Hey - It’s Nico.

Welcome to another Failory edition.

This week, we noticed we’d been paying a subscription for our testimonial wall for 2 years just to show a few tweets. To fix that, we built a simple Wall of Love Generator, which allowed us to cancel the recurring fee. Feel free to use it to easily embed your social proof.

Here are today’s top 3 highlights:

• GummySearch, a startup helping founders and marketers uncover insights from Reddit threads, has shut down - learn more below

• A guide to crafting your brand voice

• Nano Banana Pro enables founders to build tools that weren’t possible before - learn why this matters below

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This Week In Startups

🔗 Resources

A Guide To Crafting Your Brand Voice

How to price and sell a product when creating a new category

One year with ChatGPT Pro as a first hire

How ‘fofr’ built their blog from scratch using Gemini 3

💸 Fundraising

Cybersecurity Startup 7AI Raises $130 Million in Series A Funding

AI startup Flex raises $60 million to offer finance tools for mid-sized businesses

Black Forest Labs (FLUX) Secures $300 Million Series B Funding

Fail(St)ory

When an API Pulls the Plug

Indie SaaS product GummySearch is winding down.

After four years of helping founders, marketers, and investors uncover insights from Reddit threads, GummySearch announced last month it would stop accepting new signups and renewal payments as of November 30th, 2025, and fully shut down on December 1st, 2026. Existing paying users will retain access until their billing cycles end, but the business itself is entering its final chapter.

In the announcement from GummySearch, the startup’s founder explained the reason for shutdown: GummySearch was unable to reach an agreement with Reddit to obtain a commercial license for compliant access to Reddit’s Data API.

What Was GummySearch?

Launched in 2021 by solo founder Fed, GummySearch was a lightweight audience and market research tool that pulled real-time insights from Reddit. It helped users validate ideas, monitor niche communities, study customer sentiment, and track emerging trends, all by surfacing what people were saying in subreddit conversations.

The Numbers

• Founded: 2021

• Team: 1

• Subreddits tracked: 10,000+

• Revenue: $35K MRR

• Duration: ~4 years (2021-2025)

Reasons for Failure

• No commercial API agreement: GummySearch relied on Reddit’s API for its core functionality. Despite attempts at negotiation, the company could not reach a commercial licensing agreement, meaning GummySearch would need to become a non-commercial product or shut down. As the sole founder of a for-profit platform, GummySearch’s founder chose the latter.

• The cost of being “legit”: Many products still technically use Reddit data without a commercial license, but Fed made it clear he didn’t want GummySearch to be one of them. Running a business “looking over your shoulder every day,” as he put it, wasn’t sustainable, especially when the company would be running the risk of a sudden API access cut-off affecting paying customers.

• Free tier economics: While GummySearch did offer a free tier, it relied on revenue from paid subscriptions to stay operational. Without paying users, it simply wasn’t possible for the company to continue offering a free version of the product, resulting in the full closure of all new signups and renewals.

• No viable pivot without risking quality: GummySearch was Reddit insights, and an attempt to rebuild it around other platforms or scraping alternatives could compromise quality and reliability. Fed stated he would potentially be open to selling the product to Reddit itself or to a company that has a Reddit Commercial API license to maintain the quality.

Why It Matters

APIs remain one of the most powerful yet fragile foundations of many startups. When you build on someone else's platform, you rely on their policies, pricing power, and risk factors. GummySearch wasn’t out of customers, demand, or product-market fit - it simply lost its ability to operate commercially under the constraints of its core data partner.

Indie SaaS can be resilient, but third-party platform dependency is a major risk. Even a healthy, beloved tool with a strong user base can be forced to sunset when upstream providers change course.

Transparency leads to a graceful exit. Fed’s open communication, long wind-down period, and insistence on honoring existing customers show how to handle a shutdown the right way.

Trend

AI Image Processing Goes Pro

Two weeks after its launch, Nano Banana Pro is starting to spark a quiet shift in the AI ecosystem. Not because it simply generates nicer pictures than the many other AI image tools out there, but because it enables founders to build entirely new categories of visual tools that weren’t possible before and startups to streamline their image production like never before.

For the first time, an AI model can reason about objects, layouts, labels, physics, and context with a level of precision that allows it to power real products. If earlier AI image tools were “creative assistants,” this one is closer to a visual engine - one that can take real-world inputs and turn them into structured, functional outputs.

What Nano Banana Pro Is

Nano Banana Pro runs on Google’s Gemini 3 Pro AI Model, and it’s the first widely accessible AI image processing tool that can generate, edit, adapt, and analyze images with professional reliability. It understands perspective, lighting, material physics, and spatial relationships well enough to maintain consistency across hundreds of outputs.

Some examples of what the model can potentially do:

• Read and rewrite text inside an image

• Generate accurate diagrams and step-by-step overlays

• Maintain brand consistency across thousands of variants

• Localize scenes, environments, and packaging for any region

• Infer missing details when restoring or cleaning up photos

Imagine dropping in a product shot and generating a hundred localized versions with appropriate backgrounds, signage, and cultural details, or offering a visual tech support app that provides users with step-by-step image overlays for troubleshooting and repairs.

These weren’t realistic use cases for error-prone novelty AI image generators, but they are now with Nano Banana Pro.

Why It Matters

Nano Banana Pro turns AI image generation into a reliable visual engine. It lets startups automate visuals with the same trust they place in AI models for text.

Entirely new product categories become buildable. Think real-time financial charts, global campaign localization engines, visual tech support SaaS, contextual architectural rendering tools, dynamic QR menu boards, and more.

Visual workflows can now be automated end-to-end. Small teams now have the capabilities to complete tasks that used to require large production departments.

Startups can ship features faster and validate ideas earlier. Consistent, editable, brand-safe images can now be generated on demand without sacrificing accuracy.

Visual consistency at scale becomes a default. This is critical for marketing automation, enterprise tooling, technical documentation, training content, and any product that needs structured, repeatable imagery.

Help Me Improve Failory

That's all for today’s edition.

Cheers,

Nico