The Execution Triangle

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Stop Just Wishing. Start Achieving. GF Coaching provides the proven framework for success in work and life. (Link)*

• 17 contrarian takes on startups and venture capital (Link)

• Natia Kurdadze on how to promote a startup with 0 followers (Link)

• 3 product changes that made Arib Khan over 8 figures (Link)

• Cody Schneider's AI business idea (Link)

• Matt Gray on how to scale your X following (Link)

• Shaan Puri's triangle of talent (Link)

• YC on how to get AI startup ideas (Link)

• Matt McGarry on what info product to start selling (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Churn Prediction Agent

What’s the Holy Grail of retention?

Knowing, well in advance, that a customer is going to churn.

This gives you the best chance to save them and, hopefully, spend less to keep them than you’d have to spend to acquire a new customer to replace them.

Personally, I’ve never found traditional churn prediction software to be particularly accurate. For every 1 user it correctly identifies, it misses 10 and incorrectly labels 1 more for good measure.

Sounds like a job for LLMs (courtesy of this idea from Greg Isenberg):

🧠 Framework: The Execution Triangle

When I started my first company, I believed I could do everything.

No matter how much time I had, I’d be able to figure out and complete the right actions to reach a good outcome for customers.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true.

Sometimes we don’t know what steps to take. Other times there’s no viable path to a good outcome for a specific customer. Other times there is, but there’s simply not enough time to get there.

Meet the Execution Triangle:

It’s a reminder that we have three main levers to pull on when doing anything — what we’re trying to achieve, what we’re going to do to get there, and how much time it’ll take to do those things.

If you change one, the others change too.

There’s no right lever to pull all the time. Our job as founders is to make those tradeoffs between them and keep the business moving forward.

📈 Trend: Landing Page AI

Landing pages are a science, not an art.

A great landing page does one thing — converts the right people to become customers.

Yes, some startups have gone viral for outlandish, artistic landing pages, but if it didn’t help them close their target customers, did it really matter?

The hard part of this is that what converts well changes — once everyone’s landing page looked like Linear’s, they updated it.

Who has time to keep up with that?

This is why landing pages are a great use case for AI.

1. Pages are optimized for conversion — forget needing to set up A/B tests, it’ll do them itself.

2. It can research current trends and test new designs based on them

💬 Quote: The Benefit Vortex

In startups, we sell the benefit — the transformation — but we build the feature.

If you get the first part right, then you might assume that since users will understand how your product can help them, they’ll be willing to do things to achieve that.

This is a bad assumption.

Every thing you ask a user to do is a place where you’ll lose some percentage of them.

And this percentage is probably higher than you’d think.

This is the benefit vortex.

Founders get trapped here because they’re so close to the problem and the solution.

From inside the benefit vortex, you can’t see beyond it. You miss how the average user’s willingness to learn or do anything at all is extremely low.

Your job is to build the feature in a way where it’s painfully obvious how they can receive the benefit — or, ideally, it happens organically.

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