u/Great_Key_766

Sharing an event I'm running in London next month in case it's relevant to anyone here.

I'm hosting a closed-room evening on Wednesday, June 10, for 30 founders and operators working on AI-native products. The whole evening is built around one question:

What's actually defensible when the next foundation model ships half your roadmap natively?

Free to attend if you show up. £35 no-show fee if you book and ghost. Or skip the queue with a guaranteed seat (£50). Invite-only, nothing recorded.

Three speakers:

- Rishabh Kaul (Venture Partner, Hoxton Ventures) - investor, ex-Appsmith and Belong, 25+ angel cheques in early-stage AI/infra. On the early signals he reads when a category is about to collapse.

- Sergey Toporov (Partner, LETA Capital) - reviews 200+ AI pitches per quarter across UK/US/EU. On what investors actually score AI startups on in 2026, which moat stories get funded, and the red flags that kill an AI Series A in the first 10 minutes.

- Dmitry Kushnikov (COO/CTO, ManyChat) - running one of the largest messaging automation platforms in the world (1M+ businesses), now rebuilding core product on LLMs. On the real tradeoffs: where ManyChat builds proprietary AI vs. uses foundation models, and how they defend pricing when frontier labs can replicate features in a weekend.

Plus a hot seat: one founder brings a live defensibility case from their own company. Panel reacts in real time, room weighs in. No prepared pitch, no slides.

Format:

18:00 - welcome drinks

18:15 - panel

18:55 - open Q&A

19:25 - small-group mastermind sessions (one real case per table, brought in advance)

20:10 - drinks, food, unstructured time

Who it's for: founders and senior operators building or defending AI-native businesses. Most of the room will be Seed to Series B, but stage matters less than how seriously you're sitting with the defensibility question.

If you're interested, link in the comment.

A post for everyone who doesn't know why nothing is working for them in marketing (and more just to offer some support).

I work at a startup, I joined relatively recently as a marketer. The startup raised 3 million dollars 1,5 year ago. When I joined we had an average of 10 site visits (now it's 200+ a day on average). Before this I worked at a startup (which fired me, and three marketers before me) that raised 25 million dollars, and the situation was only slightly better: 100 visits a day, less than 100 signups in a year (0 paying customers, 0 enterprise deals signed).

You'll ask, where's the money?

Hell if I know, but all the money was spent on the team and development and just zero money on marketing. And suddenly it doesn't matter how cool the fund that gave you money is, how well-known a founder you are in the Valley, how great your engineers are. No customers come running to you ready to use your product, especially if it's not a hyped B2C product that's just fun to use or has INSTANT VALUE so everyone googles your product and uses it right away.

So what we're left with:

1. It's very noisy right now. Even big launches with good awareness don't bring quick signups and money.
2. Even if you have a strong personal brand but a complex tech product (especially if you're targeting enterprise), you'll still have to work long and hard doing very boring marketing, and it's not guaranteed to work out.
3. You need to start doing marketing before you've even started building the product (because now, and this is already a fact, you can build products fast, but marketing remains the hard and confusing part).

The exception is: you have a super technology or expertise, you're 100% sure that's the case (but then you'll have people lining up with money at your door before you've even made yourself a website).