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- The Cold Email Tool Doing $650K, a High School Dropout's $200M Brand, and the Copied App Making $81K/Month
The Cold Email Tool Doing $650K, a High School Dropout's $200M Brand, and the Copied App Making $81K/Month
Chris Bulen & Daniel Ebohon
September 22, 2026
In partnership with
Hey! It's Chris & Daniel.
Here's something nobody wants to admit: your idea probably doesn't need to be original.
This week we found a founder who proved it, plus a cold email tool making serious money in a category everyone calls dead, and a high school dropout who built a $200M brand while most people were still recovering from 2020.
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Startups FYI Spotlight
Here are the startups that made it to the top of the list in this week's edition.
🌙 Moonmap (Pre-revenue): This tool catches the waste ad platforms will never flag for you, and brands using it have cut around 17% of their ad spend.
🛡️ ShieldLabs (Undisclosed): Here is a tool that gives every website visitor a persistent ID and risk score. It takes about 5 minutes to install and has a free plan with 5,000 identifications.
Most founders are one system away from turning LinkedIn into their best sales channel.
Engagement is easy to mistake for pipeline. On Sep 30, watch how a founder turns LinkedIn content into real outreach. Live. You'll walk away with a repeatable system: what to post, who to reach out to, and how to sequence it.
Eligible startups also get the LinkedIn-to-Leads Toolkit: ad credits, Apollo, Captions, and HubSpot's Prospecting Agent.
📞 VoiceDrop ($1M): Use AI to send personalized voicemails directly to prospects without their phone ringing. It can also send SMS follow-ups automatically.
📧 Emailchaser ($650K): An all-in-one tool for cold email. It helps you find leads, verify emails, manage multiple sending accounts, run campaigns, and handle replies.
🔎 1Lookup ($450K): A tool with one API that lets you verify and enrich phone numbers, emails, and IP addresses, using the same credits across everything.
— Want your startup in next week's issue?
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Startups FYI Roundup
🔥 $100M in 11 Months, $200M in 18. He Dropped Out of High School
Danny Yeung lost money through COVID, then partnered with David Beckham to launch IM8 and hit $100M in eleven months. He credits telemarketing, of all things, for the skills that got him there. On My First Million he breaks down the partnerships, the 200 offline events, and how the whole thing compounded so fast.
🤖 He Copied a $1M/Month App and Made $81K/Month in a New Country
Tomer found an AI calorie tracker doing $1M a month, noticed nobody had built it for Israel, and shipped CalBuddy in two months using AI tools. No original idea, no dev team, no funding. Just a proven model and knowing one market better than the incumbent.
👷 One Piece of Content, 30 Channels, $186K MRR
Postiz is an agentic scheduler that pushes a single asset to 30+ channels, and its solo founder just published the full breakdown of how it passed $2.2M in annual revenue. The engine was simple and repetitive: turn one piece of content into videos, posts, and articles, then distribute whatever works, over and over.
(Tag @ChrisBulen to get your project featured in next week’s roundup)
Here are the startups that made it to the top of the list in this week's edition.
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That’s it for this time! See you again next week.
— Chris (@ChrisBulen)