Slidebean Startup Club newsletter

14 Oct | Read online Sponsored by ✦ Good morning, founders 🕶️ Hope your coffee is still at the introductory price. Every day-one price comes with a due date. Google's new flagship model costs half until November 30, then doubles. Adobe's $60 a month felt normal until a small team used Claude to build seven free look-alikes. And Character.AI, a unicorn in 2022, just filed for Chapter 11, with Disney paying $20 million for part of what's left. The launch price is a loan. Somebody repays it later: the customer, the vendor or the investors. So which of your prices, paid or charged, is running up interest right now? In today's newsletter, we'll get into: How a chatbot unicorn ended at a $20M sale What your Gemini bill looks like on December 1 Seven free Adobe clones, built with Claude Why Anthropic's investor meeting today matters if you're raising ✦ FOUNDER BOARD 🧠 Highwire, a professional-development firm, surveyed 1,034 professionals: 78% of managers used AI for feedback, only 16% of employees were told, and 34% said feedback got more generic. Disclose it, then add one personal question: "What's one thing I could do differently to help you succeed?" 🔎 Semrush, which sells AI-visibility tools, found fewer than half of AI's top-mentioned brands are also top-cited sources. News sites earn 19.6% of ChatGPT's top US citations. ⚡ AWS Lambda Web Functions run an unmodified Express or Next.js server via one command, aws lambda-web deploy: up to 128 concurrent requests per environment, active-CPU billing. 🏁 a16z's speedrun invests up to $1M plus $10M+ in partner credits. SR008 applications close November 1, for a February 1–April 16, 2027 residency in San Francisco. 🤝 Serval says it pays at least $20,000 per referred hire, and over half its team came via referrals as it grew from 20 to 140 people in a year. 🔐 Maintainers: run npm trust list and confirm every trusted repo still resolves to one you control. Bloom Security found 1,500+ exposed packages (10M+ downloads); npm has patched it. Financial Model Template Use Slidebean's FREE Financial Model Template to estimate your revenue, expenses, and how much money your startup needs to raise. Check it out ✦ RUSHIN' ROULETTE Five bullets of updates 🇮🇳 India's NPCI has pushed back a 0.4% merchant fee on UPI payments over ₹2,000 (about $21), due October 15, until after Diwali, with no new date set. Retailers and petrol pump operators had threatened to stop accepting UPI. If you sell in India, the fee is delayed, not dead. NPCI says UPI costs about ₹200 billion a year to run, so price the fee in now. 🏴☠️ Prosecutors allege MonsterCloud founder Zohar Pinhasi sold "no-ransom" data recovery while secretly paying hackers more than $8M and billing clients over $19M. In one alleged case, an $8,200 ransom became a roughly $150,000 invoice. He faces wire-fraud charges. Before you sign an incident-response vendor, ask exactly how it gets your data back, and get the answer in writing. 🔒 Apple unveiled its Home Collection, including a $349.95 smart lock, a $249.95 video doorbell and a $399.95 floodlight camera, built with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric and shipping in December. That puts Apple up against Ring and Nest. Smart-home startups just gained a very rich rival. But Apple partnering instead of building everything itself shows where component makers can still get in. 🎨 A small team used Anthropic's Claude to help build ArtCraft, seven free, open-source apps that mimic Adobe Creative Cloud, from PhotoCraft to VectorCraft. Photoshop and Illustrator run about $60 a month. Once customers resent a subscription, a free look-alike becomes a product, and AI just made those far cheaper to build. If your churn surveys keep saying "price," your moat is thinner than you think. 📊 Anthropic plans to disclose its third-quarter financials to potential investors at a private meeting today, per two people familiar with the matter, ahead of what could be the largest IPO i