MailCheap lands a $149/mo customer at 9 days old
Marc Lou says someone just signed up for one of MailCheap's biggest plans, 500,000 emails a month, with zero sales calls. levelsio, meanwhile, is telling everyone with a VPS to get it off the public internet today.
Read the whole week in one goAnthropic's S-1: $16.3B in six months
Real money
Marc Lou says a 500k-email customer signed up for MailCheap at $149 MRR
Marc Lou says someone signed up for one of MailCheap's biggest plans, worth $149 MRR, on an ESP (email sending service) he says is nine days old. The customer sends 500,000 emails a month and took zero sales calls. He framed it as a reply to people saying nobody serious would use it.
+$149 MRR. 0 sales calls.
Stolen playbooks
levelsio's VPS lockdown: Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale, empty firewall
levelsio reposted his VPS hardening setup saying everyone is getting hacked and SSH keys are not the point, because AI is finding exploits. Put the app behind a Cloudflare Tunnel so the server stops answering on ports 80 and 443, put server access on a Tailscale private network, then create an empty firewall that blocks everything else.
It doesn't matter you have SSH key login, this is about exploits and vulnerabilities AI is finding
What changed under us
levelsio says AI replies have given way to AI emails in his inbox
levelsio says he is now getting lots of AI emails, where before the pattern was AI replies. He gave no volume figures and nobody else has posted numbers on it. One founder's inbox is not a trend, but it is the channel most small teams still rely on for cold outreach.