have never questioned it.

The annoying part is that it isn’t nonsense. Geography matters, and the numbers are brutal about it. Bay Area startups pulled in $90 billion in 2024, which was 57% of every venture dollar spent in the U.S. that year. And the money is clustering earlier and tighter: the Bay Area grabbed 45% of U.S. seed dollars in 2025, up from 33% the year before. We’re not denying any of that.

The trap is when an advantage becomes a requirement. “San Francisco might be the best place to scale this” is a strategic call you make later, with real information. “You can’t start a company until you’re in San Francisco” is just a story you tell yourself, one that keeps you stuck in planning for years, waiting on a plane ticket you can’t afford to give you permission you never needed in the first place.

We built the room instead of leaving it

The origin story is almost too simple. Qurb E Muhammad Syed and I started Builders Collective, with Hamza El Sousi, Srivathsan Murali, and Imane Amine as our founding engineers.

We were betting on a hunch, that Ottawa was never short on talent. It was short on a place for that talent to keep bumping into itself. The most surprising thing the experiment turned up was how fast the hunch paid off. The second there was somewhere to show up, the introductions started making themselves.

Someone needs a designer, someone knows one. Someone’s stuck on a bug another person squashed last month. Someone has an idea but no idea where to start, and across the table sits the person who’s already done it.

The people were already here. They just needed a way to find each other.

That’s why the format runs with almost no formality. You don’t arrive knowing what you’re doing. You arrive with something you want to work on, you pull up a chair next to other people doing the same, and you build. Starting is the only requirement, because starting is the part most people never get past.

What we’ve actually shipped

Builders Collective is new, and most of us are mid-build. That’s exactly what a group this age should look like, not a knock on anyone. But things are already going out the door, and that’s the part that matters.

Hamza El Sousi, one of our founding engineers, built and launched ResumeKickstarter, an AI resume builder that spits out ATS-optimized resumes, free to start, no credit card. You upload whatever resume you’ve got, paste in a job description, and it rewrites the wording to match without inventing experience you don’t have. It’s a real, working product with real users.

Qurb E Muhammad Syed built the 613 Webring, presented by Builders Collective. If you haven’t seen a webring since the dial-up days, the idea is equal parts nostalgic and genuinely smart: a loop of personal sites from engineers, designers, and coders across the 613 (Ottawa’s area code), each one linking to the next.

You add your site, paste in a tiny snippet, and “previous, 613, next” controls appear in your footer, turning every builder in the city into someone the rest of the city can actually find. It’s infrastructure for the scene. The tagline says it best:

“Ottawa’s builders, linked in a ring.”

Who’s in the room

The range is the best part. Some members are shipping their first small tool. Others are swinging enormous.

Joel Diab is an Ottawa game developer building Lemon Tree Studio, an AI-native game engine for creator-led games, and he’ll tell you flat out that he’s aiming for a $100 billion studio. The games are just the start. He describes them as a way to fund the technologies and communities he wants to build after them. That kind of goal can sound ridiculous out loud, which is the entire reason it needs a room where it doesn’t.

Hamza, who built ResumeKickstarter, is already quietly turning a profit, just not from the product with his name on it. ResumeKickstarter is the part you can click on. The bills get paid by Social Automate, a small Ottawa studio doing tech consulting for the least glamorous, most underserved clients in the city: mechanics, contractors, accountants, construction crews. Before he builds a thing, he embeds in the business for a day or two and just watches. Then he finds the task quietly eating 3 or 4 hours a week and rebuilds it into something that takes 10 minutes, a proper CRM, branded proposals, invoicing, whatever that specific shop actually runs on.

His read on AI is refreshingly free of hype. Not everyone needs an AI agent, he’ll tell you, and most of the time they don’t. What a contractor usually needs is a system that keeps them consistent, because they lose deals to lower-quality competitors who simply present better. Give them professional, branded proposals and they stop leaving money on the table. Social Automate is the quieter, more profitable half of what Hamza does, and it grew out of a leftover: the name is a holdover from a social media tool he built for his college capstone, proved out, then shut down. He kept the aged domain, pivoted the business, and kept building.

Then there’s Tandem Robotics, which settles any argument that real hardware with real revenue can’t come out of Ottawa. Ming Chen, Mumtahin Farabi, and Alvin Htet built Taro, a farm robot that lays the farmer flat and slides them down the crop rows, transplanting 2.5 times faster and weeding 4 times faster than doing it by hand.

Before they wrote a line of code, they spent 2 full growing seasons volunteering on farms so they’d actually feel the problem they were solving. It shows. They’re sitting on $225,000 in letters of intent, ran 2 robots this season, and plan 20 across more than 15 farms next year. Farmers ask for the machines back when they go in for maintenance. That’s the clearest signal there is that you’ve built something people need.

What Ottawa hands you that a hub can’t

The claim isn’t that Ottawa is secretly cooler than every tech hub. It’s that different cities let you build in different ways, and the trade Ottawa offers is a steal when you’re early.

Start with room to fail. You barely need money to exist here, and that quietly changes what you’re willing to try. Living in San Francisco runs about 78% more than Ottawa once you add rent, with rent alone roughly 148% higher. A one-bedroom in the core is around $2,068 CAD in Ottawa versus $5,261 CAD in San Francisco. When your burn is that low, a project that might flop is cheap enough to just try.

Then there’s space. In a smaller scene you’re not one of ten thousand people clawing to get into the same rooms. You have room to build your own. Some of our members who travel back and forth describe Ottawa as the place they come home to when they actually need to sit down and write code for hours. San Francisco and Toronto are unbeatable for meeting people and making connections. But when the job is to shut the door and finish the thing you care about, sometimes there’s no place like home.

The slower pace cuts both ways, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Fewer events and less hype can mean less momentum. It can also mean you’re not pressured into chasing every trend, which frees you to build what you actually want instead of copying whatever’s loud this week. And when something genuinely isn’t available locally, the internet erases the distance, while we keep widening the network until fewer gaps are left to close. Strong roots in Ottawa, connections everywhere. Not a bubble.

What Builders Collective proves if it works

Strip it back and we’re testing a single idea: talent is everywhere, but exposure, opportunity, and the ability to find each other are not. Give ambitious people an easy place to meet, learn, and work on real things, and real companies start getting built where nobody was looking for them.

True for Ottawa. Just as true for every city written off for never making the list of “real” startup hubs. Inside 3 years, we want co-hacks to be the thing you guard on your calendar, a network people actually use to find a co-founder, a designer, or the one person who’s felt the exact problem they’re chasing. We’re deliberate that “builder” covers non-technical people too, because tech companies run on designers, marketers, operators, and strategists just as much as coders. The long game reaches past a better-connected Ottawa: a model that helps builders find each other wherever they happen to land, then helps the next city stand up its own version.

The real ambition is smaller and bigger than it sounds: a place where having a huge idea doesn’t feel ridiculous.

Come build with us

If you’re in Ottawa, this part is simple. We’ve already made the room, so come use it. Show up to a co-hack with whatever you’re working on (half-finished is exactly right), join Builders Collective, and once you ship something, add your site to the 613 Webring so the rest of us can find you.

If you’re a student somewhere else, convinced you have to leave to be taken seriously, my advice is simple. Don’t confuse where you eventually need to be with where you’re allowed to begin. Maybe you’ll move someday. Maybe the company you build ends up in San Francisco. But nothing about that requires you to wait. The playbook is short, and not one line of it needs a plane ticket.

You don’t need an ecosystem’s permission to start. Sometimes you build the ecosystem around you.

And you don’t need to be in San Francisco to start building something worth going to San Francisco for, either. You just need to take the first step.

Feyza Gulbent is a business student, an artist, and co-founder of Builders Collective Ottawa. Her interests span entrepreneurship, software, design, and creative work, and she loves finding ways to bring those worlds together. As co-founder of Builders Collective Ottawa, she helps create the kind of environment she wanted to see more of in Ottawa; one where ambitious people can find each other, share ideas, experiment with technology, and build meaningful things together.

The post They Told Us to Leave for San Francisco. We Built It in Ottawa Instead appeared first on BYVI.

