The Airport Test

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

New Case Studies

• Topia ($5.8M raised) → The founder shared how the company navigated multiple pivots while raising from Alexis Ohanian’s SevenSevenSix.

Get full access to our library of 80+ case studies here. It’s growing every week.

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• The best handbook on how to scale with cold email (Link)

• A simple exercise for startups to 5x their return on demand spend (Link)

• The harsh realities of being a founder (Link)

• The changes Brex made to increase intensity, quality, and speed (Link)

• The truth about great business partners (Link)

💡 Opportunity: On-Chain Gig Economy

Bitcoin just cracked $100,000 for the first time so… you know what that means…

Another round of startup ideas for businesses that already exist… but now they’ll be on chain.

I’m half-kidding (I’m actually still quite bullish on crypto), but it’s hard not to poke fun.

Anyway, here’s an idea: Fiverr… but on chain.

Hear me out.

The freelancer world is very reputation-driven, but is also full of scams.

Even traditional sites that take a commission partially in order to offer protection against scams like Upwork and Fiverr have their share.

Distributing freelancer payments to a public ledger and attaching reputation to the wallets behind it could be interesting.

In the last crypto bull run, we saw millions and millions of dollars get invested into crypto companies because building them took highly specialized engineering expertise.

I think we’ll see the same thing happen this time around, except that some smart builders will use LLMs to reduce the need for specialized humans.

So, ideas like this one, which might seem less necessary at first glance, actually become more interesting as bootstrapped businesses.

We’ll see.

🧠 Framework: The Airport Test

The most successful people I know are:

• Kind

• Inherently, genuinely curious

The first part makes sense to any college bro who’s reading How to Win Friends and Influence People for the first time, but the second is just as important and sometimes gets forgotten.

Curiosity is the catalyst of learning. New information could be right in front of us but, if we don’t care to ingest it, it means nothing.

Turns out other people have noticed this too, and created The Airport Test to help you identify those people before they become successful:

📈 Trend: AI Website Analytics

It’s intuitive, right?

It the sources of the data are more dynamic, the method with which they’re captured, logged, and analyzed likely needs to change as well.

This might be an area people are still sleeping on, even if it’s trending up.

💬 Quote: Minimum Viable Products

I’ve seen a lot of hot takes on MVPS recently (including from Adam Alpert on last week’s Founding Journey podcast).

What Nikita’s saying, below, is that founders should take an even more iterative approach — starting with a core belief they have, something that they know to be true, and constantly be adding new users as you make tweaks and add new parts of the product (and hold a higher bar for quality for those components).

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