Don't Hero-Worship or Mock Failure

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Today at a glance:

💡 Opportunity: Personal AI-Enabled CRM

Ah, the personal CRM problem. It seems natural that a great product would exist to make keeping track of your personal network easy, right?

Many have tried but so far no one has cracked it. They best two I’ve seen are Clay and Dex, but both sacrifice a little bit of the flexibility you get from Airtable or Google Sheets in exchange for functionality. Ultimately neither has broken out into a massive success.

However this post on X got me thinking:

One of the biggest problems with existing personal CRM solutions is that they take a while to initially set up. Not a lot of people make it over that hump.

LLMs seem well suited to take on a lot of those initial tasks once you log into various services, maybe just asking you occasional questions via chat to help make decisions.

The form factor would also be unique — you wouldn’t need to interact with an AI-based personal CRM through a CRM-esque interface primarily, if you didn’t want to. Or, at a minimum, it could provide data from the CRM in alternate places (where you actually need it), and on-demand.

I talked earlier this year about how one of the few defensible moats for software companies built on LLMs is a unique dataset. At scale this would have the potential to create that.

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🧠 Framework: RACI Framework

The RACI framework helps founders clarify who is responsible for what parts of a project, and the roles each person plays. When filling it out, you classify each person by whether they are one of the following for each part of the project:

1. Responsible → Who does the work to complete the task

2. Accountable → Who provides final review on a task before it’s completed

3. Consulted → Who provides input on a deliverable based on the impact on their work or expertise

4. Informed → Who needs to be kept in the loop on projects progress

📈 Trend: Micro Weddings

Anyway, this week’s trend is micro weddings. Rather than a big ceremony, they’re intimate gathering typically with just immediate family members. I actually had one myself.

They originally spiked during the pandemic to reduce transmission of COVID, but they’re interestingly hung around as a trend even as the world has opened back up.

Common reasons for having one now include just a desire for a more intimate gathering and, of course, cost. It’s almost as if COVID broke the stigma that you need a huge wedding, and people have leaned into that as the economy has become more challenging.

The wedding industry is massive — $70 billion per year — and the average wedding costs $30k in the US, so there’s room to explore here.

What’s unique here is that micro weddings open up an entire new set of venues, vendor packages, and require a lot less co-ordination. We’ll see if it becomes a venture-scale market.

💬 Quote: Success & Failure in Startups

One of the best parts about the startup world is that it isn’t frowned upon to fail. In fact failure is just treated as something that increases your chances of future success.

Startups fail for any number of reasons, and even successful ones can reach that point due to luck.

Morgan’s point, below, is to be careful with both the hero-worship of winners and mocking failure.

🔗 Houck’s Picks

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