Maor Shlomo built Base44 by himself, went from $0 to $1 million ARR in 3 weeks, grew it past 400,000 users, and sold it to Wix for $80 million about 6 months in, without raising a dollar. No co-founder, fewer than 10 people, sole shareholder. That’s the screenshot every founder saved this year, and the proof text for a genuinely huge shift: solo founders now make up 63% of the C corps formed through Stripe Atlas in Q2 2026, an all-time high.

That same Stripe post carries a second, quieter number. The typical solo founder, the one right in the middle, made 23% less in their first 6 months than the typical founder a year earlier.

The top 10% made 19% more. So the money is splitting: the average founder is sliding while the best pull away, and the gap between them is the widest it’s ever been.

In 2022, the top solo founders made 34 times as much as the typical one in their first 6 months. By 2025 they made 61 times as much. The boom is real. So is the fact that most of the people inside it are earning less than solo founders did a year ago.

The number everyone screenshotted hides a second number

Most people share the 63% as a win for solo founders. Flip it around and it reads as a warning. If solo founders are 63% of new companies and the typical one is earning less, that’s not more opportunity to go around. It’s more founders fighting over the same customers: more people building, the same number of buyers, smaller slices for everyone.

The good news and the warning are the same fact seen from two sides. When anyone can ship software in a weekend, “I built a product on my own” stops being impressive the moment 100,000 other people did it this quarter too. Building used to be rare enough to set you apart. Now it doesn’t.

When everyone is AI-native, AI-native stops being an edge

Stripe found top-decile solo founders were about twice as likely as median founders to build AI-native products, and the obvious takeaway is “go build AI-native.” Except the same analysis notes the AI-native advantage doesn’t come from a few breakout apps at the very top. It shows up across the whole distribution, from roughly the 50th to the 95th percentile. AI-native is table stakes now, not an edge.

Think about what that means for the weekend build. The tool that let you ship a working product in 2 days is the same tool a hundred thousand other founders used the same weekend.

The build was never going to be the moat. Marc Lou, who’s launched 35 startups solo, says: the next generation “will be no-code people focused on solving a problem, shipping crazy fast with AI, and cracking distribution on social media.” The moat moved. It sits in two places now, and the best founders grab both.

Speed wins the market

Base44 is a speed story before it’s anything else. Shlomo didn’t out-engineer the field. He got a rough product in front of people, found what worked, and captured a category in weeks: $0 to $1 million ARR in 3 weeks, 140,000 users in 7. By the time competitors had a serious answer, he’d sold the lead to Wix for $80 million.

When building is free, the first founder to reach real customers at scale gets a head start everyone else has to spend money to erase.

That head start is worth more in 2026 than it’s ever been, because it’s more perishable than ever. The clone that used to take a competitor 6 months now takes a weekend, so the window where being first actually means something is short.

You either use that window to grab share, sign customers, and become the default answer, or you lose it fine-tuning a product nobody’s tried yet

Shlomo used that head start to grab the market, then took the exit before the moat question even came due. Speed didn’t just win him the market. It won him the option to leave on top.

Brand keeps it

Speed opens the lead. It doesn’t hold it, and most founders aren’t exiting in 6 months. Something has to make customers stay when a cheaper copy shows up next Tuesday, and the most reliable something is a brand a competitor can’t fork.

Pieter Levels is that lesson stretched over a decade. He runs a portfolio that publicly reports around $3 million a year with zero employees, on a famously boring stack of PHP, jQuery, and SQLite.

What isn’t boring is the audience of roughly 600,000 he built over 10 years of shipping in public. When he launched Photo AI, it did a few thousand dollars in week one and grew to six figures in monthly revenue inside 18 months. The code was ordinary. The people who already trusted him were the whole engine, and they’re the reason a hundred identical AI photo apps never took his lunch.

Speed and brand aren’t rival strategies. They’re two halves of the same job. Speed wins you the market before the crowd arrives. Brand keeps you there once it does. Base44 leaned on speed and sold fast. Pieter Levels leaned on brand and keeps growing year after year. Most founders who want to still be here in 3 years will need both.

The playbook I’d run right now

The good news buried in Stripe’s data is that the winners aren’t winning on pure luck. They share habits you can copy today, and none of them require a bigger team.

Win it fast, then make it stick

The boom didn’t do the hard part for you, and that’s the assumption founders keep tripping over. When building gets cheap, your edge has to come from what’s still hard: getting there first, grabbing the market, and earning the trust that keeps it.

And that’s the good news. Effort still wins, and the founders willing to put it in have a bigger edge than ever.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Everyone Can Build Now: Speed Wins the Market and Brand Keeps It appeared first on BYVI.

A signed licensing deal didn’t save Reddit’s visibility when OpenAI quietly changed how ChatGPT searches. If a company that just joined the S&P 500 can vanish from the answer overnight, your startup can too. The only durable defense is owning what the algorithm can’t revoke.

The short version

• Reddit’s share of ChatGPT citations fell from 3.8% to 0.5% in about a week, an 86% drop, after an unannounced August 8 change to how ChatGPT searches.
• A licensing deal doesn’t protect visibility. Reddit has paid contracts with OpenAI and Google and still lost most of its presence in the answer.
• This is platform risk, and it has happened before. Reddit’s ChatGPT citations collapsed once already in September 2025.
• The founder move is owned media plus diversification. Depth on domains you control is the only visibility an algorithm can’t take back on a Tuesday.

Reddit spent the past year as one of the sites ChatGPT cited more than almost anything else. Then, in a single week this month, it nearly stopped showing up at all.

Between July 18 and August 7, Reddit accounted for 3.8% of every source ChatGPT cited. By the week of August 14 that number was 0.5%, an 86% drop in about a week, according to data from the analytics firm PromptWatch. No announcement. No warning. Founders who had built a slice of their AI-search visibility on Reddit threads woke up to a channel that had quietly closed.

Every founder I talk to wants their product showing up in ChatGPT’s answers. Almost none of them have asked what happens when the answer changes its mind. This is what that looks like.

What actually happened to Reddit’s ChatGPT citations

On August 8, ChatGPT changed how it searches. Instead of running broad web queries, it started aiming far more of them at specific domains using the site: operator, the same trick you’d use to search inside one website on Google. Domain-scoped queries jumped from 0.37% to 16.8% of its background searches in a single day, a 46-fold increase. When the model stops casting a wide net and starts asking named sites directly, whatever isn’t on its shortlist falls out of the answer. Reddit fell out.

The timing isn’t clean. The search change landed August 8, the sharpest Reddit drop hit August 14, and PromptWatch itself calls the number provisional and says it can’t rule out a problem on its own end. OpenAI hasn’t explained any of it.

Why this is platform risk, and why it’s bigger than Reddit

Reddit itself will be fine. It signed a reported $70-million-a-year deal with OpenAI and a $60-million one with Google, it spent the better part of a year as the second most-cited domain in ChatGPT, and it joined the S&P 500 on August 18, the same week its ChatGPT visibility cratered.

If a company that size, with signed contracts, can lose most of its presence in the answer overnight, your startup can lose all of it, and nobody will ever notify you.

Reddit is protected in a way you never will be. It gets paid whether or not it shows up in ChatGPT, because it licensed its data separately from how it gets cited.

You get neither. Your visibility in an AI answer is a favor the model is currently doing you, and favors get withdrawn. When one platform decides how buyers find their answers, one back-end tweak can erase a channel you spent months building.

It already happened once, in September 2025

If this feels familiar, it should. Reddit’s ChatGPT citations collapsed once before. Semrush studied 230,000 prompts and more than 100 million AI citations across a 13-week stretch in 2025 and watched Reddit’s ChatGPT citation frequency fall from roughly 60% in early August to around 10% by mid-September, a slide that lined up with Google quietly removing a search parameter called num=100.

Two lessons from that one.

First, the pattern repeats: a back-end change nobody flagged, a visibility cliff nobody chose.

Second, and this is the part worth holding onto, Reddit recovered enough to stay one of ChatGPT’s two most-cited domains through the end of 2025. So re-rankings are volatile in both directions. And that is exactly why you can’t run a business on one.

What survives an AI re-ranking: the founder playbook

You can’t control how ChatGPT decides to search. You can control whether your visibility depends on it. Here is exactly what I tell startup founders to build, in order.

