Timon Zimmermann
@tizimmer
exited, now building @MageMetrics (data analytics for the AI agents era)
Less than 1,000 followers and building in AI People think I am a bot 😂 (Google my name you’ll find interviews of me) Here’s my story 👇
The vibe-coding paradox is that you can code an iOS app in an afternoon, but shipping it with auth, payments, deploy, and monitoring is still a week of painful work. The bottleneck has moved from code to infra.
Mediocre talent + relentless curiosity beats an overthinking genius every single time. I've watched it happen for 20 years.
Haters are a strong signal you’re building something ambitious
Whenever haters come after us we have a massive growth week. It’s so odd. @paulg nailed it with “haters are just fanboys with the sign switched.”
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Everyone’s building the same thing. What sets you apart is how it feels to use your product. That’s brand. That’s story. That’s the moat.
In 2027, paying software a salary will seem completely normal. When something does work that previously required a human, you're paying for value delivered, not number of features on the interface or hours logged.
Any pre-seed or seed investor that turns down the chance to meet a founder cos they don’t like “the space” they are in; doesn’t get this business. Markets change, products change, people remain. At this stage, the only thing that matters is people. 100%.
If your product needs an "AI integration," you're already too late.
The "AI wrapper" insult is aging like milk. Every SaaS company is about to become an AI wrapper. Every AI company is about to need a SaaS wrapper. The winners won't be the "pure" plays. They'll be the ones who wrapped the right thing at the right time. Stripe wrapped…
The most dangerous competitors aren't building in your category. They're building the tools that make your category obsolete. Zoom didn't kill conference call companies. They killed the need for conference calls. Your biggest threat isn't a better version of you. It's someone…
Working at a well-funded AI startup where you're able to try stuff *before* worrying about cost is an amazing blessing.
Crazy to think that when a technology we've been using for less than 3 years go down for a few minutes we can't work anymore while 3 years ago we were just fine working without it. The speed of adoption is unmatched with AI.
AI companies bragging about their models in 2024 will apologize for them in 2026.
Prompt engineering is the new regex: annoying, essential, invisible when done right.
Everyone's building AI tools. Winners are building tools for AI.
Your job as a startup founder is to keep the company alive long enough to win.
Your competitor isn't another startup. It's a 16-year-old with ChatGPT and no overhead.