2026-04-12. Nomoyu Daily for Indie Developers (Issue 330)

📰 News

The Stock Fell 66%, Yet the CEO Says Being Public Is 10x More Fun Than Being Private

Hims CEO Andrew Dunham may be the most “abnormal” public-company boss in the world.

Over the past six months, his company’s stock has fallen 66%, wiping out nearly $9 billion in market value. Everyone is worried for him, but in an interview he laughed and said, “I may be the only person who thinks running a public company is more fun than running a private company.”

That sentence landed like a slap across Silicon Valley’s face.

We have heard too many complaints about going public. Founders say they were kidnapped by Wall Street. Teams say they lost freedom. Everyone misses “the good old days” when they could build products however they wanted.

But Andrew reveals a cruel truth: the comfort zone of private companies is the slow poison that kills great companies.

In a private company, the worst case is usually a few anxious investors calling you. In the public market, every 90 days you face judgment from the entire world. You must show real results, with no excuses.

For true competitors, this is not torture. It is heaven.

You can set an insane goal and drive the whole team toward it. If you win, the world cheers. If you lose, the world watches you fall. This naked, undisguised competition is the most primitive and pure joy of entrepreneurship.

Andrew says he was a rower in high school. His coach told him, “The people willing to endure the most pain win the race.”

He remembered that sentence for life.

He has applied this “pain philosophy” to every corner of the company.

He does not hire polished “professional managers” with perfect resumes. He looks for people who have been through hell and climbed out of the rubble. His CFO was a firefighter at Uber during the pandemic. His product leader went through Robinhood’s GameStop crisis.

“What I look for is not intelligence, but resilience,” he says. “When you are disrupting an industry, chaos is inevitable. You need a team that is used to discomfort and can stay calm under fire.”

Too many founders, after their companies grow, become fascinated by high-level strategists. They feel they can finally escape from messy execution and just point at the map.

That is exactly where death begins.

DoorDash became an $80 billion giant not because Tony Xu hired many McKinsey consultants, but because he always surrounded himself with operators who loved building and doing. Even today, they still iterate and experiment like a 100-person startup.

Andrew admits he once made the same mistake. He hired people who “looked like they should be impressive.” Every time, it failed.

“In the end, you discover that all great things are built by people willing to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.”

Andrew’s view on AI, which everyone is now afraid of, is equally clear.

He does not think AI will disrupt Hims’ business. On the contrary, he believes AI will make companies with “physical moats” even stronger.

AI can write code, design, and generate ad creatives. But it cannot prescribe medication, prepare medicine, or deliver it to your doorstep. It cannot replace a million square feet of pharmacy warehouses, nor thousands of licensed doctors and pharmacists.

“The most defensible businesses are always the ones that do real work,” he says. “AI will open a massive traffic funnel for us, but people who actually pay will still flow to platforms that can provide real products and real services.”

Hims spends $1 billion a year on marketing. AI allows the same team to produce three to four times as much content. AI helps doctors standardize diagnostic workflows, improving accuracy and efficiency.

AI has not replaced anyone. It has simply made excellent people even better.

The most moving line in the interview was this: “If you don’t feel like you’re about to lose control, you’re probably not pushing hard enough.”

We live in an age obsessed with stability and balance. We fear risk, failure, and pain. We want everything under control. We want life to be a smooth upward line.

But entrepreneurship has never worked that way.

Entrepreneurship is dancing at the edge of a cliff. You are always testing the boundary of losing control, always wrestling with uncertainty. The anxiety that keeps you awake, the tension that makes your palms sweat, and the despair that makes you doubt yourself are exactly the proof that you are alive.

All great companies are born from pain.

Apple launched the iPod when it was near bankruptcy. Microsoft transformed into cloud while being mocked by everyone. Tesla nearly died in production hell. A company that has never gone through the furnace will never develop a steel-like will.

Andrew says he will continue to enjoy this pain.

Because he knows that when everyone else is avoiding pain, the people who embrace it will eventually win the world.

🖥️ Software

Agentic Prompt Queue

Agentic Prompt Queue is a Chrome extension that pulls information from news sources and generates executive summaries, with support for customized real-estate regional analysis.

SinceWhen

SinceWhen is an offline anti-habit tracking iOS app with widgets and iCloud sync, no ads, and a free tier limited to three events.

DarkScout

DarkScout is an evaluation app for astrophotography that combines cloud cover, moon phase, and Milky Way visibility to score photo outings and suggest ideal time windows.

syncfu

syncfu is an open-source desktop notification overlay tool with CLI and HTTP triggers, blocking process waits for user interaction, progress bars, multi-monitor support, and custom styling.

CCG

CCG is a multi-model collaborative CLI development tool that integrates Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini for end-to-end development workflows.

Blinq

Blinq is a secret confession and mutual-matching app that notifies users only when both sides like each other, with multilingual support.

TripPing

TripPing is a free mobile app for exploring more than 20,000 Korean cultural heritage sites, with offline maps, multilingual audio guides, and festival filters.

🎮 Games

PartyDeck

PartyDeck is an offline party card game made by a Korean indie developer, supporting 16 languages, more than 600 cards, and multiple game modes.

BlurBlitz

BlurBlitz is a daily image puzzle game that uses AI scoring and challenges users to reconstruct the full form of a blurred image.

✍️ Notes

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