The bottom line

AI search is turning into a single point of failure, and this week made it visible. Build for the answer, absolutely, but never bet the company on one engine’s mood. Reddit just took an 86% hit with a $130-million safety net under it and a spot in the S&P 500. You don’t have either. Own your depth, spread your bets, and watch your ChatGPT referral traffic in Google Analytics.

Questions founders are asking me

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Reddit’s ChatGPT Citations Collapsed: 86% Gone in a Week appeared first on BYVI.

You raised money, and the first thing the money wants to buy is content that makes you sound exactly like the companies you raised it to beat.

There’s a pitch sitting in my inbox right now. 40 blog posts a month, flat fee, “AI-assisted, human-edited.” Third one this month. They’re all addressed to founders who just announced a round, because of course they are. That’s who has budget, deadlines, and a board asking about the content engine.

I want to talk you out of signing it.

The swap-the-logo test for commodity content

Take any post on your blog. Swap your logo for your closest competitor’s. If nobody would notice, not your customers, not your own team, you have published commodity content.

“Top 10 Tips for SaaS Growth.” “The Ultimate Guide to Whatever.” The ultimate guide is never written by the person who knows the most. It’s written by the person who was assigned the keyword.

This is not new, by the way. Agencies produced this for years before ChatGPT, mostly through no fault of their own. A freelancer who has never sat in one of your sales calls physically cannot write anything except the average of the internet. And AI didn’t change the quality of that content, it removed every limit on how much of it you can produce.

What’s new is that you can buy it at volume now. 40 posts a month. 50. The number in the pitch changes, the promise doesn’t. And funded founders are the customers for this, almost always, because a bootstrapper looks at the invoice and feels it.

How AI search treats commodity content

Your buyers changed how they search and I don’t think most founders have absorbed it yet. They don’t type keywords. They open ChatGPT and describe their situation (the stage, the issue, the thing that broke) the same way they’d describe it to a salesperson on a call. Long, messy, but very specific.

And the model synthesizes one answer rather than ranking a page of links. It has read everything: your blog, your competitors’ blogs, your G2 reviews, the Reddit thread where someone complained about your onboarding (though as of this week, ChatGPT cites Reddit far less).

Then AI forms an opinion, and it hands that opinion to your buyer with total confidence. There’s no page 2. You’re either in the answer or you don’t exist.

Generic content is how you don’t exist. There is nothing in a swap-the-logo content for a pattern-matching machine to hold onto. No pattern that belongs to you.

Why depth gets cited and commodity content evaporates

Best proof I have is a story I’ve told so many times my clients can recite it, and I’m telling it again, sorry.

A recruiting agency came to us. And instead of “we place top talent” content, we wrote one genuinely in-depth article: a full walkthrough of how to hire a founding engineer, written for a founder doing it for the first time.

First page of Google within a couple of days.

Then ChatGPT started recommending the agency by name to founders asking hiring questions. And it was all done with just one article. I checked with the client twice because I didn’t believe it either.

Would I promise you that result? No. The channel moves monthly and anyone promising you specific AI-visibility numbers is selling something. The direction I’ll promise: depth gets cited and fluff doesn’t get you anywhere.

One technical note because people push back here: yes, officially ChatGPT’s search runs on Bing. When I test side by side, the citations still track whatever ranks on Google’s first page. Make of that what you want. My conclusion is simple and not as exciting: classical SEO still matters, don’t skip it.

What Google does to commodity content now

Not going to dramatize this part. It doesn’t need it.

In March 2024, Google shipped an update targeting mass-produced content and reported afterward that searchers would see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in results.

Next to it sits a written policy, scaled content abuse, which says the value problem applies “no matter how it’s created,” whether the pages came from AI, humans, or both.

So the worst case of the 40-posts-a-month plan is not “it underperforms.” The worst case is your domain (your history, your backlinks, the thing every future campaign sits on) becomes worthless, and you paid for that outcome with investor money.

The real cost of commodity content is trust

Edelman and LinkedIn run a thought-leadership study every year. Two figures from it live in my head rent-free: 73% of decision-makers say a company’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging it than its marketing materials, and only 15% rate the quality of what they actually read as very good or excellent.

Both true at once. That gap is the entire opportunity and almost nobody takes it.

Gartner has the other one: buyers spend about 17% of the buying journey meeting with potential suppliers at all, and if they’re comparing three of you, your slice is maybe 5%.

Underneath the numbers, though, is something simpler. Commodity content costs you the same thing the “always crushing it” LinkedIn persona costs you, and it comes from the same instinct: hide the pivot, hide the quarter you lost, cut anything that sounds human, and publish the polished version instead. But the polished version is the one nobody trusts. Buyers, candidates, the AI models, all of them have worked out by now that when something reads this smoothly, there’s usually nothing real behind it.

How to create non-commodity content instead

Four ways to turn a commodity blog into something no competitor can copy, even with a bigger budget.

1. Pull your sales call transcripts

The lost deals especially. The exact words buyers use for their pain, the objection your champion couldn’t answer internally: that’s a year of content sitting in a tool you already pay for. And it’s already in the language buyers will type into ChatGPT.

2. Describe the client, not just the win

Industry, size, constraints, the mess they were in. “ROI up 30%” proves nothing. A detailed client is a pattern the model can match the next similar buyer against.

3. Get your actual experts talking

Founder, CTO, the support person who hears everything. Nobody wants to write, fine: 5 minutes a day of them answering a few sharp questions out loud is enough raw material. True authority can’t be outsourced. But you can outsource the typing part.

4. Create content together with your prospects and partners

A prospect ghosted me once after a hard pitch. Instead of follow-up email number 6, I proposed we write something together. It restarted the whole conversation, and eventually became business. We did a version of this with Advite too: we published a practical guide on comment marketing. It ranked, and it brought them customers.

How to measure whether AI is recommending you

When a board asks how you’d ever measure any of this, the honest answer is that it’s easier than they think, and almost nobody bothers. Start with what’s already sitting in your analytics: referral traffic from ChatGPT shows up as its own source in GA4, and it’s been there for a while. Almost nobody looks. The same goes for perplexity.ai and Google’s AI surfaces. That’s your floor: people who read an AI answer, clicked through, and landed on you.

Then do the part that actually tells you something. Open ChatGPT logged out, so your own history doesn’t skew the results, and type the specific questions your buyers ask.

Note whether you get named or cited, and which of your pages it pulls from. Run the same prompts again every few weeks, and watch whether your company shows up in more of the answers than it did last time.

What I won’t hand you is a precise AI-visibility score. Anyone selling you one is selling something, the channel moves monthly. But “are we in the answer, yes or no” is a question you can check yourself this afternoon, for free.

My AI confession

I use AI for content too. Grammar, typos, polish: it’s good at that, and it touched this article for exactly that and nothing else. What I won’t do is let it think. Every time I’ve broken that rule as an experiment I get back the same recognizable smoothness I’ve spent this whole article complaining about.

Am I certain about all of this? Not all of it. The AI-search stuff shifts monthly and some of what I wrote here will age badly. I just don’t know which parts. Maybe volume comes back. I doubt it. When I picture the internet in 2 years I don’t see a shortage of content. I see a shortage of anyone worth listening to.

Go read your last 3 posts. If your competitor could have shipped them with the logo swapped, you already know what I’m going to say.

FAQs

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post The True Cost of Commodity Content for a Tech Startup appeared first on BYVI.

A tiny Ottawa startup called Tandem Robotics built a farm robot that farmers are calling every week to get back. The reason it fits their fields so precisely is surprisingly simple: the founders spent two seasons doing the back-breaking work themselves, for free, before they wrote a single line of code. Call it earning the right to build, and it’s the one advantage money can’t buy.

The robot that works lying down

The farmer weeding this row of vegetables outside Ottawa is lying down. Flat on his stomach, inches above the soil, he pulls weeds by hand while a robot slides him along the bed at exactly his pace. Nudge an arm forward and it rolls forward. Ease back and it slows. For 20 summers he did this same job on his knees, bent double, back on fire by noon. Now he jokes he’s comfortable enough to watch YouTube while he works, and for the first time in decades his back is quiet at the end of the day. When the company comes to take the machine away for maintenance, every farmer asks the same thing: can I make it through the week without it?

