Raising Less Than You Need

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Duckbill is an executive assistant for your personal life. Hand off the things you dread like scheduling appointments, making reservations, remembering birthdays, waiting on hold, and focus on what matters instead. Enter HOUCK50 for 50% off your first 2 months.*

• This investor is looking for more founders to invest in (Link)

• 5 things that boost paywall conversion rates (Link)

• Big changes in AI to watch for over the next 12 months (Link)

• Mistakes this second-time founder isn’t making (Link)

• A bad habit of early-stage startups (Link)

• The real application AI will have with social apps (Link)

🤯 Crazy PR Stunt

1. Startup sends out a survey about how stressed their team is

2. Startup fires everyone who reported being stressed

Turns out it was a PR stunt, but… feels like the negative brand marketing (for the people who didn’t see the 2-days-later stunt announcement) is worse?

💡 Opportunity: Vertical AI

I just interviewed Luke Sophinos for an upcoming podcast episode, and we talked a ton about the opportunity right now in verticalized solutions.

SaaS was already moving away from horizontal solutions and towards more niche, vertical options where your company reaches often venture scale as a multi-product business.

AI is accelerating this and expanding the set of niches that can support large-scale verticalized businesses.

This isn’t the same as the “boring businesses” niche, where ex-private equity guys raise leveraged debt to buy a bunch of laundromats and hope they generate enough cashflow to keep some themselves — this is building software to power these businesses, that replaces all of their less-optimized horizontal solutions.

If you’re building in this space, Luke actually compiled a ton of his knowledge into the Vertical SaaS Bible. This isn’t an affiliate thing — it’s just genuinely super valuable.

🧠 Framework: T-Shaped People

You often hear that startups are first built by generalists and then scaled by specialists.

But if you’re a founder, you don’t have the luxury to choose — you have to push yourself to be both, even if you’re naturally more of one than the other.

You need your unique, guiding domain knowledge (that makes your startup viable) and also be able to pick up and do “well enough” at just about anything that’s in front of you to get around obstacles (that keeps your startup alive).

You have to be T-shaped:

📈 Trend: Raising Less than You Need

You’re preparing for your fundraise.

You even used my five step framework to determine how much you need to raise and arrive at your target valuation.

You set up a bunch of meetings.

But… the investors don’t bite.

Some do, sure. But not enough to fill up your round.

All of a sudden you have less than half the capital to make it through the next 18 months that you thought you would.

What do you do?

More founders than you might think have run into this.

Not every round is a hot round.

Oftentimes, you realize something amazing — you actually didn’t need the money you thought you did.

Having less capital forced you to make hard decisions faster, prioritize the right things, and follow your instincts about the market you know well rather than waiting for data.

Does this always happen? No, of course not.

Startups do die.

But, more and more, we’re seeing startups do more with less.

It’s obvious to attribute this to AI, but I also think the ZIRP-era hangover is officially over — not just for investors, that’s been over for a while — but also for founders. Founders are embracing situations where they need to be scrappier, and getting better results.

💬 Quote: Anti 1-1’s

When I worked in big tech, I loved 1:1s.

They were my chance to learn directly from and get face time with the leaders of our business, build relationships, influence decisions, and demonstrate competence and ambition.

They felt like one of the best uses of my time.

But then, at Launch House, we did them regularly and it slowed us down.

Today I do have 1:1s with my chief of staff and one other ops manager on our team, but no one else.

As a founder, I’ve reconsidered my original stance (but with a caveat).

• Recurring 1:1s → A net-negative that leads to increasing calendar gridlock as a company grows

• Ad hoc 1:1s → Still valuable if scheduled with a purpose

The exception to this is if your company is incredibly top down — they recurring 1:1s are probably a net positive to ensure alignment is high, but otherwise your team would probably be better served with the extra time back (even if it’s just to think deeply about the business).

Curious what others do and how they feel about them!

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