Best of Startup — September 2025
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Hacker News·35w
Product Hunt is Dead — Sedimental
Product Hunt has become a pay-to-play platform dominated by vote manipulation services, losing its original value as a genuine product discovery community. The author discovered this after launching FinFam and being bombarded with offers to buy votes for $100. The platform's midnight Pacific reset time gives overseas vote sellers an advantage, while legitimate engagement has declined significantly. The piece argues that Product Hunt's focus on novelty over community building has led to its downfall, suggesting alternatives like Indie Hackers and AlternativeTo as better models.
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Where's Your Ed At·37w
Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI
Generative AI companies are fundamentally unprofitable, with every major player from OpenAI to Anthropic losing billions of dollars annually. The economics are broken: companies like Cursor send 100% of their revenue to model providers, Perplexity spends 164% of revenue on compute costs, and OpenAI lost $5 billion in 2024 despite being the market leader. Inference costs are increasing rather than decreasing, making it impossible for AI startups to achieve profitability even with usage-based pricing models.
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Jason Fried·34w
What to do with $2M?
A successful entrepreneur advises a young founder who recently sold his business for $2M to prioritize capital preservation over aggressive investment or reinvestment. The key recommendation is to keep the money safe in low-risk accounts rather than pursuing high-return opportunities, emphasizing that maintaining wealth is more important than growing it aggressively at a young age.
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GamesIndustry.biz·35w
The painful lessons learned from layoffs
Two game studios share their experiences with layoffs and strategies for avoiding them in the future. Spilt Milk Studios navigated publisher rejections by launching a Kickstarter and eventually rehired laid-off employees, while Aurora Punks scaled down from 50 to 20 people after rapid pandemic growth. Both studios emphasize the importance of diversified revenue streams, including work-for-hire projects and consulting, rather than relying solely on single game releases. The key lessons include maintaining multiple income sources, building sustainable team sizes, and focusing on consumer-driven revenue rather than depending entirely on publisher funding.
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Theo - t3․gg·35w"AI Startups" are over done (finally)
Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch shows a significant shift away from generic AI startups toward companies that deeply understand their target industries. Instead of developers building AI tools for unfamiliar domains, successful companies now combine deep domain expertise with AI capabilities. Examples include Nautilus (car wash platform by someone who worked in car washes since age 16) and co-create (video tools by actual video editors). This trend reflects higher acceptance standards and better investment outcomes, with domain experts learning AI rather than AI experts trying to understand new industries.
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Bonfire Studios reveals its first game – nine years after it was founded by ex-Blizzard CCO Rob Pardo
Bonfire Studios, founded by former Blizzard CCO Rob Pardo, has revealed Arkheron after nine years of development. The team-based multiplayer game combines MOBA, battle royale, and ARPG elements in an isometric "Ascension Royale" format. The lengthy development involved iterating on Unity's DOTS system, rebuilding network layers, and finding the right balance between accessibility and depth. With $25M initial funding and a recent Series B round, the 70-person studio aims for sustainable success rather than massive scale, targeting both Western and Korean markets through publisher Drimage.
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Manager.dev·37w
3D No-Code, nights and weekends - a director of engineering’s side project
A Director of Engineering shares his journey building a 3D no-code platform as a side project, working 15 hours per week while maintaining his full-time role. After going full-time when his company closed, he discovered the product was too complex for non-technical users but worked well for engineers. This led to a pivot toward test-driven AI code generation for regulated industries, targeting developers and engineering managers instead of the original no-code market.
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What's next for manager.dev and for me
An engineering director shares his 8-month career break experience, exploring entrepreneurship through indie products and startup ventures. After trying to build a parenting app, creating a newsletter monetization strategy, and co-founding a BigQuery analytics startup, he discovered his preference for stability over risk and team collaboration over solo work. He's now returning to full-time engineering management while continuing his newsletter for engineering managers and taking on an evangelist role at a YC startup.
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TechCrunch·37w
After selling to Spotify, Anchor’s co-founders are back with Oboe, an AI-powered app for learning
Former Anchor co-founders launched Oboe, an AI-powered learning platform that generates personalized courses on any topic through simple prompts. The app offers nine different learning formats including text, audio lectures, podcast-style discussions, games, and interactive tests. Built with a multi-agent AI architecture, Oboe creates courses within seconds while ensuring accuracy and personalization. Users can access free courses and create up to five monthly courses for free, with paid tiers offering 30 or 100 additional courses. The startup raised $4 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures.
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Building a $5K ARR Side Project While Managing 9 Engineers
Taylor Barr shares how he built Delly, a team responsibility visualization tool, reaching $5K ARR and 30+ paying customers while managing 9 engineers full-time. The 18-month journey involved learning new technologies like Svelte, finding initial customers through personal networks, and discovering unexpected business skills. The side project enhanced his engineering leadership abilities and led to a product management role transition.
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Marissa Mayer will close her old AI startup, sell assets to her new AI startup
Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is shutting down her consumer software startup Sunshine and transferring its assets to her new AI startup Dazzle, which aims to build an AI personal assistant. Sunshine, founded in 2018, struggled with low adoption for its contact management and event planning apps despite raising $20 million. All employees and most investors are moving to the new venture.
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It isn’t your imagination; Google Cloud is flooding the zone
Google Cloud is pursuing a strategy to capture emerging AI startups while industry giants like Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon form massive exclusive partnerships worth hundreds of billions. Google's COO Francis deSouza reveals that 60% of generative AI startups use Google Cloud, with the company offering $350,000 in credits, technical support, and open infrastructure access. This approach contrasts with competitors' mega-deals, positioning Google to benefit from the next wave of AI unicorns before they become too expensive to court.
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Anthony Sistilli·35w
“I spent our funding on a citizenship”
A satirical dialogue depicting a startup CEO's absurd response to immigration policy changes, including spending company funding on personal citizenship, implementing unrealistic layoffs, and creating bizarre work arrangements for international employees.
