ODF

Solo founders are underestimated. Despite solo-founded companies like Midjourney, Vercel and ODF startups like Loyal, Pave, and Settle proving the model works, many investors continue to push founders to find co-founders before taking them seriously. We're changing that narrative — starting today. We're launching two initiatives to help encourage and support solo founders: 1) Solo Club — a community for solo founders at all stages 2) Solo Founders Program — a 3-month program for 6 solo founders in SF - Housing in SF with an additional full-floor office - Incredibly talented founders wanting to spend 3 months building together. - $800K+ in perks/credits - Stipend for personal costs (as an investment) Link to apply in the comments

A blast from the past! Yesterday, our first GTM hire, Phil Hong came by the Finch SF offices to catch up, eat lunch, and take dozens of calls for his own start up, GuideAI. I remember when he first joined and mentioned that his end goal was to start his own company. He got a crash course on how to be scrappy and navigate to product-market-fit early on at Finch and it's exciting to see those early lessons/mistakes be applied to his own venture. Getting to work in the trenches in the early days with Phil made the challenging process of building a company SO. MUCH. FUN. For those who know Phil, an obligatory -- Let's gooooo!

Excited to announce today the launch of Bestever AI Commerce! If your e-commerce catalog has thousands of products, creating video ads manually is impossible. Today we're launching Bestever Commerce that automates it all – personalized, brand-compliant videos from your product feed. Catalog ads crush it for e-com, but static ones are so last year. With AI video models advancing, Bestever AI lets you dynamize them – variants for personas, channels like Meta/TikTok, copy experiments, layouts, pricing. Already in beta with major US retailers! This is a force multiplier for marketing teams. Sign up for the closed beta if you're scaling big: https://lnkd.in/gmZeHYTj The era of video creation at scale is here. #AI #Ecommerce #VideoAds

Introducing Meridian: The first Visibility Engine that gets your brand ranked #1 by AI. Last month, Google crushed SEO..... They removed the num=100 search parameter. You used to be able to see 100 results per page. Now you only see 10. This simple change was catastrophic, here's why: AI systems start with Google’s indexed web before layering their own crawlers. By cutting off deep search pages, Google effectively throttled what LLMs can access beyond the top 10 results. Search Engine Land said 87.7% of sites saw a drop in impressions, and 77.6% lost unique ranking terms within weeks. →Reddit, which often ranked between #11–#50, saw a steep decline in LLM mentions and a 15% dip in its stock shortly after. →Monday .com saw a 40% drop in its market cap because of AI overviews too. If your brand isn’t ranking inside the top 10, you’re invisible... not only to people, but to AI systems that now decide what gets recommended. ------------------------------------ Meridian fixes this by getting you ranked and recommended in 3 ways: A: Audits the invisible: Meridian runs hundreds of prompts like "best marathon shoes" across ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity to reveal how and if you are ranked. If you don't know how you brands ranks right now, Meridian will solve this for you in minutes. B: Rewrites your digital DNA: It crawls your site like an AI model would, line by line and schema by schema, then repairs your metadata and structured data, so AI systems understand (and recommend) you correctly. C: Injects your brand into the machine: Meridian reverse-engineers why LLMs recommend your competitors—then fixes it automatically. If a competitor ranks because of a Reddit thread, Meridian detects it, analyzes the trust signal and then tells you what to do. Brands using Meridian have seen 200% the traffic from AI search after 2 months. Companies like Blind, Shed, and Generation Lab use us to drastically increase their traffic from AI. I'm so confident we'll help increase your AI visibility that I'm making Meridian 100% free to try with this link: https://trymeridian.com/ ------------------------------------ To celebrate this launch, we built the world’s first FREE AI Visibility Scanner. Type in your domain: We’ll run dozens of live prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to see if your brand gets recommended, how often, and what they actually say about you. Your score = your visibility inside AI. Comment “AI” and I’ll send you the link.