That machine is the Taro cobot, and the company behind it, Tandem Robotics, is maybe two months old with a garage for a factory. The design is largely the masterpiece of their mechanical engineer, Alvin Htet, refined over years of university space rover competitions he ran alongside Kevin at uOttawa.

What I want to talk about isn’t the hardware, though. It’s the reason the hardware works, because that reason is the most transferable thing an early founder can steal.

Why the field beats the whiteboard

The problem Tandem is chasing is real and expensive. In 2022, 44% of Canadian agriculture employers couldn’t find all the workers they needed, and the sector lost $3.5 billion in sales because of unfilled jobs. The fruit and vegetable industry is the worst off, facing a gap of more than 35,000 peak-season jobs by 2030.

The people still doing the work are wearing out: the average Canadian farm operator is now 56, and 60% are 55 or older. And the work itself breaks bodies. A 2023 meta-analysis of 33 studies found 52% of farmers reported lower-back pain in the previous year, climbing above 60% for men.

You could learn all of that from a report, the way I just did. The team behind Tandem learned it from their own spines.

Ming Chen, the CEO, comes from a computer engineering background and is, by every account of the people around him, obsessed with agriculture. Mumtahin Farabi, who runs the hardware, grew up on a small tea-and-dairy farm in Bangladesh before a detour through decentralized-finance engineering.

Before Tandem, the team ran Apidae Systems, selling soil-data equipment to organic farmers, tracking moisture, pH, temperature, and electrical conductivity for clients that included the University of Ottawa and Canada’s National Research Council.

Then they spent two full seasons with their team volunteering on local organic farms, doing the labor for free, feeling exactly which tasks wreck you and in what order.

That is what “earn the right to build” means. Most hardware startups begin with a solution and go hunting for a problem it might fit. Tandem did the reverse. By the time they built anything, they knew the crops, the farmers by name, and the precise geometry of the back pain.

How to earn the right to build

Here’s how to run the same playbook, whatever you’re building.

Do the work with your own hands, not with a survey

Tandem’s two seasons in the dirt weren’t a box-ticking exercise. They were how the team learned exactly what wears a farmer down: bending, carrying, and repetitive strain, in that order, which is why the Taro cobot is built to take those 3 things off a human body while leaving the judgment alone.

This is the physical version of what Paul Graham calls doing things that don’t scale: Airbnb’s founders going door to door in New York to photograph listings themselves, learning the product by living inside the customer’s problem. You cannot outsource this part.

Sell the boring adjacent thing first

Before robots, Tandem sold soil sensors to these same farms, and when they started the new company, every early customer came with them. Those farms followed because trust compounds. Selling the humble product first bought them access, credibility, and a running start on relationships that a cold-emailing competitor will never have.

Rola Elghonimy, who led sales at Apidae Systems and runs sales here, is the one turning that warm pipeline into signed orders.

Shopify has the same origin story: Tobi Lütke was running an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil and built the store software because the existing tools were terrible, then realized the software was the real business.

The adjacent product is a Trojan horse. Ride it in.

Build for the constraint they actually have, not the one you find interesting

The sharpest lesson is buried in Tandem’s history. Their soil-sensor company worked, technically. The dashboards were good. The farmers paid for them. And then the farmers never looked at them, because after a day of manual labor and running a business, nobody has the energy to study a chart.

The founders had solved for data when the real constraint was exhaustion. So the next company attacked the exhaustion directly, with a machine that removes the physical toll instead of adding one more screen to ignore.

When your customer isn’t using the thing you built, resist the urge to blame them. They’re showing you which problem is actually holding them back.

Keep the human where the judgment lives, and support the product like you’ll see them Saturday

Tandem calls the Taro a cobot, short for collaborative robot, and the distinction matters.

It doesn’t replace the farmer’s judgment on which plant is ready and which is a weed, because current AI can’t reliably tell one seedling from another in a messy, chemical-free field where crops and weeds grow tangled together.

It removes the lifting and the bending and lets the human keep deciding. Their roadmap (“Work With Me,” then “Learn From Me,” then “Work For Me”) earns autonomy one verified step at a time instead of promising a magic box on day one.

And because these founders will literally run into their customers at the farmers market, they’ve designed for easy, swappable, right-to-repair maintenance and they refuse to lock buyers into subscriptions. Contrast that with the right-to-repair war farmers fought against John Deere, which only signed a repair agreement in 2023 after years of blocking growers from fixing their own machines. Tandem is building the opposite reputation from the start, and reputation, in a community this tight, is the whole moat.

Where the humility helps and where it hurts

I’ll be honest about the risk here, because I care about these founders more than about a clean story. The same instinct that makes Tandem trustworthy, the reluctance to charge aggressively, the discomfort with subscriptions, the refusal to beat their chest next to bigger competitors, could also leave money on the table. When I asked Mumtahin how investors get a return, he pointed to the exit most robotics companies take: getting acquired once you own a market a bigger player wants. The pricing and financing to get there are still being worked out, which is ordinary early-stage work, not a knock on the team. A product people love and a finished business model are simply two different jobs.

The good news is that the first job is far harder to fake, and Tandem already has it. They have $225,000 in letters of intent, robots that transplant 2.5 times faster and weed 4 times faster, a hardware platform that can haul 300 pounds, and a waitlist of farmers who treat the machine like a member of the family. That is the rare asset. Pricing and financing are solvable once you own something real, and they own something real because they earned it in the field.

Winning the farms giants ignore

It also helps that they went after a market everyone else skipped. The big, well-funded robotics companies chase enormous factory-scale operations, the kind of farms that are really just outdoor assembly lines, because that’s where the volume is. Tandem aimed at the small organic farms everyone else finds too fragmented and too cash-poor to bother with, and those are exactly the growers drowning in the labor shortage with no help coming.

Serving the segment your competitors dismiss is a classic wedge, and it’s wide open here. The team is going from 2 robots this season to a planned 20 next year across more than 15 farms, converting pilots into sales as they go, with their own factory (currently a garage) meant to scale toward mass production by 2028. Every one of those farms is a relationship they earned before they needed it.

Do this before you write code

If you’re building for a hard, physical, judgment-heavy market, the most useful thing you can do this season isn’t a pitch deck or a demo. It’s showing up to do the actual work. Volunteer on the line, sell the humble tool that gets you through the door, and stay long enough to feel the problem in your own body, until you understand it better than the people living inside it. That understanding is the one thing a bigger budget can’t manufacture, and it compounds every season you stay close to the work. Start there, and the product almost designs itself.

Time in the field plus a problem you’ve felt equals the right to build. No amount of funding can shortcut that.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Earn the Right to Build: How Tandem Robotics Made a Farm Robot Farmers Beg to Keep appeared first on BYVI.

Search your own product’s name plus the word “breach” right now. If your stomach dropped a little, hold onto that feeling, because it’s the entire lesson in this piece.

What actually happened in the OnlyFans leak

In May 2026, a threat actor using the handle Euphoric_Reply_5727 listed 340 million OnlyFans user records on a cybercrime forum for 0.313 bitcoin (about $24,000). The listing promised usernames, emails, phone numbers, follower counts, content stats, linked social profiles, and a field labeled “card” for the last 4 digits of payment cards. The headlines wrote themselves. OnlyFans, a platform sitting on some of the most sensitive user data on the internet, hacked wide open.

Except it wasn’t. The seller first claimed inside access, then admitted in messages they “didn’t breach or hack OnlyFans.” They took old leaks from X/Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, matched those records against publicly visible OnlyFans profiles, and stapled the two together into something that looks like a breach.

OnlyFans dismissed the reports as false, and on the narrow question of “did our servers get popped,” they’re right.

Founders keep getting this part wrong. We treat “we weren’t breached” as the finish line. For the person whose data is now in that file, whether it came from a hack or a clever reassembly job makes no difference. Their information is still for sale with your logo on the folder.

Why a leak that isn’t a breach should scare you more

The OnlyFans file is a symptom of a much bigger shift, and the numbers behind it are the reason I’d rework my security roadmap this quarter.

Attackers mostly don’t break down the door anymore. They log in.

IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report summed it up: “many attackers are logging in rather than hacking in.”

Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found the human element in 62% of breaches, and stolen or abused credentials still turned up in 39% of them. The front door is your users, and they hand over the keys constantly.

The front door is your users, and they hand over the keys constantly. That’s why “human risk management” has grown into its own category: platforms like Right-Hand run continuous, AI-generated phishing and deepfake simulations against your own team, then nudge people in the moment they slip, instead of the once-a-year training everyone clicks through and forgets.

If most breaches run straight through people, the people are worth defending like infrastructure.

Those keys get stolen at industrial scale, mostly by infostealer malware. Recorded Future indexed roughly 2.95 billion compromised credentials in 2025, with the average infected device giving up 87 stored logins across every account that person had ever touched.

Worse for anyone relying on 2-factor as a safety blanket: 276 million of those credentials came bundled with active session cookies, which let an attacker walk straight past both the password and the MFA prompt.

So the raw material for a “breach” that never touches your servers is already sitting in criminal hands, cheap and searchable. Someone just has to match it to your user list.

That’s the OnlyFans playbook, and it works against any company with public profiles and reused passwords, which is to say, most of us.

What a breach really costs a startup

The cost when it lands on you is real. The global average breach fell to $4.44 million in 2025, the first decline in 5 years, but the U.S. average hit a record $10.22 million.

For a seed-stage company, that average almost doesn’t apply. The real danger is a smaller loss: the kind that drains the runway you fought for and the trust you spent years building. The good news: it’s one of the few risks here you can actually prevent.

But there’s a newer problem that hits startups specifically, because we’re the ones shipping AI features fastest. IBM found that 1 in 5 organizations reported a breach traced to shadow AI, the tools employees adopt without approval, and those breaches ran about $670,000 higher on average.

Among organizations that had an AI-related security incident, 97% lacked proper AI access controls. If your team is pasting user data into whatever model got hot this month, you’re building tomorrow’s aggregation feedstock in real time, and you won’t see it in your own logs either.

The founder playbook I’d run this quarter

Here are the 6 moves that actually change your exposure, each one drawn from a company that learned it the expensive way.

Assume every password is already leaked

23andMe didn’t get its servers breached either. In 2023, attackers ran credential stuffing, logging in with email and password combos leaked from other sites. They cracked only about 14,000 accounts directly, but a relatives-sharing feature let that spill into data on roughly 6.9 million people. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2025.

Protect the token, not just the password

MFA is necessary and it is also not a force field. When Okta’s support system was breached in October 2023, attackers used stolen session tokens lifted from support files to ride into customer environments like 1Password and Cloudflare without ever entering a password.

Turn on MFA for the boring backend accounts, where old credentials go to work

The 2024 Snowflake customer breaches hit around 165 organizations, including Ticketmaster and AT&T, and none of it required a Snowflake vulnerability. Mandiant found that 79.7% of the abused accounts had prior credential exposure, many from infostealer infections dating back to 2020, and the impacted accounts simply weren’t configured with MFA.

Collect less and expose less, so there’s nothing to reassemble

The OnlyFans file only works because so much profile data is public and so much personal data is already floating around to match it against. Every field you make publicly visible is a field an aggregator can cross-reference. And every optional data point you collect “just in case” is a row in the next database someone puts up for sale.

Watch for your users’ data in the wild, not just your logs

The OnlyFans seller had that data assembled for weeks before it hit the headlines. If your only tripwire is your own server logs, an aggregation attack is invisible to you until a journalist emails for comment.

That’s the trap: your systems look clean because they are clean, while your users’ exposure grows somewhere you’re not looking.

Recorded Future found that more than half of stolen credentials surface within a week of a device being infected, which means detection speed is the whole game.

Draft your breach statement before you need it

OnlyFans answered a global story with one word, “false,” and technically that was defensible. It also did nothing to reassure the millions of people who saw their platform’s name in a ransom listing.

What the OnlyFans breach teaches founders about protecting user data

The strange lesson of the OnlyFans story is that it separates your security effort from your fate. You can do everything right on your own infrastructure and still wake up to your brand attached to a 340 million record file built entirely from other people’s mistakes. That feels unfair because it is.

But it also points at where the leverage actually sits. You can’t stop old breaches from existing, and you can’t force your users to use a password manager. You can make reused passwords useless with MFA and breached-password screening, you can shrink the surface an aggregator has to work with, and you can have your response ready so a bad news day doesn’t become a bad news quarter.

The founders who treat “we weren’t breached” as the start of the conversation instead of the end of it are the ones who’ll keep their users’ trust when the next reassembled file drops.

Every move here is already within your reach, and the trust you protect now becomes the one thing no old leak can ever take from you.

FAQs

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post OnlyFans Leak Explained: The Breach That Never Touched OnlyFans appeared first on BYVI.

Last Sunday, I spent the afternoon at Shopify’s Ottawa office alongside a room full of founders and builders. By the end of the day, 8 of them had taken the stage to demo what they’d been working on. That’s the whole idea behind Builder Sundays, and it’s why I think every early-stage founder within driving distance should experience one at least once.

What Shopify Builder Sundays Actually Is

Builder Sundays is a free, drop-in deep-work session that Shopify runs every Sunday from 12pm to 5pm in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. The format is simple: you bring a laptop and something you want to make progress on, work alongside other builders, and let the energy of the room do the rest. Deep work runs until around 3:30pm, followed by open demos and an hour of networking. Spots for the following Sunday are released Wednesdays at noon ET, and you register individually, including for any guests you bring.

Why Builders Should Give It a Shot

Apart from connecting with other builders in the room, Builder Sundays offer 3 things founders absolutely need to grow.

1. Practice Your Pitch

You don’t sign up to pitch ahead of time. If you want to demo, you put your name on the board that day on a first-come, first-served basis, then take the stage and show what you managed to build.

There’s no polish requirement, no committee, and no gatekeeping. You simply get up and pitch. And that’s what makes it so useful: you’re practicing in a low-stakes environment where you can experiment, get comfortable on stage, and learn what resonates.

2. Build the Habit of Shipping

A tight deadline forces you to cut scope, make decisions quickly, and actually finish something. That’s a muscle many founders lose while endlessly refining roadmaps, tweaking ideas, and planning for the “right” time to launch.

3. Get Real Feedback

You also get something that’s genuinely hard to replicate: a room full of people willing to give you immediate, honest feedback. They’ll ask questions, poke holes in your idea, test your assumptions, and point out what’s missing, all before you’ve spent weeks or months building in isolation.

8 Pitches From Builder Sundays

So you get the vibe, here’s a quick tour of the eight pitches that took the stage that afternoon.

Worth It: The Anti-Diet App Built in 2 Hours

Brandon and Brian, two students heading into their first year of university, set themselves a simple challenge: build something end-to-end in two hours. The idea, presentation, and product all started around 1pm that afternoon.

Their creation, Worth It, takes the opposite approach to typical health-food apps. Instead of finding the lowest-calorie option nearby, it pulls the menus of surrounding restaurants, runs them through AI, and surfaces the highest-calorie, most worth-it foods for your cheat day.

They pointed at an $800 billion diet and wellness industry and 88 million people tracking their macros (protein, carbohydrates, and fat), then argued the disciplined crowd is exactly who wants a proper break when they take one.

The demo found their location on O’Connor Street and served up a double bacon burger with cheddar and fries within 5km.

Built with React and TypeScript and powered by Anthropic, the app cost them just 32 cents to test. They were clear that the goal wasn’t to build a serious business, but to challenge themselves to go from idea to working product, get comfortable presenting, and see how far they could push 2 hours of focused work.

The room’s reaction summed it up: the amount of fidelity they reached in two hours was pretty crazy.

Tandem Robotics: Farm Robots Built to Work Alongside Farmers

Ming and his team at Tandem Robotics started with the farmer, not the robot. After talking to growers at the Lansdowne Farmers Market, he heard the same problem over and over: they need more labor, but it’s getting harder and more expensive to find.

According to the numbers he shared, 44% of farmers can’t find the workers they need, while labor accounts for 38% of farm operating revenue. The physical toll is significant too, with 58% of farm workers experiencing lower back pain within their first 12 months.

