Storytelling Frameworks

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Amanda Zhu on what investors are evaluating at pre-seed and seed (Link)

• Rubén Domínguez Ibar on how VCs really think (Link)

• Yurii Rebryk on the one minute pitch that gets investors to say yes (Link)

• Alex Lieberman on ‘seedstrapping' (Link)

Growth

• Lulu Meservey’s launch cheat sheet (Link)

• Natalie Kurdadze on how to grow your startup using Reddit (Link)

• The Boeing Marketer on how to create a high conversion landing page (Link)

• Cody Schneider on how to validate a product and grow it (Link)

ICYMI

• Raise with ease on Flippa Invest from HNWs, family offices, and PE funds looking to deploy growth capital in bootstrapped, Seed and Series A companies. (Link)*

• After exiting her last startup, my friend Roya Pakzad now helps early-stage founders fast-track growth and fundraising (Link)

• Marketing Max’s business hack (Link)

• Joe DiMento on how to land early customers through a roster of advisors (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI Accountability Layer

it’s increasingly common for fast-moving startups to have more agents than humans since they’re orders of magnitude cheaper.

The idea is that this will free humans up to work on high-leverage tasks only.

But, so far, it typically means human spend are spending a ton of time monitoring and managing their agents.

This feels insane, even if net productivity is higher.

I suspect we’ll see agent orchestration tools become a large sector — tools that help you observe, monitor, and ensure positive results from your agentic workforce.

This feels like a wide open area with many, many critical problems within it. Would encourage folks who have experience working with large swarms of agents to consider building in this space.

🧠 Framework: Founder Storytelling Frameworks

Storytelling is a founder skill that sounds like a scam, but it’s actually real.

Founders will in some cases pay thousands of dollars to get better at it despite it being something that sounds nebulous.

However it really can make all the difference it getting your message across clearly to investors during fundraising, employees during hiring, and the world with your marketing.

These six frameworks Chris Donnelly shared are a good set of storytelling “tools” you can use.

Think about your startup’s journey through these lenses and try subtly driving an upcoming conversation forward following one of them.

📈 Trend: VC Firms Are Dying Off

Here’s a hot take:

The ZIRP era didn’t just mean a bunch of startups that shouldn’t’ve otherwise been able to get funded actually did — it also meant a bunch of VCs who shouldn’t’ve otherwise been able to raise a fund from LPs were able to.

Think about a lot of the PE and hedge fund folks, and also the many first-time (in many cases solo) GPs, who were able to raise a fund during the pandemic.

It turns out VC is a different game that hard to do well at. And now we’re seeing the chickens come home to roost.

This happened because LPs were willing to be more risk tolerant in how they allocate capital between other asset classes and VC when interest rates were lower.

Since rates have risen, how they do their allocation has changed (in many cases it’s reverted itself) and they’re demanding stronger performance from the existing VC funds they’ve backed when those same GPs go out to raise their next fund.

With many seeing poor performance relative to more established players, and no sign of lower rates on the horizon, LPs are consolidating their VC bets into the “safer” established player.

And with no new capital coming in, many of these COVID VCs are quietly closing shop.

For founders, this means fewer options for whom to raise from and an overall more concentrated ecosystem around a smaller number of theses.

💬 Quote: Add A Buy Button

It’s tough to be a founder.

We all know that.

But it’s not just the times when nothing’s going right that are tough.

It’s also the times when everyone’s telling you things are great. Or that you’re onto something big.

They’re probably lying to you.

Not because they want to deceive you, but because they like you. They want to encourage you. They want you to remember they supported you on this journey.

Sadly there’s only one solution:

Make them pay you.

I wrote about why you should charge users early and using unreasonable pricing early on. It’s still true.

So, in Jack Dorsey’s words…

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