Nobody Will Notice

Hey y’all — I’m launching a bounty board with over $468,000 in bounties available on Day 1.

After testing the idea with a single bounty two weeks ago, it was clear that you all know people who could help other startups.

So here’s how the MVP will work:

1. Go here to see the available bounties

2. Reply to this email letting me know which role you’d like to refer someone to

3. I’ll intro you to the founder

New bounties will be added each week and, if it works out, I’ll build a more automated way to get intro’d.

In the meantime, take a look and LMK if you can help fill any of these roles.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Andreas Koupparis on how angel investors value pre-seed startups (Link)

• Kyle Edwards-Brooks on how valuations are actually calculated (Link)

• Sam Awrabi on what pre-seed founders should not do (Link)

Growth

• Roy Lee on what he learned about virality & hype over the past 6 months (Link)

• Andrew Yeung on 3 simple truths to understand to grow your audience (Link)

• Madhura Hoval on how to quickly validate your startup on using TikTok (Link)

ICYMI

• Hire rockstar devs your investors wish you hired first (Link)*

• Ayman Al-Abdullah on things he should’ve done sooner as a CEO (Link)

• Lenny Rachitsky shares a super underrated book for founders (Link)

• Denislav Jeliazkov on how founders shouldn’t over pay for design early (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Making Better Use of Support Conversations

Intercom has over 30,000 customers.

And they’re not the only common on-site chatbot.

Plenty of these customers won’t want to offload customer support fully to AI.

But AI can help in other ways than taking the human out of the loop.

There’s a ton of unstructured, but useful, information in support chats.

Why not have AI extract the most common, most painful, and most useful insights that can help shape your product roadmap?

It’s a benefit of AI support bots, without the need to have your customers greeted by a robot.

While that might sound like a crazy idea for businesses that operate at massive scale, it actually makes a lot of sense for SMBs. In those settings, an AI bot is off-putting.

🧠 Framework: The P.L.A.Y. Framework

Work hard, play hard.

That’s what people say but, for founders, sometimes working hard just means more work and less play.

Alvin Huang’s P.L.A.Y. framework helps you recover some time by adding structure to your work:

1. Prioritize → Cut anything that doesn’t move the business forward

2. Leverage → Make each hour go further through people, tools, and capital

3. Automate → If you’re going to do something more than twice, build a system

4. Your Revenue Engine → Ok, the nomenclature falls apart a bit here, but the principle is true. Identify the 20% of your actions that drive 80% of revenue. Go all-in on those.

📈 Trend: Team Construction Shifts

We all knew this was coming.

You’ve probably heard people refer to AI as a junior employee (…that hallucinates).

Turns out that’s basically what’s happening.

Attention Is All You Need, the Google research paper (read it here) that introduced the transformer architecture (which acts as the foundation of all modern LLMs) to the world, was released in 2017.

Since then, a Harvard study shows we’ve seen a growing shift in team structures across industries:

While there are challenges for LLMs to continue to improve at the rate they have so far (namely, the lack of new data to be trained on relative to what they’ve already consumed), we should assume performance gains will come from two things:

1. Researchers will reach new breakthroughs and improve training quality

2. Founders will build tooling that better makes use of LLMs. There are countless opportunities here.

If that’s true, Sam Altman’s vision of a 1 person billion dollar company may come true.

💬 Quote: Nobody Will Notice

If you’re building a startup for recognition, you’re going to be disappointed.

It’s not another checkbox on your resume.

Many of the top VCs I’ve spoken with over the years have mentioned that, if they pick up a hint of that as a founder’s motivation, it’s a huge red flag.

It’s because so much of building a startup happens in darkness.

When no one’s watching.

And about things no one will ever hear about.

These are the most important moments and decisions.

You can take pride in the moments of recognition that come along with success, sure.

But if that’s your motivation, it’s going to twist your decision-making during the other moments.

If you’ve ever read The Score Takes Care Of Itself, you understand this idea.

Your job is to do the thing you’re doing as well as you can do it.

Not to make Forbes 30U30.

Not to get a TechCrunch article supporting your fundraise.

Not to be a regular guest on TBPN.

If you do your job, those things will happen. They’ll take care of themselves.

But they’re not a signal you’re doing the job right.

It’s the moments nobody notices that define that.

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