His answer is a collaborative robot designed to work alongside farmers, not replace them. The robot handles the heavy lifting and repetitive work, reducing the amount of walking, carrying, bending, and physical strain while allowing farmers to focus on what they know best. It can carry up to 300 pounds, and in early trials, the team found it could transplant 2.5 times faster and de-weed roughly four times faster than traditional methods.

The robot has already been tested on more than 5 farms, many within 10km of Ottawa. One detail that really stood out: farmers reported zero of their usual pain while working with the robot. And when the team takes a robot away for maintenance or to move it to another farm, their biggest concern is whether they can manage without it.

The pitch wasn’t about replacing farmers. It was about giving them the tools to keep doing what they love, for longer, with less physical strain.

Keating: AI That Teaches You Without Melting Your Brain

Keith opened with a simple question: who here worries about losing skills by relying too heavily on AI? A lot of hands went up.

That concern is exactly what led him to build Keating, an AI-powered teaching system designed to help people learn with AI without becoming dependent on it.

Keith has been building Keating for 3 months, and the project has already passed 2,000 npm downloads, with more than 500 weekly downloads.

Instead of giving you the usual wall of chatbot text, Keating turns AI into a more structured learning experience, with flashcards, visualizations, quizzes, and courses that users can build and share. The system also adapts to how you learn and can evolve its own code to improve the experience.

Keating is open source and runs in the browser, with your data staying under your control. You can bring your own API key, connect it to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Ollama, or even run certain models locally in the browser using WebGPU. Keith said his own AI usage for learning cost him only about $20 over three months.

The product has come a long way since Keith first demoed an early version at Builder Sundays 3 months ago. What started as an experiment has turned into a genuinely interesting take on one of AI’s biggest use cases: not just getting answers, but actually learning.

From $1,000 in 3D-Printed Signs to a Finance Student Hub

Frank came up to show 2 things he’s been building. The first is a 3D printing business he runs on Facebook Marketplace and Etsy, documented on TikTok, that cleared over $1,000 in revenue in its first month. His edge was leaning into what small shops do best: custom letters and signs where customers pick the exact thickness, color, and size, plus catching a couple of viral product trends and printing risers for trading-card displays. With just one printer and a handful of materials, he was typically shipping orders in under a week.

The second is The Finance Student, a platform he built after struggling to find a single place for finance students to discover corporate networking events, job opportunities, and other resources. And, in true Builder Sundays fashion, Frank had a little help from Claude, which he called “a GOAT.”

Ottawa is live first, with a hiring section that tracks live application deadlines across banking, wealth management, accounting, and internships.

Frank ended by asking the room for help with 2 challenges: automating the process of finding and posting relevant events, and figuring out how to market the platform.

This was a perfect example of what Builder Sundays are about: build something around a problem you’ve personally experienced, then bring it to a room full of people who can help you figure out what comes next.

Colive: A Better Way to Find a Roommate

Osman came up with a simple observation: finding a roommate can be a nightmare, especially for students and newcomers. Listings are scattered across websites, Facebook Marketplace, word of mouth, and community groups, and even then, you’re never quite sure who you’re dealing with.

His solution is Colive, a roommate-matching platform he described as “the Tinder of roommates.” The idea is to match people based on lifestyle and behavioral preferences, so you can find someone who is not only looking for a room, but actually compatible with you. Users go through a verification process, and the platform also includes a community feed where newcomers and students can share advice, experiences, and local information.

Trust is a major part of the product. Users are verified through their email and Canadian phone number, with additional identity checks being tested as the platform develops. Osman emphasized that Colive is currently in beta and that he’s actively using feedback from early users to shape the product.

Opero: One Workspace to Run Your Entire Business

As an accessibility consultant and software developer, this founder knows firsthand how fragmented running a small business can become. A growing business can easily end up juggling 11 different jobs, 11 different tools, 11 logins, and countless data exports just to keep everything moving. Marketing, sales, invoicing, collections, project management, and operations all live in separate systems that rarely communicate with each other.

His solution is Opero, a unified workplace platform designed to bring those core business functions into one workspace, with one login and one bill. Instead of simply putting different tools side by side, Opero focuses on connecting the underlying data, so things like clients, quotes, invoices, projects, and communications can work together in context.

The platform has been in development for 2 years and already has 79 active workspaces, serving solo operators, independent workers, and small teams. The founder built the platform himself using React, TypeScript, PHP, and Python, initially coding it before incorporating AI agents into the development process.

His pitch was less about showing off another piece of software and more about challenging other founders in the room: if you’re building a business, how many tools are you going to need to run it?

The end goal is simple: give Canadian businesses one place to run their entire operation.

An AI Gym Coach That Roasts You Into Shape

Sarbjeet came to Builder Sundays with a product he had actually built years ago. His original workout app had attracted more than 3,000 users, but he eventually stopped maintaining it because keeping the codebase going manually was too much work. This year, he decided to bring it back with a new twist: AI-powered coaching.

The app tracks workouts, progressive overload, strength, body weight, and training streaks, while remembering what you lifted in previous sessions so you don’t have to. It can also swap exercises when a machine is occupied, help design workouts, and give you feedback after each set. And if you need a little extra motivation, you can turn on “Roastmaster,” an AI coach that will call you out when you’re slacking.

The app uses a bring-your-own-key model, with support for models including OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. It also keeps workout data and AI conversations on the user’s phone rather than storing them on a central server.

What started as a workout tracker is now becoming something closer to a personal AI training partner: one that remembers your progress, adapts to your workouts, and, if you choose Roastmaster, isn’t afraid to roast you when you start slacking.

18, Ambitious, and Just Getting Started

David’s pitch was a little different from the others. Instead of demoing a product, the 18-year-old got on stage to share his story and talk about where he’s headed next.

After moving from Seoul to Canada as a child, David struggled with the adjustment, and later found himself dealing with low confidence and isolation during high school. Working out, meeting new people, and pushing himself outside his comfort zone helped him turn things around. When document complications prevented him from attending his dream university just after high school, he decided to make the most of the unexpected gap year.

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He took on part-time jobs, worked as a tutor, trained in Muay Thai and powerlifting, and got involved with 4 different startups. He also helped generate more than 100,000 views from a campaign at Carleton University and co-founded Pitch Tank Ottawa, where he helped sell out 4 events.

Now, he’s heading to Western University to study Management and Organizational Studies, with an advanced entry opportunity to the Ivey Business School. Rather than trying to map out the next five years, David said he wants to stay open to new experiences and opportunities. But he does know one thing for sure: “I’m going to be a millionaire.”

The Point Isn’t to Have It All Figured Out

If there was one thing I took away from Shopify Builder Sundays, it’s that none of these founders waited for the perfect idea, the perfect product, or the perfect moment to start.

They came with different ideas, different levels of experience, and very different reasons for building. But they all had one thing in common: they were willing to put something into the world before they had all the answers.

And that’s what makes Builder Sundays worth experiencing.

Some of these ideas will become companies. Some will pivot. And some will change completely after a few more Sundays. But each founder now has momentum, feedback, and a room full of people who’ve seen what they’re building.

For anyone building from Ottawa, that’s a pretty powerful place to start. You don’t need a pitch deck, a team, a five-year plan, or a billion-dollar idea. You just need something you’re willing to build, and of course, the courage to show it to others.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post What Founders Ship at Shopify Builder Sundays in Ottawa appeared first on BYVI.

I flew to San Francisco for YC Startup School 2026 with something I didn’t have a year ago: a product real people actually use. Having a real product changed everything about this trip.

Here’s what the sessions, the hallway run-ins, and 6,000 founders in one place did to the way I think about building, and why I came home to Ottawa readier to go bigger on my own terms.

Why I live on Twitter/X, not LinkedIn

Two lines from the stage stuck with me before I’d even left the building. Boris Cherny joked, “Maybe don’t listen to the LinkedIn influencers.”

Alexandr Wang’s session put it plainer: “Top advice: ignore LinkedIn.” My takeaway landed fast: more Twitter/X, less LinkedIn.

Strange thing to write in a piece you might be reading on LinkedIn, I know. But it’s the honest version.

The reason I’ve been able to track AI closely and pick up new tools quickly is Twitter/X. It’s the platform I’ve used longest and most consistently, and it’s where people share what they’re trying before it gets sanded into polished content. I spot a tool early, then I find out if it’s any good by throwing it at a problem I already have.

