Sam Altman's Startup Playbook

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Notion’s founder shares their journey to 100M users (Link)

• Why everything changes once you get a term sheet (Link)

• Everything this founder knows about starting a company (Link)

• One major thing this founder wishes he did differently (Link)

• Peter Thiel on the difference between founders and CEOs (Link)

• How Palmer Lucky built the first Oculus headset at 16 years old (Link)

• 10 wild examples of founders using Claude 3.5 to build startups (Link)

• Learnings on pre vs post product-market-fit teams (Link)

• How to take advantage of YC (Link)

• 28 rules this founder learned the hard way (Link)

• Advice to founders trying to find a problem to solve (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI Email Terminator

Remember a few years ago when it seemed like you couldn’t go a week without hearing about a new app that showed you how much you were spending on subscriptions?

They all alerted you to what you needed to take action on by linking directly to your various credit cards and bank accounts.

But what if one used your email instead and helped identify more than just subscriptions.

Once highly performant agents are easily available this becomes a sort of inbox manager for you.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the inbox is a very interesting, high-leverage point to build AI tools — this is another example.

🧠 Framework: Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook

One more before he co-founded OpenAI, Sam Altman created a very straightforward yet thorough playbook for startups.

There are audio versions and long essays for each section.

He’s said before that OpenAI made him rethink all the startup advice he’d given before, but I read through all of these and it’s hard to argue with much of it.

Worth a read!

📈 Trend: Pay What You Want

In 2007, Radiohead released “In Rainbows” digitally. Aside from being a great album, it was the first mainstream use of the pay-what-you-want strategy.

They did this to compete against the then-prevalent illegal torrenting of albums in the pre-streaming days.

It turned out that they made more money from album sales before the physical version released than they had made in total from their last album.

So while it may be true that you can’t eat goodwill, you certainly can cash it in if you’ve earned people’s trust.

And now we’re seeing more founders explore the idea as a way to combat subscription fatigue.

It’s most useful when you’re still unsure about pricing — you certainly can use it to validate and increase conversion in those cases.

💬 Quote: One More Feature Trap

Good founders talk to their users all the time.

But that makes them more vulnerable to this trap.

Users (and churned users, and potential users) are always requesting features that they say will make them love the product even more (or finally sign up).

This makes founders think that by adding those features they will be able to attract more users en masse.

Unfortunately this often isn’t true.

A complex product = complex education about how to use it = a higher barrier to entry.

PMF happens when your product is simple in both how you explain it to users and also how they use it.

💡 How I Can Help

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