Excited to announce that I've raised $3 Million to build supermemory, the best memory for LLMs and agents. I turned 20 last month. Memory is one of the hardest challenges in AI right now. I realized this when building the first version of supermemory, which was merely a bookmarking and notetaking tool I was building as a side-project in dorm two years ago when I was 18. There weren't many good solutions, so I built my own vector DB, content parsers and then an engine that works like the human brain. This is my life's work - I dropped out of college, moved to SF, and continued to build out the product as a solo founder. Today, I am delighted that we have one of the best and fastest memory products in the world, with many hundreds of enterprises and builders building apps on top of supermemory. And this is just the start. grateful to my investors Susa Ventures , Joshua Browder (Browder capital), Sudarshan Sridharan (SF1), Dane Knecht, Julian Weisser at SFP, Logan Kilpatrick from Google Deepmind, Theo Browne, and many others who have supported me in this journey. This is just the start. We are hiring across engineering, research and product roles. Join us in the journey of creating the best memory engine on 🌎 https://lnkd.in/gm2pmDKx

After 7 applications to Y Combinator, we just got into F25 I grew up on a farm in a town of 2,000, reading sci-fi as a kid and dreaming of what I might build someday. Manu grew up in a small city in Germany. We both dropped out, me at 12 and him from a PhD, and taught ourselves how to build. We met through ODF, launched an AI agent for product managers, and got paying customers. But we realized the bigger problem: every AI agent is a genius with amnesia. They can reason but they cannot remember. So we made the hardest call of our journey. We refunded our customers and pivoted. That pivot became Hyperspell (YC F25), the context and memory layer for AI agents. The road wasn’t easy. I spent months sleeping in a closet in a hacker house (Mission Control). We applied to YC again and again, taking the feedback from each rejection as a checkpoint for our business. It became a quarterly ritual. Finally Manu and I applied once more, this time with paying customers (including multiple YC companies). A few days later we had our interview. We had planned to prep, but that morning we were firefighting an urgent customer issue. We pushed the final fix minutes before the call. Manu put on music to hype himself up. I wrote a list of everyone I was grateful for: friends, investors, and customers who believed in two outsider dropouts. Then we logged in. They grilled us. I left convinced there was zero chance. But I felt strangely calm. Customers come first. We were going to keep building with or without YC. That afternoon, YC called and said yes. Today: - Live product - Double digit # of paying customers - $1m+ raised from early believers It took 7 applications and many late nights. Grateful to everyone who stood with us. This is only the beginning. Conor & Manu

I'm very excited to share that for the past few months, we’ve been building our second product besides Superflex. Introducing Wonder AI – the first AI-native design tool on an infinite canvas with taste and understanding of your designs. It helps you explore layouts, build your design system, and go from idea → beautiful screens while reusing your components in minutes. Possibilities are limitless here! With that, we are now also #hiring a cracked founding designer to join us and help us build the vision to life. If you're interested in checking it out, please comment or reach out to me directly!

Chasing hype almost killed hostAI. Then we got lucky. I started hostAI with two co-founders in July 2022 with a mission to grow direct bookings for hospitality brands using AI. By January 2023, we had strong validation of the problem and some early traction on a solution. Then we made a big mistake: we got distracted by the AI hype and drifted from our core mission. We chased an exciting but premature idea: a travel marketplace operated by AI agents. Six months later, despite lots of prototyping, we had little to show for a breakout consumer product. And then things got worse. Both my co-founders resigned. It was like being hit by a bus. I was an inch away from giving up. A lot of smart people advised me to shut down and start fresh. I thought about what I would want to do next. And realized it would have been starting another company to go after our original mission. So instead, I kept at it. And then we got lucky. More than once: - Our early investors stepped up in ways I never expected: Peter, whom I'd known for just two weeks at that point, started referring talent. Others helped vet candidates, acted as sounding boards for critical next steps, and offered support in countless other ways - My old colleagues jumped in to help: one became interim CTO while holding down a full-time job and family. Three joined part-time to help ship hostFront; re-igniting our growth. They’re still building with us in stealth mode - I found a new cofounder, Aamir, thanks to ODF   And now we're getting somewhere. Start-up stories are either told as a flawless victory or not told at all. The reality is a lot more messy.  So if you’re a founder who believes in your mission and you’re finding yourself in a tough spot; in the wise words of Julian: “Keep Going”.