The room didn’t make me a builder

The bigger takeaway from the trip, though, was confidence. And that’s really what I want to hand to anyone reading this who doesn’t have the “right” background and is wondering whether to build anyway.

Startup School didn’t turn me into a builder. Building had already changed who I was by the time I showed up. Over the past year, AI stretched what I could do alone. The people I met stretched what I thought was worth doing.

What my YC Startup School experience actually gave me

Last year I applied to Startup School and got rejected. I flew to the Bay Area anyway, went to the events around it, and found my way into the community.

That trip forced me to face something: I had years of product experience and pages of ideas, but nothing I could point at and say, ‘I made this.’

One year later, I came back with Joe Speaking. It started as a fix for my own English-speaking problem. I was user number one, and it got me the language score I needed. Since then it’s reached more than 1,700 users through purely organic growth, 130 of them paying, and it became my first iOS app.

At Startup School I met people from top universities, research labs, and big tech. Plenty were younger than me with resumes that read better than mine on paper. A year earlier, that would’ve had me quietly questioning whether I belonged. This time I just felt proud. I didn’t need a famous school, company, title, or investor to explain who I was, because I’d put something real into the world and people were using it.

Building became my credential.

Startup School didn’t give me that. It helped me see I’d already earned it. While I was drafting this, Paul Graham posted the line that sums it up: confidence comes from evidence.

Here’s my evidence from one year. I went from product person to someone who can turn a personal problem into a shipped product, then debug it, distribute it, support it, and improve it.

Even while wandering around San Francisco, I shipped 1 iOS release and 3 web releases remotely, acted on feedback from 3 users, and burned through roughly 4.4 billion tokens. That pace still feels a little unreal to me.

There’s no magic prompt

Boris Cherny’s session explained why some people get so much more out of tools like Claude Code. There’s no magic prompt. His advice was to treat the model empirically: give it hard work, give it a way to check its own output, watch where it breaks, then adjust the prompt, context, tools, or workflow. Then run it again. The loop is the skill, not any single line you paste in.

That’s exactly how I got better. Not by hoarding prompt templates, but by testing tools against problems I genuinely needed to solve and letting the results grade me. A template promises a shortcut, but the model, the task, and the tools keep shifting, so what worked last week quietly stops working.

Running that loop against my own real problems taught me what to actually change when the output missed, and the feedback was honest because it was mine.

AI didn’t take my job off my plate. I still had to decide what to build, understand users, judge the output, and make the tradeoffs. What it did was amplify my agency.

One person still isn’t enough

The trip reminded me that one person still isn’t enough for everything. Tools made me faster. The people I met changed what I thought was possible, and brought the judgment, trust, and perspective no tool can provide.

Permission to build what you actually want

Most conversations gravitated to giant markets, hockey-stick growth, fundraising, and whatever’s trending. That energy is part of what makes the place worth it. My path just looks different.

Joe Speaking is a product, an experiment, and a way to learn all at once. I built it because I needed it, not because the problem was fashionable or easy to pitch. I literally put my own name on it.

Because AI has dropped the cost of execution, I have more room to follow that instinct. But more freedom raises the stakes on choosing a direction.

AI can make me faster. It can’t tell me what to care about.

What I took from Peter Steinberger’s talk was permission:

Afterward I caught a few minutes with a YC partner, walked through my background, why I built Joe Speaking, and what I want to explore next. The product has grown further than I expected and become genuinely useful to a group of people. But I’m not going to jam it into a story built for YC or fundraising before I understand what the bigger company should even be. I might apply later, when the product, the opportunity, and my ambition actually line up. For now I’m fine saying: not yet.

That’s probably the cleanest summary of my trip. Call it a refusal to perform ambition for other people. I’m plenty ambitious. I just won’t fake a version of it to fit someone’s slide.

Building for myself means starting from a problem I understand deeply, listening to users, and seeing how far it goes before I call it something bigger. Feeling a little out of place might’ve been part of finally finding my own lane.

> be joe.

> always build for myself and be my own first user. even the product name has “joe” in it.

> build to solve my own problems, not to optimize for yc or fundraising.

> twitter is still on my phone dock.

> on my own track.

Thank you @steipete ! pic.twitter.com/octq3iwkQq

— Joe Hu (@hubeiqiao) July 26, 2026

Staying on your track doesn’t mean thinking small

Authenticity can turn into an excuse, though. “I’m staying on my own track” should never quietly mean “I’m scared to think bigger.” Startup School pushed me here, hard.

Alexandr Wang framed this as a once-in-a-civilization moment. The question I walked out with: what kind of world do I want my work to help build? I’m good at spotting a concrete problem and shipping a practical fix. I’m still learning to connect those fixes to a much larger vision.

Sam Altman argued that coding agents have raised the ceiling for small teams. They let a tiny team chase work that used to be out of reach, not just do the familiar stuff faster.

Blake Scholl made that tangible in the physical world. He came from software, not aerospace, and still built toward an economically viable supersonic airliner. His story was a reminder that better technology doesn’t hand us a better future on its own. Someone has to build the products that carry it forward. I’ve long been drawn to products that bridge the physical and digital worlds. I don’t know the exact shape yet, but Startup School pushed me to look past whatever’s directly in front of me.

Later, at a fireside with Vinod Khosla, it got even blunter: dream bigger, take more risks, accept that you might fail. For me that means pushing my own path further than I first thought possible, instead of copying someone else’s company or someone else’s definition of winning.

“How hard can it be?”

Jensen Huang’s session gave me another handle on confidence. NVIDIA didn’t start with the right technical approach. When the team finally admitted that, they bought textbooks, learned what they had to, and rebuilt. His point was simple:

Great founders don’t already know everything. They’re willing to face reality and go learn.

He described the attitude he still brings to unfamiliar problems: “How hard can it be?” The honest answer is usually “harder than you think.” But picturing every future ordeal in advance can rattle you enough to never start. So start. Learn what today asks of you. Then build toward tomorrow.

And that felt personal. Last year I didn’t know how to build the product I now run. This year, users occasionally wake me up with support messages. New problems, sure, but problems I’m grateful to have. Resilience isn’t repeating the same idea forever or pretending everything works. It’s facing what’s real, learning fast, adjusting, and continuing. Not knowing something isn’t a permanent identity. You can learn your way there.

The best of the YC Startup School experience happened between sessions

The talks were great. Some of the meaningful stuff happened in the gaps. At a Google DeepMind after-party I met Logan Kilpatrick and showed him what I’d built with Gemini Live. Telling the builder what I thought, face to face, beat any feedback form I’ve ever filled out.

I first met Nolan Lwin at Founders, Inc. We crossed paths again at Startup School, then at a coffee shop he recommended, where nearly everyone around me was grinding on a YC application. Everyone but me.

Coming back from the restroom, someone stopped me: Mark Nakatani. We’d tried to meet at Startup School and missed each other, only to collide there by accident. I also finally met Nelson Lee in person after knowing him through X for years.

There were real conversations, new friendships, after-parties, and even builder hotpot. Some of these meetings probably felt ordinary to the other person. To me they carried years of context.

When you’ve followed someone’s work, used what they built, or traded posts for a long time, meeting in person changes the whole thing.

Help first, the network builds itself

Sam Altman also talked about how the best networks grow from genuine curiosity and helping people, not from treating every chat as a transaction. That matched my whole trip. I didn’t walk into rooms hunting a target. I shared what I was building, listened to other people’s stories, asked questions, and let the unexpected conversations happen.

It’s how I think about a personal brand too. To me, a brand is the memory people build from what you do over and over, not a polished profile or a job title.

Sometimes helping is sharing what you know or making an intro. Sometimes it’s honest feedback, or just caring about what someone’s trying to build. Writing this is one of those ways.

I’m early, and I haven’t figured it all out. But maybe the honest version of my journey helps someone start sooner, feel less intimidated, or trust their own path a little more.

I want what I publish to make me more useful and more honest, not just more visible.

What San Francisco gives me, and what Ottawa does

In San Francisco, especially at a YC event, ambitious ideas feel normal. Conversations open with agents, models, infrastructure, distribution, and products that were impossible a year ago. Startup thinking leaks into ordinary places. That density is powerful, and it’s still a bubble. Step outside it and plenty of people have never meaningfully used an AI agent, and plenty of businesses are only starting to grasp what today’s tools can do.

