Keep Going

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Aaron Golbin on the number one fundraising mistake founders make (Link)

• Trace Cohen on what gets you the next round of venture capital funding (Link)

Growth

• Amanda Zhu on how she got to $2M in founder-led sales (Link)

• Kyle Bigley’s 10 boring rules that helped him bootstrap to $2.6M ARR (Link)

• Allen Yang on tips learned about running a product waitlist (Link)

• Jimmy Kim on how to master your send times across any channel (Link)

ICYMI

• B2B identity management and scaling best practices for apps built on AWS (Link)*

• Scot Chisholm on the beauty of proper delegation (Link)

• Euclid Ventures on hiring in the AI era (Link)

• Matt Gray on the 7 founder fundamentals (Link)

• Joseph Lee on the hiring mistake founders make (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Email Optimization Platform

Like I talked about in this weekend’s deep dive, not many marketing channels are working well right now.

The exceptions are GEO and audience building + creator partnerships on social (PS — I can help with both, grab time with me here).

So, naturally, any tool that can change that for businesses that are already devoted to other channels is something they’d gladly pay for.

One example would be in the email marketing space.

Open rates are lower than ever. Inboxes are filled with AI spam.

Tools like Mocke are using innovative, simulation-centric approaches to help you have confidence in your emails before you send them.

They’re focused on cold email, but the same principle could easily apply to promotional emails to warm targets.

🧠 Framework: Ansoff Matrix

There are really only four things you can do when selling:

1. Sell a new product to a new market

2. Sell a new product to an existing market

3. Sell an existing product to a new market

4. Sell an existing product to an existing market

The Ansoff Matrix uses this simple framing to direct your overall strategic focus.

Of course, “diversification” isn’t really an appropriate term for most startups since you are typically building from nothing.

Instead, it’s more like market creation or market expansion.

Either way, the stage you’re at determines how to approach sales and marketing.

You already know which you are doing. If you’re struggling to find resonance with your target customers, consider whether your messaging could use improvement.

If you’re not speaking the language that’s congruent with where you’re at and what you’re actually attempting to do, you’ll hear crickets.

📈 Trend: CRM Management Tools

CRMs have been around seemingly forever.

But here are two weird observations about them right now:

1. AI’s usefulness is causing people to not feel like maintaining a CRM is worth their time or something that they should have to do

2. Teams are more open to niche CRMs rather than more classic one-size-fits-all options

I don’t have any hard data to back those up, but they’re consistent trends in anecdotal conversations I’ve had over the last year.

It’s natural, then, that an opportunity that arises from this would be tools that help you manage your CRM (via overlays, add-ons, or companion platforms).

The bottom line is that CRMs increasingly feel like a chore rather than a value-add.

Not because they’re not useful, but because the work to maintain them feels low-value.

Tap into that. Make it easier for people to get value out of their CRM.

💬 Quote: Keep Going

Founders aren’t dumb.

They can’t be.

They have to understand something about the world in order to deliver value.

But they also don’t need to be geniuses.

I’d go as far as to say they don’t even need to be particularly smart (but it helps).

What they really need is relentless.

They need to keep going.

One of my favorite Paul Graham essays is about this — the defining characteristic of successful founders is being relentlessly resourceful.

Not smart.

Not their resume.

So just keep going.

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