Stay In The Game

Hey y’all — as a reminder I’m hosting a live workshop on how to crack distribution using LinkedIn with my friend Blake Emal on June 26th at 3pm EST (RSVP here).

We’ve leveraged LinkedIn to build Megaphone Studio, our content + distribution agency that’s helped founders add over 4 million total followers and do over 605 million impressions.

Hope to see you there!

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Zain Jaffer on the ‘poisoning the well’ strategy (Link)

• Luke Sophinos on why he invests in vertical software over horizontal (Link)

Growth

• Jen Abel’s startup sales learnings (Link)

• Gokul Rajaram on selling before building (Link)

• Tibo Louis Lucas’ on how to ship fast stack (Link)

ICYMI

• Replit: The easiest way to vibe code production-ready apps, start now! (Link)

• Alex Lieberman on hiring for slope (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on things you should never do when building an app (Link)

• Matt Gray on how to hire A-players (Link)

• Rob Snyder on how founders should think about pre-PMF burn rate (Link)

• Rohan Paul on how YC outlines top AI startups prompt LLMs (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Bounced Payment Revenue Collector

Have you ever looked through your Stripe transactions?

Even when you’re making something people want, chances are you have more failed payments (and therefore lost revenue) in there than you think.

When I first became a founder this was pretty surprising. It seemed like the rate of failed payments was way higher than I would’ve thought at least.

And now I have this same Zap set up that Max talks about below.

I bet some other people do too.

But not everyone knows how to use workflow automation tools.

By using Stripe’s API I bet there’s a very simple but effective product here that could bring in more revenue for users.

You couldn’t even necessarily need to have it ping Slack — just have it send the email automatically.

Not a billion dollar company by any means, but likely a cashflowing opportunity.

🧠 Framework: Product Onion Framework

In Shrek, the titular character famously says “ogres are like onions — they have layers.”

This framework should’ve been called the Product Ogre Framework instead, but c’est la vie.

The Product Onion Framework, from Chris Tottman, breaks down a startup into seven intuitive layers:

1. Core Customer Problem Set → Helps you identify and solve a specific customer pain point

2. Vision & Strategy → Defines a clear mission

3. Growth & Engagement Engine → Somewhat PLG-centric, but overall good for keeping churn low and net growth high

4. User Journeys → Reminds you to optimize onboarding and user flows (to minimize friction)

5. UI & Technology → Ensures intuitive interfaces and scalable, reliable infra

6. Product Marketing → Crafting messaging that actually highlights the product’s benefits

7. Marketing & Sales → Builds an effective go-to-market strategy based on strong, consistent inner layers

It’s a thought exercise you can do either when you’re:

• Launching a new product → Helps align your strategy from one end (customer pain) to the other (marketing tactics)

• Diagnosing issues → Think flat sales, high churn, or team misalignment

• Planning quarterly reviews or major updates → Ensures each part of your business is included in the new plan

📈 Trend: Generative Engine Optimization

One of my favorite recent essays is Andrew Chen’s “Every Marketing Channel Sucks Right Now.”

And it’s true:

• Traditional SEO is saturated and takes too long

• PR is hard to make repeatable and more of a founder vanity project

• Cold email is dealing with more restrictive inboxes and, now, email arbiters

• Ads are too expensive

• Affiliates have increasing fraud issues

• Even some of the best PLG app growth hacks have been nerfed by Apple

Building a trustworthy social presence still works (I can help) but your content has to be unique, which can be a full time job in and of itself.

But every time this happens, a new channel tends to emerge. And, right now, the new kid on the block is GEO — aka SEO for LLM chatbots (and agents).

This is where the most underpriced attention is right now.

In 2 years, thousands of businesses will be optimizing for Model Relevance instead of Google’s Page Rank algorithm.

Today, that’s not the case. That’s your opportunity for growth.

Some tools to get started:

• Anvil → YC-backed visibility and insight platform

• Scrunch → Monitoring & insight platform (useful for competitor analysis)

• Goodie → Content creation & insight monitoring platform

• SEO Bot → Autonomous programmatic content creation agent

• Daydream → Full service offering for Series B+ companies (tell them I sent you)

💬 Quote: Stay In The Game

A lot of people talk about increasing your surface area for luck.

This is something Naval said a while ago.

Most commonly I see this applied horizontally in people’s lives.

They increase their luck by meeting more people, consuming more things, and being in more interesting situations.

The other way — the less fun way, perhaps — is the Bryan Johnson way.

Don’t die.

In this case, I don’t mean physically.

Just that if your company is going through a hard time, unless there’s a fundamental insight that makes it correct to move on and do something new instead, or you’ve had some life change where it’s not the right time to build a company… then you can increase your luck surface area also by just staying alive.

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