Stop Waiting for Funding. Start Distributing.

THIS WEEK’S STORY

Stop Hiding. Start Distributing.

A brutal truth: most apps don’t fail because the product is bad.

They fail because no one knows they exist.

I keep seeing the same cycle in Europe:

Build an MVP. Get one friend at a big company to test it. Call it traction. Then chase pre-seed money. If it doesn’t land, chase a government grant. If that fails, fold and go back to the safe job.

It’s a loop. A waste of talent.

The missing piece isn’t capital. It’s distribution.

You don’t need a million-dollar ad budget. What you need is to put yourself out there as a founder. People don’t buy from faceless startups. They buy from humans they trust.

That means showing up online, posting your learnings, documenting the messy parts, cold-DMing prospects, sharing videos, and letting people connect with you. Founder-led distribution always works at the start because it cuts through the noise.

Yes, it feels uncomfortable. Yes, you’ll be ignored at first. But consistency compounds. The earlier you start building your own brand, the easier every launch, pivot, or upgrade becomes.

Stop hiding behind interns. Stop waiting for funding.

If you’ve built something, your next job isn’t polishing it. It’s putting yourself (and your product) in people’s hands.

You got this! 🔥 

HEADLINES

Why Pay Creators? Just Use Sora2

OpenAI dropped Sora2 and the internet is losing it. The realism in its videos is scary good, almost indistinguishable from real life.

But here’s what matters for you as a non-tech builder: you can now create entire UGC campaigns from your phone with a single prompt. No expensive creators. No influencer contracts. Just type, render, and publish.

Want a person using your app? Done. Want a street interview or a café demo scene? Easy. The possibilities are endless, and the cost of marketing is dropping to almost zero.

This is vibe marketing paired with vibe coding at its finest.

THIS WEEK’S TIP

How to Reverse Engineer Any App

This week I stumbled upon a pretty cool trick to reverse engineer and build your own version of many open source apps/codebases available on GitHub. The difference between just downloading the source code and edit it, and reverse engineer it and then build on top, is that you will have your iteration and not just an exact copy.

Here’s how to do it:

• Go to any public github repository like https://github.com/freestyle-sh/Adorable

• Replace the “hub” part of the url with “mvp”, so it looks like https://gitmvp.com/freestyle-sh/Adorable

• You’ll see all the details and then click on “execute in Cursor”

• Review the pre-populated prompt and add your spin to it (design, UI, UX, functionalities…). You can also use chatgpt to perfect this if needed.

• Click on “create chat”, then select Sonnet 4 or 4.5 with “agent” mode

• Watch it build everything from scratch

• Fix any issues there might be by feeding the error logs back to the agent

• Voilà, you have reverse engineered an app that you can use to kickstart your project!

It’s quite straight forward but extremely powerful! Let me know if you try it out 😉 

QUICK HITS

• OpenAI Hits $500B Valuation: Employee share sale makes OpenAI the world’s most valuable startup, surpassing SpaceX and ByteDance.

• Anthropic Launches Claude Sonnet 4.5: Touted as the top coding model, with 30-hour autonomous runs, Claude Code checkpoints, VS Code extension, and Agent SDK.

• AI Chip Market Enters “Supercycle”: AI semiconductors to hit $150B in 2025, driving the global chip market toward $1T by 2030.

• Princeton AI Boosts Fusion Energy Control: New plasma control methods could accelerate commercial fusion viability and cut costs.

• EU Pushes AI-Driven Cars: Von der Leyen calls for an EU-wide autonomous vehicle push; Nvidia and Fujitsu expand AI into robotics in Japan.

And That is all for this week!

See you next Saturday!

Filippo

Filippo Pietrantonio

Find me on X, or Book a 1:1 Call