🗞️ What's New: From a Chrome extention to $100M+ ARR, AI pokes holes, marketing via product updates
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Here's what you'll find in this issue:
- This founder raised a Series A he didn’t need to spend because schools paid upfront. Now his company tops $100M ARR.
- 5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
- 30-second growth tip: Send product updates every two weeks to reduce churn.
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From a Chrome extension to $100M+ ARR 🏫
Investors thought schools wouldn't pay for GoGuardian. Schools ended up paying for a year or more upfront. Enough that, as co-founder Advait Shinde puts it: "We raised a Series A but did not need to spend it."
A decent problem to have!
Advait and his co-founders started with a Chrome extension in a small Hermosa Beach apartment, helping schools manage Chromebooks and keep kids safe online. Today, GoGuardian brings in over $100M ARR.
But those first schools weren't exactly lining up. Most of the team was ready to give up on outreach. His co-founder Aza kept at it.
Once they got educators talking, they'd spend the day hearing what needed fixing, code that evening, and show off the changes the next morning. Happy school admins told other school admins.
Then the team started paying resellers commissions on customers they'd found themselves. Sounds a little backwards, right?
In our interview, Advait walks through why that worked, how they got those partnerships going, and what he'd rethink before raising money again.
Stop leaving your laptop open for your coding agents 🌙
Prized (YC S26) gives Claude Code and Codex their own computer in the cloud, so they keep working after you close the lid. Start a task before bed and check the result in the morning.
Think of it as a VPS without the setup. One command copies your project and your Claude Code and Codex logins to the box, files stay in sync with a folder on your laptop, and whatever your agent runs opens on localhost. When it's idle, the box pauses itself and costs only its disk. As of today, storage on Prized is infinite.
New accounts get $30 of free credit, no card needed. Try Prized free.
Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻💻
Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Augment Code: Context-aware AI agent that navigates huge repos and writes fixes like a senior dev.
Cursor: AI code editor that predicts your next edit and understands your project context.
Amazon Q Developer: Build and refactor AWS apps faster with AI that understands your stack.
Cline: Plan, act, and execute tasks inside VS Code with an open-source dual-mode agent.
Bite-sized growth tip 🍪
Send product updates every two weeks to reduce churn.
Aleem Mawani and Omar Ismail built Streak, a CRM that lives inside Gmail. Early on, it was missing features other CRMs already had. While they worked on catching up, they gave users a reason to stay: an email at least every two weeks about what had improved.
A small feature or bug fix was enough to make the email. Those regular updates showed customers the team was still working on the product, even when it wasn't perfect. Which helped build trust and gave users a reason to stick around rather than switch to a competitor. The growth report lists Streak's peak revenue at over $833,000 a month.
Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦
Can't tell whether I'm frustrated or relieved that AI can't convincingly do our writing for us [yet!].
We'd love your feedback! 🙃
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Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing a post.
