Anthropic killed Viktor.com. A post-mortem.

& And how you can make millions on their launch. A letter from a baby founder building a competitive product.

Yesterday Anthropic launched a product that does what we do. A goliath walked up to our little startup @viktor__com and announced, in effect, that it intends to kill us.

So this is the post-mortem. Except we're not dead — and I want to tell you how the day actually went, including how a launch designed to kill us became one of our best growth days ever.

The fun part

Imagine you're building a small startup with a huge mission. You and the whole team sleep five hours a night. You grind for years. You sacrifice your family. You sacrifice your personal life. You miss the birthdays, the weddings, the quiet evenings everyone else gets to keep. You pour every waking hour and every last bit of yourself into this one bet. And then one day a $900B+ frontier lab ships a product that claims to be exactly yours.

Scary, right? So what do you do when a frontier lab wants to kill you?

You launch a Google Ads brand campaign and bid six figures on their keyword. You point every "Claude Tag"-related search straight at your own landing page, and you let the giant's launch-day hype do your demand generation for you.

I'm not going to report on exactly how well it worked yet, because those trials haven't converted yet. More on that soon!

Context

We've been trying to build an AI employee for three years.

The mission is simple: free humanity from knowledge work. Almost all the knowledge work we do today is the cognitive equivalent of pushing stones around before the industrial revolution. It's ridiculous that it's still done by hand. That's the thing we're trying to end.

Me & Peter after leaving Meta in 2023

This year — 2026 — was supposed to be our final shot. The last roll of the dice before we ran out of money.

We launched Viktor in the middle of February.

February 2026, Viktor.com launch

It went viral. We hit $20M in annualized run-rate within four months, which is fast by any standard. On the back of that launch we raised a $75M Series A led by Accel.

Were we surprised Anthropic came for us?

Absolutely not.

If you launch something that works, it is the most obvious thing in the world that a big lab will try to replicate it. We've been getting the question from literally everyone since the day we launched: "What happens if Anthropic ships something competitive?"

The honest answer is: there's nothing you can do to stop it. And if they do it, it validates your direction. They also have far better distribution than we do. There's a real upside to that — it helps establish the category we're trying to build.

Category definition

The one gift in all this: Anthropic just helped us define a big category.

A category of multiplayer AI employees. Until yesterday, nobody was Googling for this. Zero.

Now they are.

When a $900B+ company launches, people start searching — "multiplayer agents," "AI employee," "Claude Tag" — and every one of those searches is demand that didn't exist last week.

That's demand we get to capture.

We can compete for those exact impressions, bid against Anthropic on the keywords their own launch created, and put Viktor in front of people at the precise moment they go looking. They did the education; we get to ride it. Net-net it's not a threat — it's rocket fuel for our growth.

Churn

We lost five customers.

Wow!

Viktor's report on our churn.

We actually encouraged a bunch of our customers to go try Tag and tell us honestly if they wanted to switch. None of them did.

And... New signups? 407.

Viktor reporting the signups.

Guess what: we can coexist!

"Wow, Anthropic shipped your product, you're done" is a deeply stupid take.

In 1922 Ford owned ~48% of the car market with the Model T — one product, any color you liked as long as it was black. Five years later GM had beaten them, not with a better Model T but with the opposite bet: "a car for every purse and purpose." By 1927 Ford's share had collapsed to 19%. The single one-size-fits-all product didn't win. The one that respected that different customers want different things did. Same lesson here.

Because the differences are real, not cosmetic. There is a ton of design choices you get to make within a bot in Slack. In fact, there is room for 10s of such products!

Tag is a Slack-only beta, locked to one model (Claude Opus 4.8), with ~14 connectors and no free tier. Viktor runs in Slack and Teams today, on any model you choose, across 3,200+ tools — and builds the one you're missing. Tag posts raw output back in a thread; Viktor ships the finished deck, dashboard, spreadsheet, or ad campaign, and will drive a real browser to do it. Tag is one bot per channel that remembers the recent thread; Viktor is one AI employee across the whole company with persistent context that carries across tools and time. One is a building block technical teams wire up and maintain. The other is the easy button. Those are different products for different buyers — which is exactly the point.

Married to one engine

There's one structural disadvantage they can't escape: they're tied to Anthropic's models.

What happens when OpenAI ships a better model? Or when Google does? Or anyone else?

