Nick Trenkler
greg is right
we researched companies that skyrocketed in the AI era and hand-picked 7 for you
same pattern - they know what makes a human click & share and have 1 groundbreaking moment defining their growth
read their stories below.
The best thing ANY engineer/programmer can do right now is learn how to become a top 1% marketer
— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg) April 9, 2026
For 20 years, the engineer was the most important person in the room. They had the rarest skill. They could build the thing. Everyone else had to wait for them.
Claude Mythos and…
1/ @midjourney - 10M users in 8 months
@DavidSHolz didn't build a website or app - he used a discord server
every prompt users typed appeared in a public channel. thousands of strangers watching images render in real time, then trying to top it
visibility + competition = compounding growth
he picked the only platform that guaranteed both
2/ @deepseek_ai - 33.7M users in 1 month
they could have led with the benchmarks - R1 was on par with o1 across most tests
instead they led with one line: $5.6M to build ChatGPT
that single framing hijacked every existing narrative at once - chinese tech vs us tech, ai cost crisis, nvidia overvaluation, export controls. the press couldn't help itself
nvidia dropped 18% in a day. cnn, bbc, nyt for a week. #1 in 57 countries in 7 days
3/ @openclaw - 3.2M users in 5 months
one guy in austria, losing $15k/month of his own money to keep it alive
then anthropic's lawyers sent a trademark complaint - he had to rename it - people noticed and got mad and starred the repo out of spite
247k github stars in 60 days. react took 10 years to get there
4/ @GammaApp - 10M users in 9 months
3 years stuck at 60k users
march 2023 @thisisgrantlee stopped treating AI as a feature and made it the front door - launch video did 1M views on X
took them 8 months to get the first 60k - less than a week to get the next 60k
then every deck shipped with "made with gamma" at the bottom. that watermark is still printing users today
5/ @elevenlabs - 1M users in 5 months
@matiii shipped to prosumers first, not enterprises. and let users discover use cases the team never imagined
then a creator made "harry potter by balenciaga" using elevenlabs voices. 7M views in a month. elon musk replied with fire emojis
that wasn't luck, it was the strategy working - prosumers found a use case nobody at the company had imagined
6/ @boltdotnew - 5M users in 8 months
spent 7 years on a browser IDE that never broke out. dying at $80k ARR
claude 3.5 dropped - @EricSimons rebuilt the whole thing in 90 days
launched with one tweet, no landing page, just a text box on a white screen. people typed a sentence and watched a real app build itself in seconds
it looked impossible so people screen-recorded it and posted it everywhere
7/ @Lovable - 8M users in 12 months
@antonosika built in public. every update, every milestone, every weird user demo - he posted it
then he ran a waitlist before launch and turned it into a community. first month of public launch hit $4M ARR
claude 3.5 made the apps actually shareable - users started screenshotting everything
100k+ projects daily. fastest european startup ever to $20M ARR
