I never imagined terencefong.com to once again be a live site. Its first iteration was in the early 2000s as my MVP when I started my first startup providing webhosting services to students. Its second iteration was during Covid after I exited my second startup and was looking for a platform to share my learnings (and prevent friends from making the same mistakes).
This seems to be the launch of terencefong.com v3.0 which roughly also coincides with exploring ideas for my third startup.
Building a startup today is so different from building in the early 2000s where I could sell within my personal networks, and building in the 2010s where I could sell on social media and buy targeted ads.
Building in 2026 is truly about distribution and building a relationship with your audience. AI has reduced the barriers to entry on creating a product, the bottleneck has shifted to how are you going to get your product in front of people and get them to buy.
Unfortunately, I am not gifted in the art of dancing to music so Tiktok probably will not work for me. Therefore, I am back to my key skill set of writing, and hoping to build a relationship with you.
Yes you, my beloved reader. My promise to you is that everything here is humanly crafted and deeply thought of, and you are always an email away from a human voice or a human response. DM me, email me, I love to hear from you.
So what is going to happen here?
First, I intend to share my entire journey. From ideation to testing to failures and hopefully successes. If this journey does end up in some success somewhere, this would be a good record of the journey. If this journey ends up nowhere, at least I hope it can be entertaining or educational for you.
Second, I will share with you all my tools. In today’s AI age, it seems like my startup will just comprise of me, myself and AI so I have created various custom tools, skills and automation which you will have access to once you subscribe (or give me your credit card number, just kidding, no monetization (yet))
Third, building distribution and an audience is important only if there is feedback, so you will get first hand beta tests to all of my new random wacky experiments. The mantra of building in an AI age is validate fast, kill losers and double down on winners. I rely on your to provide that positive feedback loop of validation to let me know where should I be spending my time.
Why is this important to you?
I truly considered whether starting yet another newsletter was necessary at this point in time where information is so easily accessible. Beyond my personal selfish goals of building an audience, I actually hope that my entrepreneurship journey would be helpful to you.
In my opinion, I foresee the future world to be one where we all have to be entrepreneurs. As our traditional social contract of labour evolves in the AI age, where the marginal cost of work could potentially go down to near zero. The need to prove your value proposition to remain employed becomes stronger over time. In that universe, being entrepreneurial in an employee setting or in a self-employed setting would be the best way to continue to make a living.
TLDR: if you are employed don’t rest on your laurels, we are going for a roller coaster ride, but let me do it first for you so that you can have an easier time.
Ok great what’s next?
I will try to share my thoughts on interesting problems I am thinking of and potential solutions to solve them. Maybe even build a MVP, record a loom, showcase a solution and if it resonates with you please let me know. Back in the cycle of landing pages, building a waitlist, collecting commitments – only instead of a powerpoint deck of the past, hopefully AI can build me a working prototype today.
Words are obviously a comfortable platform for me hence I am hiding in writing. Videos are less comfortable hence I have no Youtube, Instagram or Tiktok.
But I have learnt in the attention competition of 2026, having an online video personality apparently is helpful, so that is something I am still considering, let me know if you have thoughts.
But wait, is this really a playbook to building a start up in 2026?
Glad you asked! Do you have an idea for the start up you wanna build? If you do then, build in public, build an audience, experiment quickly, subscribe to my things and let me know how I can help you grow!
If you do not have an idea – then I have just the thing for you! I created my own Claude thought partner to bounce ideas off with me to see what ideas I should be building while optimizing for speed to cash, personal unfair advantage and all the good things I learnt across my multiple start up experiences. For the princely sum of your email address, you might be able to unlock a whole new business idea!
Thanks for the pitch
I am really excited to start this new iteration of terencefong.com, hopefully some fascinating new ideas come out of this and ideally I have you with me on this journey.
I read every email, I reply every DM, so ping me if you have anything to share.
Till the next letter,
Terence