It’s Thursday.

A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI, the current zeitgeist, and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world. 

This week in AI: 

  • Salesforce slashed 4,000 jobs. Ouch! 

    The customer support team has been slashed, as Salesforce deploys AI agents to replace the roles. 

  • Taco Bell’s AI-powered drive through all talk 

    Taco Bell customers “bypassed” the AI ordering system by requesting strange orders to speak to a human. AI errors can create long lines and more unhappy customers. 

  • Meta’s rolls out new rules on training AI chatbots 

    Meta’s chatbots are being trained to no longer engage with underage users on topics of self-harm, suicide and conversations sexual in nature. If only it didn’t take an exposé for this to be a priority. 

Good morning. I’m a sucker for the building in public posts. The underdog stories, the unlikely founders, the paradoxes. While Twitter can be a dumpster fire these days, it’s still the best platform for founders to share their insights and ideas. 

As a reporter who has covered crypto and AI extensively, I’m used to interviewing founders in their 30s and 40s. So, when I came across a teenager vibe coding his way to virality and half a million users, I had to speak with him. 

He spoke with maturity and grace well above his age. I cringed at what I was doing at 17 years old, but alas. 

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The 17-year-old who built a viral AI app in 3 hours

A year ago, Rexan Wong was on the school bus in Hong Kong watching Daniel Dalen YouTube videos. Those cool “day in the life” entrepreneur clips, sharing his lifestyle and lessons. 

Dalen had a signature thumbnail, with the POV text behind the image. Wong went home that night and played out in Photoshop, to see if he could emulate it – but he couldn’t.  

Source: YouTube @danieldalen

So, he set a challenge for himself: To prototype a text-to-image AI app using Cursor AI. He did it in three hours, decided to record a demo, put it on Twitter, then went to bed. 

The next morning, on the school bus again, he checked the post. It got hundreds of thousands of views in less than 24 hours. Having cracked the code, he spent the next week building the landing page, packaging the product, and formally launched a week later. That post got 400,000+ views, became the #1 product of the day on Product Hunt, and grew to 300,000 users in months. 

Wong has used that playbook to launch and scale apps other AI apps like make.ad, which hit $5,000 revenue in the first month. He’s since teamed up with a bunch of guys at AI portfolio company, 24labs. 

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As a solo founder, entrepreneur and influencer, he doesn’t see the need for the VC path, once you master organic content. Founder-led storytelling, behind-the-scenes content, and building-in-public strategy for bootstrapping AI apps. It’s the new PR.

“It used to be that building products was the hard part. It’s now the distribution, marketing and growth that’s hard. It’s so easy to build a product right now with AI, but not everybody knows how to spot a problem and how to go viral,” he said.

Get to MVP ASAP

When Wong comes across problems in his daily life, he thinks about how he can solve it with AI. Then he builds a minimum viable product (MVP) with vibe coding, as fast as possible. “I build the simplest solution but that’s sufficient enough to solve the problem.” 

Audience as beta group: As he’s building, he shares his journey on Twitter with posts like “this is what I’ve built today” to gain product feedback and traction. Once he’s done, he launches with the Twitter demo video and doesn’t stop posting, as this is his traffic source. 

“I’ve received a lot of feedback from my Twitter posts. When text-to-image was still free, a lot of people suggested making it freemium. So, I implemented the payment model,” Wong said. Imagine that… an audience telling a founder to charge for his product. 

“Twitter is by far the easiest platform to create content and get a massive return. All you need to do is write words and include a video. For other platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, there are other components to the content creation process,” Wong said. Twitter doesn’t require that high production value and it’s also where founders are hanging out. 

Wong said he spent about six months without much of an audience, but it gave him the freedom to test content formats.

Mastering organic in 2025: “It can 100% still be done today. I’m still doing it and getting results.” His whole thesis is if you share value and talk about the cool things you’re building, people pay attention. People want to learn from individuals who are on the path and have the bruises, bumps and triumphs to share. 

Underrated platforms: “I’ve heard of a lot of founders making a lot of noise on Reddit, by posting in a very strategic way. It doesn’t require that big of an audience. It’s its own rabbit hole.”  

Having coding experience has helped Wong accelerate his speed to market, but he says the future founder will need to be more creative (than technical). 

“The best bet you can take on yourself is to build a product with tools and technologies that you’re comfortable with, and then don’t stop distributing it.”

Wong is part of a new era of founders who are flying solo, building cashflowing products, and riding the AI wave. With the portfolio career the future of work, we might soon see $1 billion solo founder businesses… and it might be a school kid just like Wong from Hong Kong, not an ivy league graduate in Silicon Valley.

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