Open MakersClaw Essays, breakdowns and news for founders building with AI.
Startup Blogs
Two of Cal AI's founders were in high school, and one founder's mom had to co-sign the bank account. The team reached a reported $50M ARR and sold to MyFitnessPal. Founders keep asking COO Jake Castillo how to build a team like it. His answer: they got extremely lucky. Here is what he says to do instead.
What happened at a company, and the number that actually moved.
Startup Blogs
Profound, now valued at $1.8 billion, measures how AI engines see a company. Its own crawler test found bots could not see the plans on its pricing page; the fix shipped on 25 June. HubSpot hit the same wall. What both did about it, and what Profound's page shows a bot today.
Startup Blogs
Sunday night, Amazon told Meta's Muse agent that unauthorised agents violate its Conditions of Use. Monday, Shopify wired Shop Pay into Muse. Amazon made over $68 billion in ad revenue last year, a business that depends on browsing. Shopify's merchants need to be found.
Startup Blogs
Liz Wilcox charges $9 a month for newsletter templates. About 4,400 people pay it, churn runs around 5%, and in April 2026 she bought Smart Passive Income. Her original target was 1,000 members in two years. The mechanism is a price nobody re-decides and customers who do the selling.
We read the application that got in, then say what carried it.
Three Purdue students applied to YC in 2015 to put automated CS courses into high schools.
Flex applied to YC in 2016 with one founder, $225,000 raised and nothing shipped.
Athens Research got into YC W21 as a one-person, open-source Roam alternative: 1,800 GitHub stars, 70 users, $800 in a good month.
MakeGamesWithUs got into YC W12 to match coders with artists and publish their games.
OpenPhone's S18 application shows 1,500 users, 32 paying customers and $320 of revenue in the last month.
Take-away files
Playbooks and field guides you can open and use. One email address opens all of them, and puts you on Makersfuel.
The deck slide by slide, with what it was raising on.
Five mornings a week: the tools, resources, reads and numbers worth keeping.
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