NEOBANK TIKTOK TIER LIST: I ranked the TikTok game of 10 neobanks from S to D. Most of them are failing for the exact same reason. If you're running a neobank, you should bookmark this thread.

Btw, still hiring a BD Lead at Growgami to run cold outbound and close deals. Remote, no CV, apply by Oct 30 forms.growgami.com/careers/b…

People can tell when nobody actually wrote to them. Copy-paste outreach got ignored before agents too. Agents just made it cheaper to send more of it. What works for us is the opposite. Fewer people, picked on purpose, and a message that opens a conversation instead of pitching. Let the agent find and sort. But you should write the first line. Always

If an agent is doing the buying, your ads don't reach it. Greg calls Amazon and Delta blocking agents stage 1. It won't stay there. Once agents research and shop for people, the agent is your audience. It reads your site, your docs, your public proof. It never sees your banner. AI search is the first thing we pitch clients now. Getting an AI to find you and read you right is distribution. Easy test: ask ChatGPT what you do and why you're legit. If the answer is weak, fix that before buying more ads.

Honest question after that clip of someone forwarding their boss's instructions to Claude and sending Claude's answer straight back: If Claude writes it and the boss approves it, who did the work?

TOKEN2049 week in Singapore, predicted: 1. The same panel, on six different stages 2. "gm" from the same people at every side event 3. Everyone complaining about standing around, while standing around 4. One good conversation at 1am that makes the whole trip worth it

"Encrypted NFTs" is trending on X right now. Fungo Labs says every NFT in its collection mints sealed, encrypted onchain with Zama's FHE. The contract can work with what's inside without ever reading it, and randomness decides how each one looks. Not even the team gets to choose. NFTs have always been the most public thing in crypto. I like that someone is trying the opposite. Curious whether it holds up after mint.

It's been an interesting couple of days to follow if you're building anything consumer in crypto So here are the three things we think are worth knowing > Banks and card networks are shipping stablecoins > Porsche is closing its Web3 project > Google is paying publishers for AI answers More in-depth here: t.me/theagiclub/87

Most crypto teams go looking for a vouch at the exact moment it's worth the least. Why? Early on, a vouch is the only proof you've got. No users, no volume, nothing anyone can check. So one credible person saying "I've used this, it's good" does the job your numbers will do a year from now. But most teams save the big names and the KOL budget for after the raise or right before TGE. By then there's plenty of proof around, and one more endorsement barely moves anyone. We wrote up the full version on our Telegram, including the two things that decide whether a vouch helps you or backfires t.me/theagiclub/83

Sonnet 5.5 is out! And it reportedly beats Opus 5.5 on coding benchmarks at $2/$10 per MTok. Basically half of Opus's $4/$20 Same 1M context, 30% faster than sonnet 5, and early testers are already reporting way fewer tokens per task The pricing math just changed again if you're routing agent workloads

If you are winning every impression, are you overpaying? Your dashboard is green. Your quarter lost money. Both are true. Delivery is full. Budget is spending. Acquisition cost is up maybe fifteen percent over two quarters, and everyone blames the platform, the season, or an aggressive competitor. But nobody blames their own bids. We've watched a few teams unknowingly walk right into this. They win almost every auction they enter, and winning is exactly how they end up paying more for a customer than that customer is worth. Every time your ad could show, Meta or Google runs a quick auction for that one slot. Every advertiser chasing the same person puts in a bid, and a bid is really a guess at what that person is worth to them. On most accounts the platform places that bid for you, working back from a target cost someone set months ago. It weighs the bid against how good it thinks each ad is, but a bigger bid wins more often. The person is worth roughly the same to everyone bidding. Nobody knows the real number, so everyone bids their own guess. The company that wins isn't the one that valued the customer correctly. It's the one that overestimated the most. Economists call it the winner's curse. It came out of oil lease auctions, where the firm that won a block was reliably the one that had guessed highest about what lay underneath. The winning bid was a prediction, and it was wrong in a predictable direction. Picture three companies on one segment worth about forty pounds a customer. They bid > thirty, > forty, and > fifty-five. Fifty-five wins everything, acquires at fifty-five, and reports full delivery and healthy volume. They're fifteen pounds down on every customer and nothing in the account shows it. The fix sounds backwards. Bid what a customer is actually worth to you, and let yourself lose the auctions priced above it. A win rate well under 100% isn't the account failing. It's you refusing to pay fifty-five for something worth forty. Crocs played a different game. They reported roughly $52.4 million through TikTok Shop in a year, and their chief brand officer credited a test, fail, scale mindset instead of any single hero campaign. Run enough shots and the auction stops deciding your quarter, because you're no longer betting the year on one correct bid. The distinction for your next planning cycle: > a channel you bid for is a position, and > a channel nobody can outbid you in is an asset.

everybody's making their employees post online now and honestly, smartest thing they could do. nobody trusts a company account. you see the logo talking about itself and you scroll. but the engineer who actually built the thing, or the founder who explains it like a human? you stop for that. Edelman asked 34,000 people and "my employer" scores 78% on trust vs 64% for "business" in general. nowadays, people trust a person more.

a company so slammed (successfully), its own engineers have to warn you off buying the thing with the replies are split between "where do i sign" and "who taught you this marketing"

the market's climbing back up, and most people are reading it wrong. they see the stock market hitting new highs and money moving again, and they think: good, we've got budget, let's go buy some attention. and they're half right. the money is coming back. but here's the thing, it doesn't get spread around. it floods into the same few places everyone already buys from: Google and Instagram ads, the same big influencers, the same crowded feeds. and when everyone piles into those spots at once, they bid each other up. you end up paying more to reach the exact same person you could've reached cheap a few months ago. the S&P just hit new record highs, and Gartner says marketing budgets are creeping back up, 7.8% of revenue from 7.7%. so it's more companies, all chasing the same customers. and that's not a bad thing. it's actually the best moment in years to get your name out there, once you see which kind of attention is worth having. there are two kinds: > the kind you rent, and > the kind you own. rented attention is anything you pay for: ads, influencers, promoted posts. it works while you're paying, and it disappears the moment you stop. owned attention is what's already yours: the people who follow you, the customers who tell their friends, the name people bring up on their own without you paying anyone. that kind sticks around long after the ad money's gone. so when everyone starts spending at once, the rented kind gets expensive for everybody. the kind you own just quietly gets more valuable. when ads cost more, being the name people already know is how you keep getting customers without paying for every one. and this is the part that plays out over and over. the companies that come out ahead are never the ones with the biggest ad budget. they're the ones who used the quiet stretch to build. growing an audience. earning word of mouth. becoming the name people mention on their own. so you want this built before everyone else realizes they need it, not after. right now attention is still cheap, and you're ahead of the rush before everyone piles in.

everyone pretty much expected the $800M hyperliquid:native unlock to sink the price. it didn't. the token hit an all-time high the same day. that tells you something. when real money flows through a token, supply stops being what moves it. Hyperliquid takes 97% of its trading fees and buys HYPE back with them, every day. ETF money is now pushing from the other side.

OpenAI basically shipped JARVIS Stark used his to run a flying suit. ours is gonna file expense reports