Close Your Gaps

Hey y’all — ICYMI, I’ve updated the name of Saturday’s framework and issue to be Don’t Be a Helicopter Founder after hearing from readers who’ve served in the military.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• How Ankur Nagpal Raised $2.5M from a Notion page (Link)

• Eniac VC cofounder on seed stage pitch red flags (Link)

Growth

• David Fastuca just released The B2B Sales Playbook — I read a pre-release copy last month and loved it. Worth picking up the $1.99 Kindle version (Link)

• Sam Blond on how to generate more demand (Link)

• Namya Khan on great CTAs (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on how to advertise with limited budget (Link)

ICYMI

• Vimcal is the calendar for busy founders who can't burn time scheduling. Use Vimcal to lock in meetings in seconds (not after five back-and-forth emails) so you can get back to building. (Link)*

• Andrew Gazdecki on how to know if your SaaS is worth over 3x revenue (Link)

• Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch gives free AI ideas (Link)

• John Rush’s take on the future of software companies (Link)

• Vedant Nair on founder archetypes (Link)

💡 Opportunity: All-In-One Agency Tool

Don’t underestimate the market for selling to agencies. They’re high cashflow, chaotic operationally, and, often, margin-challenged.

So if you can offer them something that simplifies operations and helps cut costs, most will listen:

You see a lot of all-in-one offers like this for SMBs (even verticalized ones), so why not agencies too?

There are challenges, for sure. Namely:

1. Different types of agencies operate very differently

2. There’s a lot of functionality to build here

However, since this is a market that probably doesn’t need the product to be perfect right off the bat, there’s likely an 80/20 you can find and code up quickly in Cursor with the help of AI.

🧠 Framework: The ICP Grid

Growth isn’t about chasing every customer. It’s about a clear focus on the right ones.

Breaking PMF down into the product side and the go-to-market side via The ICP Grid helps make this clear in a very straightforward way:

📈 Trend: College Degree Job Dilemma

The more advanced a degree you have, the harder it is for you to find a job.

That doesn’t sound right, but it is.

This may be a bit of a “chickens coming home to roost” moment — for years it’s been clear that higher education is increasingly supportive of degrees that have little practical value for value creation in society.

Over a long enough time horizon, it follows that there would be an end of society being able to support those increasingly low-value degrees with paying jobs.

What does this mean for founders?

Well, it’s an opportunity to offer training for these folks, either by creating new startups in edtech or just as part of your hiring funnel.

In most cases, these are highly thoughtful and intelligent candidates — it’s worth investing a bit more upfront to bring them in and get them up to speed.

💬 Quote: Close Gaps

It’s easy to overestimate what a sudden growth spike actually means.

Spikes typically come from your startup being exposed to a new audience in a way that resonates with them. It can be PR, a viral piece of content, or a number of other things.

When this happens, it feels great. It’s a busy day and everyone’s excited.

But it’s not necessarily an indicator of being any closer to PMF unless you can replicate how this audience found you, or if this audience loves the product enough to stick around and start referring their friends like crazy.

A better indicator is slower, but more consistent, growth through channels you can control and understand (and, to be fair, maybe that channel for you is a traditionally spiky channel — but, for most founders, it likely isn’t).

It’s more important that you understand the levers in your business and how to build a full loop of a system.

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