Today's victim is Publora. One REST API call to post to ten social platforms. Ten. LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, AND Telegram — because apparently the MVP was "connect everything humans have ever posted to." | Publora's free tier is a welcome mat for exactly those people — the ones who are long on time-to-value and short on credit cards. | That's not a landing page, that's an obstacle course at the finish line.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market (Podcast), Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business (Newsletter), The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses (Newsletter)

An 8-year VC built this. Eight years in venture capital and the best idea he had was... a mail merge with a confidence score. | Workday hits 95% 12-month retention. Salesforce hits 90%. VC Boom doesn't even have a retention number because there's no recurring relationship to retain. | The pricing page says "$297 one-time" with a Spring launch price that "increases July 1." Today is June 9, 2026. That deadline expired a year ago and it's still on the website. The urgency is fake, the scarcity is fake, and the "moat" is fake — three fakes for the price of one.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Product-led marketing (Newsletter), What is good retention? (Newsletter), Pricing your SaaS product (Newsletter), How to determine your activation metric (Newsletter)

They invented a new category name. And history has a verdict on that move: 90% of tech companies that have gone public over the past five years positioned themselves in EXISTING markets, not new ones. Honen skipped straight to inventing the word "fluflommer." | Cornerstone OnDemand is hideous. It still owns the contract. | Honen is doing all the expensive market education work so that Microsoft Teams Learning or Google Workspace Courses can roll it up as a free feature update in 2027.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), Scaling your B2B growth engine (Newsletter)

Wave is 100% free with zero paywall. They have built a structurally identical retention death machine. | If a CSV was too low a bar, what happens when the bar is just... owning a Mac? | A monetization strategy where the customer pays a third party — Groq — and Wave collects exactly zero dollars from that transaction.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business (Newsletter)

Somebody looked at entrepreneurship and said "the hard part is the typing." | Manus cheerfully builds your "premium tinned fish storefront" with Lorem Ipsum descriptions and a hero image of a can of cat food, then tells you it's perfect. | Sample prompts are a band-aid on a broken leg.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses (Newsletter), The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder) (Podcast), Counterintuitive advice for building AI products (Newsletter), Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam (Podcast), Summary: The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) (Newsletter)

They built a corporate org chart for a dropshipping operation. | "Every action is visible and approvable" doesn't sound like automation, it sounds like a second job. | "Free to start" is a great hook — right up until the agent starts.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Why your AI product needs a different development lifecycle (Newsletter), What it feels like when you've found product-market fit (Newsletter), Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam (Podcast), Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more (Podcast)

Today's victim is Empromptu AI. They promise to "build your AI app AND train your custom model" — which is the startup equivalent of a restaurant advertising "we cook the food AND wash the dishes." Congratulations. You've described having a kitchen. | Jen Abel says early-stage enterprise ACV sweet spot is $50K to $100K for founder-led startups. But Empromptu is leading with "working features in 10 days, full production in 30." That's not an enterprise pitch, that's a Fiverr gig with SOC 2 compliance bolted on. | Empromptu's entire positioning is "zero AI engineers hired, zero vendor lock-in" — that's a cost-cutting argument, not a value-creation argument, and you cannot build a sales team on razor-thin margin messaging.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Differentiating your product (Newsletter), The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product (Newsletter)

Today's victim is InsForge — the "agent-native cloud infrastructure platform." They took every backend service a developer needs, bundled it into one platform, and then called it a new market category. Congratulations, you invented the cloud. Again. | Neighborrow had journalists writing love letters, users sending weekly fan emails, and startup competition wins — and zero people actually using the service. The founders themselves said it: "We were great in theory but not in practice." Read those InsForge testimonials again — every single one says "I tried it and it was good." Not one says "we replaced our infra stack with it and hit production." | InsForge is a late entrant paying 2026 prices to acquire developers who already have AWS, Supabase, Railway, and Render bookmarked.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses (Newsletter), 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) (Podcast), The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft (Podcast), Why marketplaces fail (Newsletter)

Congratulations: you built a conference room for robots, and charged humans to sit in it. | Where is the Vokal waitlist full of angry fans demanding a credit card link? | The product page reads like a merger between a pitch deck and a Wikipedia disambiguation page.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses turned their early users into paying customers – Issue 36 (Newsletter), GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter)

They've essentially built a coworker nobody hired, who cannot be fired, and who will interrupt your Zoom call to update Salesforce in front of your client. | HeyGen's CEO said it plainly: "Building a cool AI demo doesn't mean we have a product that customers love and is useful." The novelty-driven acquisition leads to the phantom PMF churn cliff — and Mina's entire wow factor is watching an AI speak on a call. The second that stops being a party trick, what's left? | Mina's killer feature is an AI that speaks up at the right moment. The right moment is exactly what the technology cannot reliably detect yet.

Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter), Counterintuitive advice for building AI products (Newsletter), Elena Verna 4.0 (Podcast), Al Engineering 101 with Chip Huyen (Nvidia, Stanford, Netflix) (Podcast)