gm friends, hope the sunday scaries aren't beating you this morning. In today's Roundup, we've got five products you ought to know about, a move to turn Alcatraz into the new YC offices, a feel good founder story, and some Twitter hacks to get those numbers pumping.
You might’ve seen the headline about Trump wanting to reopen Alcatraz. Isaiah Granet took that and ran with this cursed rebrand: Y Combinator, now headquartered on the island. Miss your MVP deadline? Say goodbye to sunlight. Raise a down round? Straight to solitary.
Denis Iurchak didn’t set out to build a business. He just got irritated.
Microsoft decided to kill of Skype, along with it, it's cheap international dialling feature. Denis spotted the gap and decided to fill it with a weekend build and zero ceremony.
Enter Yadaphone. It’s a barebones web app for cheap international calls. Buy credits, dial numbers, talk. No logins, no app store, no AI pretending to help. Just a big dialer, a credit box, and a browser tab.
He posted it to r/Skype. The thread got deleted in under an hour, but not before a few people grabbed the link. One of them became a fan and started spreading the word. That one user turned into a feedback machine. Denis kept up, fixing every weird dialing edge case, squashing bugs as they came in, and quietly watching Yadaphone grow.
He launched it on Product Hunt mid-chaos, forgot it was happening, and still walked away with a featured badge. Someone emailed asking for an enterprise plan. He built it overnight and closed the deal the next morning.
Ads flopped. Reddit and Twitter carried the whole thing. Pieter Levels retweeted the story and the traffic exploded.
Two months in, Yadaphone makes $8,000. Denis quits his job. Support requests still go straight to his inbox. He answers them every morning and ships whatever’s broken.
Rodrigo Soviero tossed a classic founder worry into the forum: “As a founder, how do I get started on X?”
Replies split into three camps.
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Just post: lurk a bit, then hit send. Your first tweets disappear into the void anyway.
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Show the build: followers care about the messy middle—shipping notes, tiny wins, and face‑plants—more than polished releases.
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Pick a lane: stick to one theme—product lessons, indie revenue, spicy market takes—so strangers know why they’re following.
X veterans also begged new founders to skip growth‑hack tricks and reply to people like humans. The consensus: consistency beats clever hacks, and screenshots of real numbers still crush AI‑generated quotes.