The Ladder Of Proof

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Peter Walker shares location data on $500k-$1M SAFEs (Link)

• Evan Fisher on what most founders miss about in-house rounds (Link)

• Chris Smith shares 3 distinct ways to play the VC game (Link)

• Eddie Lou on 3 things he looks for in startup investing (Link)

Growth

• John Rush on how he got his first 100 users for each of his startups (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on the new TikTok growth marketing guide (Link)

ICYMI

• Gokul Rajaram on weekly founder emails (Link)

• John Rush shares lessons learned from failing 30 startups in 20 years (Link)

• Dylan Ander’s hot take on having the opportunity to sell a company (Link)

• Mike Vilardo on the bad (and one good) reasons to become a founder (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Networking Event ROI Tracker

My good friend Andrew Yeung runs the best tech events in NYC through his company, Fibe.

With his events, you can trust your time will be well spent because he curates interesting groups of people.

But unless you trust the organizer, “networking” events are generally hard to directly attribute an ROI to unless you denote the specific event you met a sales lead at in your CRM.

As a result you’re likely going to fewer events than you should, and/or the wrong ones.

But if you had a way to more directly attribute leads, deals, and revenue to specific conferences or happy hours that would change fast.

You’d need a layer that integrates with both your CRM and event platforms, or lets you import attendee lists (that you’d have to secure).

Integrating with CRMs is the easy part though.

The key, of course, is securing partnerships with commonly-used event platforms like Luma, Partiful, and the others.

Their APIs don’t allow non-hosts to collect and use info on other attendees. You could likely scrape event pages for names and potentially some other info, but accuracy without email would likely be spotty at best unless you compared the event’s attendee list as a sort of micro social graph against what you can publicly find about people’s connections through LinkedIn.

🧠 Framework: Ladder Of Proof

One of the most often underrated content creators in the startup world is the venture firm NFX.

They’ve consistently been putting thoughtful posts with a unique POV on their site for years.

One of their frameworks is called The Ladder Of Proof. It’s a way to think about how investors will be evaluating the investment opportunity you’re presenting to them.

Here’s how it works:

Each rung on the ladder is something that helps your startup get a “leg up” (get it?) in the market. Therefore, any run that you don’t have covered and is instead “broken” means it’s a potential reason to not invest in your company.

The rungs at the bottom are foundational. You can’t get to the point of even worrying about the ones that are higher up unless you’ve stepped past the initial ones.

And any rungs you haven’t reached yet might be broken, you just won’t know it yet.

Investors actively want to write checks, but they run through these rungs in their head as they try to understand how far you are in your journey, they need to understand how much of your journey has been de-risked, and if there are any broken rungs you’re not fixing as you go.

Note that some rungs are in red — you can argue two things here:

1. Some would say these rungs are more important than the others

2. Other investors might not, though

The point of the red rungs is to emphasize that investors will index on specific rungs based on how they understand risk broadly and also in your specific case. When you’re talking to them, try to suss out what the red rungs are for them by noting what they ask questions about or otherwise comment on.

📈 Trend: How Search Is Changing

I’ve talked a lot about how LLMs are impacting SEO and how consumers are using LLMs for a rapidly-rising share of their search queries.

But there’s also another layer to how search behavior is changing: the types of searches people are doing.

One of the primary uses of Google has historically been to get you to the right place. It’s basically the entirely point of the PageRank algorithm that powers Google’s results.

But LLMs are making it less important to navigate to websites to get the information you’re looking for. In fact, the LLM will probably be able to format it in a way that actually delivers the answer to you more efficiently than the website it came from.

It’s a more personalized, tailored experience for the user.

As a result, the overall share of searches that are navigational in nature are dropping fast, and people are instead interested in more top-of-funnel, informational queries.

Something to think about as you craft your SEO and GEO strategy. Book a quick call with me and we can chat about what this should look like for you specifically (yes it’ll actually be me on the call).

💬 Quote: Let The Shipping Do The Talking

I’m gonna let the quote do the talking this week.

Skip your next meeting and get back to shipping :)

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