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  "description": "Potluck joined the team. Claude became our biggest source of new users",
  "path": "/2026-may",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-10T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "Dear investors and friends,\n\nVal Town is the 100ms deployment platform. Our mission is spreading the joy of\nprogramming.\n\nMay 2026\n\nWe grew ARR 3% in May, driven mostly by Pro subscriptions, which in turn is\nlikely because we made private & unlisted vals no longer accessible on our Free\nplan. We also had our first fully-self-serve Business plan subscriber; they\nsigned up and subscribed without talking to us.\n\nOur May focus was Claude Code + Val Town. It's really fun to use Claude Code and\nCodex to make vals!\nIn this silly livestream,\nI spin up 33 parallel Claude Code subagents to deploy 33 demos on Val Town – one\nfor every API on Stripe Projects – in 20\nminutes! We built a\n“Claude Plugin”, redesigned\nthe top of our homepage, and plastered copyable “install our plugin” snippets\npages throughout our site and docs.\n\n\n\nTry it for yourself:\n\nnpx plugins add val-town/plugins\n\nI was shocked to learn that in the last 30 days, a whopping 25% of new users\nself-reported learning of Val Town from Claude, dwarfing any other single source\nof traffic.\n\nOh, and a personal May update: I got married!!!\n\nJune 2026\n\nMy very good friend Potluck joined Val Town! We’ve been friends since college –\n14 years now – and it’s a dream to work together. He’s helping us on operations,\nproduct, & growth.\n\nOur goal for June remains growing MRR 20%.\n\nKey numbers\n\nTeam: 6\n\nHiring: 1 (Infra Engineer)\n\nRevenue Growth: 3% (Goal: 20%)\n\n\n\nWe generate this ^ ARR chart – a shockingly hard problem – by syncing Stripe to\nVal Town SQLite.\nHere's a template!\n\nHighlights\n\nPotluck joined!\nFirst 100% self-serve business customer\n\nLowlights\n\nMissed 20% revenue growth goal\n\nBest,\n\nSteve",
  "title": "Investor Update – May 2026"
}