Hey app builders, I'm Yusuf, co-founder at Vendo (YC S26). Berkeley honors grad at 19, Stanford MS, and now building open-source software that lets companies agentify their products: embedded agents your customers use to automate work, build views, and connect their tools. We're at 412 stars and I'm trying to push past 500 so more builders find it. If you have a GitHub account, this takes 10 seconds: open https://github.com/runvendo/vendo and hit the Star button in the top right. That's it. Live product if you want to poke at it: vendo.run Happy to answer anything about the stack, agents, or YC. And I'll return the favor, drop your repo below and I'll star it too. 🙏

This video alone brought in 10M organic views in July, no ads Two months ago Maria (my co-founder) found a video concept that seemed to be doing well...a few hundred thousand views We did our own version of it and it video was an instant hit 2M+ views in a few days This was the starting point for our app, it was the spring board for all future growth since then I was afraid of somehow saturating Instagram with this video so I was afraid of posting it too often, but Maria told me to just go ahead and keep replicating it. I change the hook but the entire video concept stays the same and it just goes viral every time, it's' crazy. I have heard creators before talk about re-making the same video to infinity....but I didn't take it literarily. No they really mean that if you find a winning formula, you just keep making it over and over again. If you're not getting traction on socials, keep experimenting with new formats until something will eventually work. Once you find your winner, keep iterating on it but stick with the same format. Try new b-roll, new CTA, re-order scenes, etc.

Creator apps are generating millions in revenue with 1% of the audience. MKBHD Inc.'s app made $95k, lifetime. He has 21M subscirbers. The app was finally put to sleep in December 2025. Kylie Jenner's app hit number 1 on the App Store in 2015. Dead by 2019. Kardashian apps...fail Taylor Swift's app survived 13 months before being taken down. Jeremy Renner shut his down I too thought that big social media following doesn't translate to app revenue but the market has shifted. The biggest winners of the last few years and especially in 2026 are creators. The Hot High Priestess on TikTok launched a manifestation app Stella that's made $1.05M since launch in March 2026! Chani Nicholas has 693k followers and her cute astrology readings Instagram followers have converted to $47.4M in sales on her "CHANI: Your Astrology Guide" app Kayla Itsines turned her training programs into Sweat: roughly $100M revenue in 2020 and a nine-figure exit. Gabby George turned her Pilates classes into GGStudio: 30,000 members in 93 countries in under a year. In the old era, celebrities would just throw up random apps unrelated to what they do OR they would try to monetize access. That format clearly didn't work. New format is: 1. Build an audience with a specific niche like astrology, fitness, manifesting 2. Build an app that does that exact thing you yap about on TikTok or IG Another thing that should stand out as you read this: these hyper successful apps are built by women, for women...is the tech-bro era coming to an end?

9 out of 10 app success stories in 2026 are winning because they figured out Instagram or TikTok distribution. They did this with organic content or paying creators. Go and watch the last 20 videos from Starter Story on YouTube (my favorite app channel) and you’ll see a clear pattern this year. I have watched the industry move from ASO to social, but I did nothing. For months I kept swimming with the current of momentum of ASO. It worked until 2025. In fact at the end of 2025 we had our best month, $175k profit in 3 weeks from one dating app. It was made in 6 hours from idea to Apple submission. No ads, no marketing, just the Trending Keyword Method, a term I coined for my ASO. I thought I just need to do more of what worked before…false. I had to pivot our strategy completely. It was time to do the uncomfortable, to do something I didn’t have experience with and be a completely rookie again. I can do ads, easy…but I have never really done much organic social content. This is Maria’s zone of genius. I became a student again and rolled up my sleeves. Long story short, we got more than 10M social media views for our app Absorbed in the first full month of operations. Point of the story: it’s nice and cozy to just keep going with what worked in the past, but the world is changing by the minute now, especially with AI. You have to discard everything that worked in the past. Easier said the done. The hard part of course is knowing when something stopped working and you need to change strategy or if it’s just a temporary speed up. Only you can make that decision, now go and meditate on that my friend.

When I first started playing around with Claude Code everyone told me that it's good enough to make MVPs... but once you scale you'll have to hire real engineers to untangle the mess. They said it'll crash and break at scale. They told me it's irresponsible to use it in production. I decided to mess around and find out. Clade Code MCP connect to XCode and many late nights later I entered into "cyber psychosis". That's when merge with your Claude and become one. Now, 2 months after launch, we have a rapidly growing user base with a 4.8 rating on the App Store for Ābsorbed. It works! I TOLD YOU! Well...almost perfectly.... Okay I have to be honest, I did hire an engineer towards the end there just before submitting to Apple. This is a premium product with a $99 / year subscription. I want to make sure our users' data is safe and the transactions flow without a hiccup. I built 95% of the app myself, the engineer took my code, added RevenueCat integration and made sure I'm not exposing any API keys or doing something silly like that. That's a few hours of work for a decent engineer. Chamath Palihapitiya was saying on the All-In Podcast how the companies that are integrating AI haven't seen a return on investment...and in my mind I'm thinking "What are these people doing with AI if they haven't seen a return?!?!" The technology is unreal, but it's only as good as the human sitting in the chair. Me personally, I'm not sitting, I'm writing this laying down by the pool in Bali, while Claude is redesigning our onboarding.