Focus On Small Wins

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Andres Klaric on the truth about VC funding (Link)

• Tibo Louis-Lucas on why bootstrapping beats being VC-backed (Link)

Growth

• How Marc Lou grew his audience from 0 followers (Link)

• Michael Ho on why growth at all costs is over (Link)

ICYMI

• Top DTC brands like MUD/WTR use Gembah to bring new products to life—faster, cheaper, and smarter (Link)*

• Nick Huber on what the life of an entrepreneur really is (Link)

• The Boring Marketer on Cursor’s vibe marketing playbook (Link)

• Jesse Buckingham on his biggest mistake as an early founder (Link)

• Chris Tottman on founder resources to make things 10x easier (Link)

• Rubén Domínguez Ibar on the 7 deadly sins in tech (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Fake Lead Smart Forms

AI spam is increasing.

As a result, small local businesses end up spending a lot of time sifting through fake phone numbers, emails, etc in their online lead forms.

This bad data gets mixed into their CRM.

And these types of businesses simply don’t have the hours it takes to keep their CRM clean, which makes it harder to keep on top of their leads and, in some cases, can negatively impact their email sending domain reputation.

A form builder specifically targeted towards these businesses, that specifically and automatically filter out fake data before it reaches their CRM would be a notable improvement over Google Forms or other types of lead forms, which many of them use.

This is the type of market that many folks forget exists, but the are 35 million small businesses in the US.

🧠 Framework: 5 “B2B” Frameworks

Every now and then I stumble upon a curated set of frameworks that are worth passing along to y’all like this one.

And this is one of those weeks.

These are billed as being for B2B founders and execs, but most are actually applicable across many verticals.

The most unique, and where I’d start, is the Six Thinking Hats framework.

It says that when you’re considering how to solve a problem, think about it in six different ways (each represented by a different color hat):

• White hat → Focus on facts and data

• Red hat → Consider your intuitive and emotional gut reactions

• Black hat → Focus on the “bad points” about the decision

• Yellow hat → Focus on the merits and benefits of solving it

• Green hat → Be creative — no idea is too crazy

• Blue hat → Sort of a meta hat. Evaluate the other five perspectives and ensure the process is capturing the full picture.

If you run through these on particularly challenging decisions, either on your own or with your cofounder and/or team, you’ll capture a variety of considerations clearly and without overlap.

📈 Trend: AI Marketing Automation

I caught up with Greg Isenberg a few weeks ago and learned he’d entirely automated one of his marketing businesses with AI.

Literally, everything after the sales call was entirely automated.

It could effectively run as passive cashflow, assuming consistent demand.

It inspired me, and I’ve actually been toying around with something in this space (more to come on that in a future issue).

The truth is that a we’re now at the point, with tools like Plumb powering sophisticated workflows, where you can automate a lot of traditional marketing tasks.

Some folks will hear this and build their entire marketing stack out in-house.

But I’d still bet on outsourced service providers for now.

You can get 60% of the way there on your own, but there’s still a level of domain expertise needed for the rest.

For example, we see folks coming to us at Megaphone Studio who’ve tried to use Claude or even a workflow tool to create their own LinkedIn or X content and, while in the best cases they can get it to sound like something close-ish to what they want, the content itself isn’t optimized to perform well because they haven’t spent years learning what platform algos prefer.

Will have more to share here soon.

💬 Quote: Focus On Small Wins

What’s the path to building a big company?

It’s obsessing every day about countless little decisions, not the perfect strategy.

A startup is a journey of collecting information and then acting on it.

Over and over. Indefinitely.

The products people love are the ones that understand their usage patterns and problem so well that the product itself feels obvious and natural.

But you don’t get there by knowing it all upfront and crafting a path.

You get there by gradually iterating until every little detail works just right.

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