There’s an insane amount of alpha in:
– People in SF leaving SF to see how people and companies around the world are using AI (hint: most are still using it primarily as search)
– People outside SF spending even two weeks in SF to see how people and companies are operating here…

— Akshay Kothari (@akothari) July 21, 2026

So the right rhythm for me might be to visit San Francisco now and then, soak up the ambition, meet people, then go home to communities where the problems and the level of AI adoption look completely different.

I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if I’d moved straight to the Bay instead of staying in Ottawa. Maybe I’d be more connected, or building faster. Maybe I’d have optimized too quickly for the conversations right around me. Ottawa gave me distance, and time to explore freely and find my own direction. That distance cost me access. It also gave me room to become different. San Francisco shows me what’s possible. Ottawa reminds me how much of the world hasn’t reached that future yet.

I also met a lot of Canadians on this trip, a surprising number of them from Waterloo. It left me chewing on Canada’s talent story. How do we create more places where ambitious builders keep bumping into each other? How do we give them better reasons to take risks and stay long enough to build the next wave of communities?

I don’t have a tidy policy answer. But as an immigrant building here, I want Canada to be more than a place that grows and attracts talent right before that talent leaves. I dig into that more here: Canada helped Joe become a builder. Does Canada know how to keep builders?

What I’m taking home from the YC Startup School experience

Last year I flew to the Bay with ideas and uncertainty. This year I flew home with a product, real users, more confidence, and friends from around the world. Startup School felt like a reward for the previous year’s work, and a reminder that a personal win doesn’t have to follow anyone else’s template.

You don’t have to chase every trend or reshape yourself for investors and algorithms. Start with something you actually care about, keep learning, help people, and build something you’re proud to share.

I still don’t know exactly what I’ll build next, or who I’ll be when I’m back in San Francisco. But I know how I want to keep going:

• Be real.
• Be yourself.
• Help others genuinely.
• Think bigger.
• Stay on your own track.

Thank you, Y Combinator, for putting this many ambitious, thoughtful, and generous people in one place.

About the Author

Joe Hu is the founder of Just Joe Technologies, a one-person, AI-powered studio based in Ottawa, Canada, where he builds products with AI and shares the journey publicly. His first iOS app, Joe Speaking, started as a fix for his own English-speaking problem. He writes about building as an explorer, builder, and founder at hubeiqiao.com and posts on X @hubeiqiao.

The post How YC Startup School Rewired the Way I Build appeared first on BYVI.

The hardest part of building something new is never the part everyone assumes will be hard. I keep coming back to this, and Travis Kalanick’s new venture is the cleanest example I’ve seen in a while.

After roughly 8 years of near-total stealth following his 2017 exit from Uber, Kalanick’s company Atoms just raised $1.7 billion in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Uber (the company whose investors forced him out) joining as an investor and Ben Horowitz taking a board seat.

The pitch is enormous: use software, sensors, and robotics to automate the physical economy across food, mining, and logistics

Travis Kalanick is back.

After 8 years of building in stealth, he joins Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to tell the story of his latest company, Atoms, and its vision to digitize the physical world one industry at a time:

01:32 The a16z & Uber backstory
15:36 Different… https://t.co/CmHLuzWYBR pic.twitter.com/hjzHk1vkBf

— a16z (@a16z) July 22, 2026

Ask most people what the hard part of an automated kitchen is, and you’ll hear the same list:

• The computer vision.
• The robotic arms.
• The supply chain.
• The capital.

Every one of these sounds hard because it is hard, and because it’s what makes it into the pitch deck. So that’s where the money and the engineering attention go.

The hard part turned out to be everything nobody puts on a slide.

The machine that slows down when it has to bag your food

Atoms’ flagship food system, the Bowl Builder, takes an order straight off the point-of-sale, dispenses and weighs ingredients, adds sauce, lids the bowl, labels it, drops in utensils, and closes the bag. On paper it can assemble up to 300 bowls per hour.

Except it can’t, not when it also has to bag them. The moment bagging enters the workflow, throughput drops to about 200 bowls per hour. Kalanick’s own word for the bagging problem, on the TBPN podcast, was that it’s “surprisingly hard.”

Look at what that means. A company that just pulled $1.7 billion in a single round, run by one of the most operationally aggressive founders of his generation, loses a third of its output to the most unexpected step in the whole process. And it’s not the sensing. Not the dispensing. Not even the sauce. It’s the bag.

That’s the “fries in the bag” problem: the step so ordinary nobody budgets it any respect, right up until it’s the exact thing standing between you and shipping.

Why the boring problems are the hard ones

There’s a reason this pattern repeats. The glamorous problems attract attention, talent, and money precisely because everyone can see them coming. They get scoped, staffed, and de-risked. The boring problems don’t get that treatment, so they arrive undefended, and they arrive late, usually after you’ve already committed to a timeline and a number.

A bowl is a rigid, predictable object. A plastic bag is not. It’s floppy, it clings to itself, it doesn’t hold its shape, and no two are quite alike. Everything a robot is good at (precision, repetition, hard geometry) is exactly what the bag refuses to give it.

This is what quietly reshaped how I think about leadership, and about finance specifically.

The leadership lesson hiding in the bag

It’s tempting to treat “hard problems” as the big strategic ones, the market, the model, the fundraise, and hand the messy operational stuff to someone else. That instinct feels like leverage. It’s usually the opposite.

The leaders who actually ship are the ones who stayed close enough to the work to know where the real friction is.

Not because they insist on doing everything themselves; that doesn’t scale and it isn’t the point. It’s that you cannot fix what you’ve never gotten close enough to see. Kalanick knows his throughput drops on the bagging step because someone in that organization got close enough to the machine to watch it happen and put a number on it.

Delegation doesn’t work against this. Good delegation is how you build a company. But hand off a problem before you understand it and all you’ve really done is arrange for someone else to discover it for you, later, and usually at far more cost to the business than if you’d caught it early.

I sit in finance, which makes this personal in a specific way. Every model I’ve ever built has a “fries in the bag” line item: the assumption everyone waved through because it seemed too small to matter. The onboarding step that quietly determines whether a customer ever activates. The reconciliation process that works fine at 50 transactions and breaks at 5,000. The manual handoff between two teams that no dashboard captures because it lives in the gap between them.

On a spreadsheet these look like rounding errors. In the business they’re the difference between a plan that holds and one that doesn’t.

The costliest surprises I’ve seen were never the risks we named and argued about in the boardroom. We had those covered; that’s what boardrooms are for. The expensive ones were the steps so ordinary nobody thought to ask whether they’d actually work at scale.

What Atoms actually confirms

It would be easy to read the Atoms story as a victory lap: stealth genius resurfaces, raises a fortune, takes on the physical world. And maybe it turns into that. Horowitz is betting that reshaping the old, heavy parts of the economy needs a founder with range across software and mechanical engineering, and that Kalanick is that founder.

But the part of the story I keep pointing people to is the honesty about the bag, not the $1.7 billion. A founder with that much capital and conviction telling you, plainly, that the humble step is the one giving him trouble. Read it the right way and that’s a good sign: someone got close enough to the friction to name it before it showed up in the numbers on its own.

The strategic bets are real, and they’ve earned the attention they get. But the thing most likely to cost you a third of your output is usually sitting one step downstream of where everyone is looking, dressed up as a task too simple to fail.

Before I sign off on any plan now, I ask myself one thing, and I’d pass it to you:

What’s your “fries in the bag” problem, the boring step you’ve already handed off, assuming it would sort itself out?

Better to go find it yourself than to read about it later in the P&L.

About the Author

Daniel Zhao is Head of Finance at Landbase and a multiple-time founder, most recently co-founder of LavaReach (acquired). He started his career as a CPA, building the financial rigor that still shapes how he operates, then moved from the ledger into the parts of a company where the numbers are actually made or lost: revenue, operations, and go-to-market. That path, from accounting fundamentals to B2B revenue leadership, gives him a rare vantage point on how startups really grow, and where they quietly break.

The post Every Startup Has a “Fries in the Bag” Problem Most Founders Miss appeared first on BYVI.