👋 Hey — Egemen here (started using my dormant X account after 2 years, give me a follow, I share more there).
Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:
💡 Spotlight: Real user research in 30 minutes, $20 a study
🧠 Deep-Dive: Less Product, More Moat
🗺️ Method: AI ads backed by data
⚾️ Catch: Biggest Dev Event In the World
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Factory
💡 Spotlight: Real user research in 30 minutes, $20 a study
Last week I rewrote my homepage headline four times. Zero of those versions got tested against an actual audience before it went live. That's normal. It's also why founders ship worse copy than they should.
Articos is the fix I've been using.
Define your ICP, brief your research goal, and Articos runs structured interviews with a stance-diverse panel of champions, pragmatists, skeptics, and blockers.
You get motivations, objections, language patterns, and prioritized recommendations in a report your team can ship.
Decisions I used to ship on gut now get a 30-minute check first. That alone has been worth it.
🧠 Deep-Dive: Less product, more moat
Every headline this month is about Q1 2026's $300 billion VC quarter. For most of us building at seed or Series A, those numbers are noise. The real signal is buried one layer down.
Look at the stage-by-stage breakdown. Late-stage funding jumped 205% year-over-year, almost entirely on AI megarounds. That's a winner-take-most game most of us aren't playing. Early-stage funding rose 41%. Seed rose 31%. But seed deal counts dropped 30% year-over-year.
Translation: fewer founders got funded, at bigger rounds, with higher bars on focus. Investors are paying a premium for clarity and punishing optionality. The "all-in-one platform" pitch is dead at seed. Singular utility is what's getting checks.
Then there's the product side. Pendo's analytics research shows roughly 80% of SaaS features receive little or no usage. Industry benchmarks put average core feature adoption at 24.5%, with admin and power-user features landing closer to 5-15%. You're not shipping a roadmap. You're shipping a graveyard.
I keep seeing the same pattern on founder roadmaps. The core loop accounts for maybe a third of the planned build. The rest is features for edge cases, personas that don't exist yet, and buyer objections no one has actually tested. That's not a product strategy. That's a wishlist in a Linear board.
Here's the uncomfortable part guys:
In a market where 80% of features go unused and capital only flows to teams with a clear singular value proposition, adding surface area doesn't defend you.
This dilutes the one thing that might actually set you apart. The feature list you're proud of is the reason buyers can't describe what you do in one sentence.
👉 Your moat isn't your feature count. It's how unmistakably you solve one specific problem.
🗺️ Method
AI ads that look and feel like your brand
Most AI tools fall short because they lack context. They generate in a vacuum.
Hightouch Ad Studio uses your data and brand guidelines to produce high-quality creative. Refresh ads based on performance, react to trends, and respond to competitors instantly.
Less time prompting. More time launching.
⚾️ Catch
The World's Biggest Dev Event Hits Silicon Valley
From AI and cloud to DevOps and security — WeAreDevelopers World Congress brings the entire modern stack to San Jose. 500+ speakers. 10,000+ developers. One epic September. Use code GITPUSH26 for 10% off.
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Factory
Factory has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.
Factory is an AI software company that creates "Droids," specialized autonomous AI agents designed to handle the most repetitive parts of the software development lifecycle, from writing unit tests to refactoring legacy code.
Their platform integrates directly into a team's existing developer tools, allowing engineers to offload routine maintenance tasks to AI and focus their energy on high-level architectural design and new feature innovation.