Customers Don't Care

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Leo Polovets on pitch deck minimums (Link)

• Ilya Strebulaev on most active unicorn investors since 2015 (Link)

Growth

• How Mark Hughes’ Solidroad grew to $1M ARR in 9 months (Link)

• Eva Christine Reder on a product marketing flywheel for GTM (Link)

• Yurii Rebryk on legendary PMF case studies (Link)

ICYMI

• A 4-week in-person sprint for founders to test their idea, validate fast with AI, prove demand, and build the right thing. Get a $2.5K stipend, $200K if it works. (Link)*

• Marc Lou on the biggest mistake he made as an entrepreneur (Link)

• Ben Lang on Marc Andreessen’s hiring criteria (Link)

• Peter Walker on employee option pool by stage (Link)

• David Politis on doing whatever it takes to stay in the game (Link)

💡 Opportunity: GA / Shopify Copilot

I’m almost surprised neither of these exist already?

Google Analytics 4 was widely hated basically as soon as it launched.

Shopify, not so much, but there’s a large ecosystem of tooling for it.

But a pretty simple chat interface that proactively and dynamically creates visualizations to help users understand their data is a no brainer.

Imagine — rather than open up GA at all, you’re chatting via text or voice with this app and not only does it respond with text telling you the answers about your business, but it also understands how to build the right charts to really tell the story (and gives you an easy way to share those charts outside the app with your team).

Call it a very basic version of Cursor for GA or Shopify.

🧠 Framework: Wheel of Strategy

70% of CEOs say their strategy is clear, but only 10% of their teams agree (allegedly).

In order to get on the same page with your team, try walking through the questions on the Wheel of Strategy with them:

Will 20 questions solve everything?

No, of course not.

There’s an endless stream of questions founders needs to answer, and those answers can often shift with one new bit of information.

But I view the Wheel of Strategy as a good alignment technique you can refer back to or even use during planning sessions to keep everyone pointing in the same direction.

📈 Trend: Bootstrapped Solo Founders

At this point most people have internalized that AI gives people more leverage and that can translate into getting more done without a big team.

But VCs don’t seem to be getting the message.

If you classify startups by whether or they’ve raised VC, and by whether the founder is solo or not, an interesting trend emerges:

The total share of startups that are led by a solo founder has risen from ~35% in 2017 to ~55% last year.

But that’s almost entirely due to bootstrapped solopreneurs.

The data doesn’t show how success rates or revenue compare for the different cohorts, but I’d guess a few things are happening here:

1. The chart shows a percentage, not raw numbers. If there are more founders overall today than 8 years ago, the raw number of bootstrapped VC-backed founders is increasing somewhat.

2. The types of businesses solo founders are starting may be less likely to be venture-backable. For example, I wouldn’t raise venture for my holdco. It wouldn’t really make sense — my goals with this business are not aligned with the VC model.

3. And, yes, there’s probably some legacy bias against solo founders by VCs.

Investors view solo founders as riskier because they don’t have someone else to sanity check their thinking and hold them accountable to the level a co-founder would.

This is probably smart for first-time founders but less so for multi-time founders.

💬 Quote: Customers Don’t Care

No one will pay for undercooked food at a restaurant.

They’ll send it back.

Similarly, your customers don’t care where your product is headed.

They might be interested and excited about it, sure.

Maybe they’ll keep an eye on it from afar if you’re lucky.

But they have a problem that they’re coming to you to have solved and if you don’t deliver, nothing else matters.

If they do pay you for it, they’ll end up disappointed and…

They’ll send it back.

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