Marc Lou says MailCheap hit three-figure MRR in days
Tyler Denk published the several-hundred-item backlog a weekend beehiiv clone would need. Marc Lou shipped his anyway and says it is profitable from day one at 99.2% delivery.
Real money
Marc Lou says MailCheap hit three-figure MRR with 99.2% delivery
Marc Lou says the newsletter tool he vibe-coded is at three-figure MRR days after going on sale, with delivery currently running at 99.2%. He says he will open up all metrics, while warning there is not enough data yet to make them reliable, and that the business was profitable from day one.
My new startup is profitable from day 1
Cheap inference from two sides: dax's own rack, Sol at $0.80 a run
dax says a first test run on a new GPU rack with their DeepSeek inference setup is getting better price/performance than every vendor they have found, with more optimization still to do.
Sol completes the tasks less than 5 percentage points off Opus, but at less than a tenth of the cost!!
Stolen playbooks
levelsio asks non-buyers at checkout why they will not join
levelsio added a line under his checkout reading "Don't want to join? Tell me why", which opens a modal for the answer, after Paul Graham said few founders bother asking non-buyers what they would buy. Separately he says a post from @id_aa_carmack about measuring speed against the speed of light rather than a sloppy competitor pushed him to get filter responses down to 87 milliseconds.
If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy.
What changed under us
Isenberg says Delta, Chase and Amazon are blocking AI agents
Greg Isenberg says Delta, Chase and Amazon are blocking AI agents and laid out a nine stage war that ends with selling to agents being as normal as having a website. In between: an arms race, a trusted layer for agent identity and payments, then the blockers reopening on their own terms.
the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over
Founder fights
Tyler Denk listed everything a beehiiv clone needs, Marc Lou shipped one anyway
Tyler Denk published the backlog any weekend beehiiv clone would have to cover, from IP warming and bounce classification to three layers of suppression, plus the dozen vendors you would still be paying. Arvid Kahl's reply was one line mocking the idea that you can prompt your way through it.
Hey Claude, implement every item on this list. Make no mistakes.
Skim these
DHH says Chinese software is still rough
DHH says he respects Chinese AI models and hardware but finds the software rough, naming WeChat, Alipay and HarmonyOS. Taste, he reckons, is not the easy part.
Theo calls Gemini 4 Argon a liability in real codebases
Theo says Gemini 4 Argon was factually wrong about more than half its claims across his tests and hallucinates how systems work.
Frequently asked questions
How fast did MailCheap reach three-figure MRR?
Marc Lou says MailCheap hit three-figure monthly recurring revenue (money the business makes each month) days after going on sale, and the business was profitable from day one.
Why does inference cost matter for AI agent products?
The per-token cost of running an agent product is falling from both ends, which means pricing built on today's inference bill will not hold as costs continue to drop.
What did levelsio add to his checkout?
levelsio added a line under his checkout reading "Don't want to join? Tell me why" which opens a modal for customers to explain their reason for not buying.
Which companies are blocking AI agents?
Delta, Chase and Amazon are blocking AI agents, and this could eventually become a distribution decision for any product trying to reach agent buyers.
Can a small newsletter tool compete with beehiiv?
While a full beehiiv clone would need to cover features like IP warming and bounce classification plus multiple vendors, a small operator serving small senders does not need most of it on day one, as Marc Lou demonstrated with MailCheap.