The Astute founder on her dad's snail money and the habit Fluidstack gave her

In a village outside Belgrade a man who was no good at school, worked days in a mechanic's shop and spent his nights at the river collecting snails, which he sold to smart restaurants in the city for about ten pence each.

He kept at it. The snail money went into a mechanics workshop of his own, the workshop eventually employed fifty people, and he became the first person in Serbia to hold a licence for carrying dangerous goods.

Last month his daughter's company beat Cursor and OpenAI to win the day on Product Hunt.

I asked Vida Stanić what she took from watching that.

"If you work hard you can achieve."

London, then Fluidstack

She left Serbia at seventeen on a full academic scholarship, read at Queen Mary in London, and went into startups early. Her first commercial job was at a company that hadn't found product-market fit yet.

Then Fluidstack, where she was one of the first in and ran growth while the AI infrastructure business went from a $2m valuation to $2bn inside a year.

She doesn't lead with any of that. What she wanted to tell me about was a conversation with the CEO, who sat her down and told her she had a chip on her shoulder. Then told her he liked it, and that she should hang on to it.

It made her determined. She answered him on the spot.

"I told him I'm going to be a billionaire."

She could have stayed. "I could've 100% easily stayed at Fluidstack." She likes the early stage and she wanted her own thing.

I asked what the $2bn run taught her that gets in the way now.

"Knowing how to spend money. When you have a lot of money in a fast-moving company, results are key, so you become good at spending money. That isn't so helpful in a startup."

Where the devs are

The idea came out of Fluidstack. Nobody was contacting creators on behalf of companies like hers, and the buyers she wanted were already gathered around people who had built audiences in newsletters, podcasts and LinkedIn.

"Where are devs hanging out? Where are they spending their time? Those are the creators we should be focusing on."

Doing it by hand was miserable. Evenings on Substack hunting for an email address the writer had gone to some effort to hide. Hundreds of creators contacted. One reply, a fortnight later.

So she went and built the thing she'd been trying to buy.

How it works It's self-serve.

You upload your assets, answer some questions, and the platform works from two sides at once, the creator side and your strategy side, then marries them up and finds the matches.

Two agents do the work. The one pointed at your company reads over a million creator posts a minute, picks up mentions of you and your competitors, works out which creators your buyers actually trust, and then measures what the partnership did — impressions, conversions, and whether AI search engines have started naming you.

The other one works for the creator and handles the admin. Astute doesn't charge them for it. No fee, no percentage. Her co-founder and CTO is Abhishek Manikandan. Oxford, machine learning engineer at The Trade Desk, and a B2B engineering audience on YouTube past 15 million views. Between the two of them they've sat at both ends of this pitch, which is more or less what their lead investor said when he wrote the cheque.

The pre-seed came in oversubscribed at $1.2m, with backing from Flyer One Ventures with Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. They announced it on a Monday. On the Tuesday they launched on Product Hunt and finished the day on 495 points, ahead of Cursor and OpenAI.

If you want to point it at your own account use code PRESSWHISPER to get a one-off campaign for $50 instead of $99. https://www.joinastute.com

I had a short window, and my recorder picked that window to stop recording, so I got through about a third of what I'd written down.

She was warm about it, and humble in a way you don't often get from someone three weeks off a front page.

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