Donkeycorns

Author

Adam Smith
June 28, 2025

What’s in this issue?

  • Donkeycorns - the new net worth goal

  • $100M Disappointment - Sam Altaman’s Deception

  • Business Idea of the day

  • In Other News

Henrik Werdelin, the entrepreneur behind Barkbox and startup studio Prehype, is on a new mission: helping everyday people build million-dollar businesses using AI. His new platform, Audos, wants to take the startup playbook he’s used for years and scale it to the masses.

And the timing couldn’t be better. With layoffs rising and traditional career paths shifting, more people are thinking about launching something of their own. Meanwhile, AI is making it easier than ever to do just that.

Audos uses AI agents to guide aspiring founders through building a business, from idea to customer validation. It starts with a simple Instagram ad. Click it, and the platform kicks off a conversation to uncover what problem you want to solve and who you want to serve. Then, using paid social media, Audos tests your idea fast and helps you find your audience.

Unlike traditional accelerators, Audos doesn’t take equity. Instead, it offers funding and tools in exchange for a 15 percent cut of your revenue. Forever. For some, that’s a fair trade to launch a business without needing tech skills or startup capital. Others might balk at giving up long-term income.

Still, the appeal is clear. Since launching in beta, Audos has helped start hundreds of micro-businesses from AI nutritionists to virtual golf coaches. Werdelin calls these one or two-person ventures “donkeycorns”. Small but mighty businesses that could change lives without chasing billion-dollar exits.

The big vision? A million small businesses doing a million dollars a year each. That’s a trillion-dollar impact.

You can check Audos out here.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but your elaborate plan to get a $100,000,000 check from Meta was never going to work.

After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that Meta was offering hundreds of millions of dollars in sign-on bonuses in an attempt to lure top AI personnel away from his company, actual employees are calling fake news.

In a post on X, Lucas Beyer, confirms that he and 2 other members of the technical staff at OpenAI are moving to Meta, and that their purse wasn’t as massive as we were lead to believe. Some are speculating that Sam Altman purposefully leaked this info to make those on his team receiving offers believe they were being lowballed.

Regardless, Meta is seriously bulking up its roster of AI super heroes (or villains... we’ll see) in attempt to compete with other major players in the AI arms race. After a flurry of key hires and a massive investment in Scale AI, Mark Zuckerberg is looking eerily like Thanos collecting infinity stones. This will definitely end well, right?

Business Idea of the Day

Summary: With the right tools, you can build this app within a couple hours for under $100 in total. The variable costs (hosting, storage, API, and transactions fees) will likely start to increase as you scale, but this means you’re brining on new customers!

  1. Build the app: If you're a non-technical person, use Replit, Loveable, or Bolt to build the foundation of your app. Each of these IDEs (integrated development environments) can help generate your app for you, and they all offer free versions you can use to test the initial output. With just a few sentences and a clear prompt, you can vibe-code this product into existence.
    Tip: Ask your favorite LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) to generate a fully fleshed-out prompt that you can feed into your IDE so it knows exactly what you want to build.

  2. Nail it and Scale it: Find a small group to test every feature, button, workflow, and function you want the app to perform. As you discover bugs or issues, return to your IDE and continue refining the product until it's ready for production.

  3. Distribution: Now it’s time to get your product in front of your target audience. We live in an age where anyone can quickly build and scale amazing products. Identify the ideal customer for your app and replicate the process again and again.

In Other News

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