We can move. They can't. We pick the best intelligence available at any moment and route to it. They are, by construction, married to one lab. In a market where the frontier changes every few weeks, that's a real constraint.

Own the context, or rent your company back

The expected move for a model lab is to lock you in with the context it collects. Tag keeps its own memory, and that memory isn't portable. It absorbs your tacit knowledge — the exception paths, the customer promises, the "we tried that in Q2 and it failed" — and stores it inside one vendor's agent layer.

That's not model lock-in. Models can be swapped. That's context lock-in, and it's far harder to move. You stop renting intelligence and start renting your own operating memory back from the company that sells you the model.

And it's the wrong bet for the moment. The world is going multi-model: Codex is catching up, teams switch on quality and cost every week, millions run open and local models. The only way to keep them is to trap the context on the consumer layer — exactly what enterprises don't want.

Our architecture is the opposite: rent the best intelligence from whoever's best this month, own the context layer. Portable, inspectable, model-neutral. Rent the intelligence. Own the context.

The advantages of being small

Under the Claude brand, Anthropic now runs at least four products: Cowork, Code, Chat, and Tag.

Picture a person who just heard about Claude and wants to try it. Where do they go? claude dot ai. What do they see? A chatbot. "Ah — it's like ChatGPT, nothing new." The traffic doesn't get routed to Tag; there's a fork in the funnel at the very first step. In self-service, that fork is brand dilution (in enterprise it's the opposite — a broad brand helps — but that's a different essay).

We don't have that problem: anyone who hears "Viktor" pictures one thing, an employee. One name, one promise, one funnel. And it's the same story inside the org — Tag, as I understand it, sits as a team under Claude Code, which makes them roadmap-dependent and harness-dependent on a bigger org with its own priorities, with very little flexibility to chase their own product vision.

We have nothing but flexibility. That asymmetry compounds over time.

Why this is actually a collaboration

A huge chunk of our revenue already flows to Anthropic. They benefit from us winning — as long as they keep shipping state-of-the-art models and we keep making them our default, which today we do.

In fact, we really love their team. They told us about Tag’s launch a week in advance, and of course, we kept it confidential. We were extremely excited for them.

I have to say, while Anthropic is now a competitor, they are also an amazing partner that we love to support.

And I'll be honest: OpenAI is cooking hard right now, and we love their team too. It's a real battle. But it's a battle where we hold the choice, not them. We get to be the divas. We decide whose engine goes in the car.

Engine producers aren't always the best car producers

I'm going to borrow this from @mntruell at Cursor, who put it better than I could when he was asked the exact same question we keep getting — how do you compete with the labs you depend on?

He likened the labs' own coding products to a concept car, versus a production car you can actually drive off the lot:

"It would be like taking an engine and a concept car around it instead of a whole end-to-end car that was manufactured. What we do is we take the best intelligence that the market has to offer from many different providers. And we also do our own product-specific models in places. We take that, we build it together and integrate it, then also build the best tool and end UX for working with AI." — Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor (Fortune AI Brainstorm, Dec 2025)

Building a world-class engine and building a world-class car are different companies, with different DNA. We're a car company. We're happy to put their engine in — and swap it the day a better one ships.

Founders: keep building with the frontier labs

A lab copying your product is a signal of very strong product-market fit.

Read the recent history:

OpenAI built TTS models — did it kill ElevenLabs? No.

Claude Code and Codex were supposed to bury Cursor — did they? No.

Same story with Cognition.

OpenAI shipped a notetaker; Granola is doing fine.

Perplexity was supposedly turned into a ChatGPT feature overnight — last I checked they're the opposite of dead.

So, small team, huh? Yes. And we plan to stay small and keep shipping.

The truth

I want to end honestly, because the rest of this would be cope if I didn't.

Self-service is one thing. Enterprise is trickier — and enterprise is where most of the world's knowledge work actually happens. There, the outcome is not obvious. There, we are genuinely fighting a goliath, and the $2M in annualized run rate we made this week does not move the needle.

I think Anthropic is our biggest competitor and the single largest threat to our mission. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Will we die? Statistically, yes.

Will we fight? Until we die.

See you in Google Ads.

— Fryd, on the plane from Cannes to Warsaw

PS. We'd love your support. The best way to support is by signing up at @viktor__com or reposting this post. Thank you!