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A guy in Azerbaijan posted his product on Reddit and Twitter and hit $2K MRR in 19 days. No funding, no team and no growth hacks. Just a real problem and two posts.

Meanwhile OpenAI and Anthropic just soaked up 43% of all global VC money this year. If you're not one of two companies, the funding game isn't really available to you right now.

It doesn't matter. Below is proof.

Let's jump into it. 👇

You don't need the round. You need the two posts.

SoloPush is a Product Hunt alternative built by one person, Abbas, working solo from Azerbaijan. He posted about it on Reddit and Twitter. Nothing else. Three weeks later: 20,000 visitors, 300 users, 60+ paying, $2K MRR.

No pitch deck, no pre-seed and no 10-person growth team. Just a real problem, told honestly, in front of people who had it.

Compare that to the headline this week: Anthropic and OpenAI took 43% of every venture dollar raised globally in H1 2026. Nearly 90% of AI funding stayed in the US. If you were waiting for a fundraising environment that includes you, it's not coming this year.

Here's the actual takeaway.

The capital game and the customer game are different games. One requires you to be one of a handful of companies on earth. The other requires a real problem and the nerve to post about it in public. Abbas picked the one anyone can actually play.

Five things worth your time

Spotify Wrapped, but it's your Claude bill

Whoburnedmore turns your Claude and Codex token spend into a shareable leaderboard. Genuinely funny, mildly horrifying, exactly the kind of small dumb idea that gets shared.

Where 43% of this year's AI funding went

Anthropic and OpenAI absorbed almost half of everything raised in H1 2026. Useful context before you compare your progress to a funding round.

Windsurf is now Devin Desktop

Quiet rebrand back in June. If any of your workflows still call Cascade directly, migrate before it's fully retired.

GitHits gives your coding agent a memory of every open-source library

Before this, agents hit an unfamiliar package and started guessing. Now they can inspect the real implementation. One CLI command to set up.

He built this because students kept complaining about back pain

SitSense is a webcam posture coach: computer vision tracks your slouch in real time, entirely on-device, nothing ever leaves your laptop. Started as a student side project, now a live product with real early users.

Teardown: Zro, private inference for coding agents

🔥 Our take: Every AI coding agent ships your code to someone else's API and you just hope. Omer Shlomovits spent a decade in crypto working on math for computing on secrets without seeing them, ZenGo, zero-knowledge proofs.

Zro is that instinct pointed at coding agents: fast open-weight models like GLM 5.2, served from EU infrastructure, zero request retention. OpenRouter and friends sell you speed and price.

Shlomovits is selling "we literally cannot read your code," and he's one of the few people who can say that and mean it.

In Case You Missed It

DDScore shows you what investors will see before the first pitch

It's a due diligence scorer for your own deck.

Upload your pitch materials and DDScore cross-checks every claim against itself and against public sources, then scores you across 12 dimensions investors actually use: team, market, competitors, IP, exit, fundability, the works.

Same-stage benchmarking, confidence ratings, and a list of the exact gaps a real investor would poke first.

You can re-run it as your materials improve, so it works as a fix-and-recheck loop rather than a one-time grade. Built by a four-person team in Espoo, Finland. Free trial gets you one summary report; €39 one-time unlocks five re-runs.

DDScore review and pricing | We Are Founders

Runs pitch decks and supporting materials through a 12-dimension due diligence score, cross-checked against public sour…

We Are Founders

One small thing

Abbas didn't wait for permission, funding, or a growth team.

He posted twice and let it work.

What's the version of that you've been sitting on?

Hit reply. I read every one.

Chris