标签：#founder

Marc Lou read a tweet, slept on it, and woke up still annoyed. The tweet, from Pieter Levels, was about all the fake revenue screenshots on X. By the next evening Lou had built a thing to fix it. By the day after that, the thing had made $20,378. That is the part everyone retweets. I want to walk you through it, and then I want to show you the line in his own year-end letter that complicates the whole legend. The setup Lou got fired by Tai Lopez in November 2021, was broke and depressed, and moved to Bali. He started shipping tiny products in public, copying the playbook of, yes, Pieter Levels. His breakout was ShipFast , a Next.js starter kit that did $40,000 in its first month in September 2023. By December 2025 he was running 15 startups generating about $84,900 a month, with cumulative revenue past $2.26 million, per his verified TrustMRR data. The reason I trust his numbers more than most is that he verifies them through Stripe on his own product, TrustMRR , which brings me to the 24-hour story. The moment something worked, absurdly fast TrustMRR exists to kill fake MRR screenshots. You connect a read-only Stripe key, and it shows your verified revenue on a public page nobody can edit. Lou built it in a day on top of his own boilerplate, which is the cheat code here. He was not starting from zero, he was starting from ShipFast. "TrustMRR is 24 hours old and was built in 24 hours." @marc_louvion on X He monetized it with sidebar ad slots. He listed them at $299 a month, then raised the price each time one sold, all the way to $1,499. In his newsletter he wrote that within three days every slot was gone and the side project had made $20,378. He called it the third fastest-growing thing he has ever built. Five days in, he posted the run-rate dream out loud. "20/20 spots filled! TrustMRR went from $0 to $18,380 MRR in 5 days. That's $220,000 ARR if I'm allowed to dream a little" @marc_louvion on X It kept going. By December 2025 TrustMRR was his single biggest inco

We just opened the waitlist for Something, and the part that surprised me most while building it wasn't the multi-agent orchestration — it was how hard it is to make an AI actually disagree. Every model we tested defaults to being helpful, which in practice means agreeable. Even when explicitly prompted to "find flaws," the outputs would soften into "here are some considerations" instead of a real critique. We had to engineer around this specifically: Separate system prompts with opposing reward framing — one agent optimizes for identifying growth potential, the other is explicitly told its only success metric is surfacing a disqualifying flaw Structured output forcing a verdict, not a summary — the skeptic agent (Nothing) has to commit to a specific weakness category (unit economics, timing, technical feasibility) rather than hedging across all of them A reconciliation step where both outputs get merged into one conviction score, so the founder isn't just reading two contradictory paragraphs If anyone's built adversarial agent setups and hit the same "it just wants to agree with me" problem, curious how you solved it. [Everyone who has a brain is a founder here] something-waitlist.vercel.app

2 days left to lock in your spot at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 and save up to $190 before Early Bird rates expire on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register here.

You have just 3 days left to save up to $190 on your pass to TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 before Early Bird rates end on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register here.

The debut episode, moderated by Founders Fund chief marketing officer Mike Solana, included a star-studded cast of current tech luminaries.

Layup Parts co-founder Zack Eakin has drawn on a motorsports background, and his experience working for Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk, to tackle making faster, cheaper, and better composites.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Crunchbase’s head of research Gené Teare, said the factors holding back Black founders include “access to networks, relationships, and early introductions."