Do You Need More Features?

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• What Reid Hoffman asks founders when he’s considering an investment (Link)

• What a successful process looks like to raise a pre-seed (Link)

• The crazy valuation journey of Good Eggs (Link)

• Heads up — YC is doing a Fall batch for the first time ever (Link)

• Realize the long road you’re signing up for by fundraising (Link)

Growth

• How this startup got its first 15 customers (Link)

• First time founder vs second time founder (Link)

ICYMI

• Imagine your calendar filling with qualified sales meetings, on autopilot. That's AI BDR Ava's job; she automates your entire outbound demand generation. Book a demo with Artisan and supercharge your sales team today.*

• Counterintuitive recommendations for building hardware (Link)

• How Perplexity manages product (Link)

• How to generate and validate startup ideas in 2024 with AI (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Full-Home Health Assessment

Is there any doubt that, in most municipalities, IRL infrastructure is breaking down and not being pro-actively repaired?

Assuming these will be fixed by the local (or higher) governments is a mistake, so is there an opportunity to fix these problems with a startup?

Selling the assessment is a smart way to start.

Identifying what fixes need to be made is non-obvious to everyday people most of the time.

You can outsource the actual work of fixing the problems, which is more labor intensive, by routing these requests to trusted local service providers who have deeper ties to the local communities.

Sahil Bloom actually shared a different version of this idea a few years ago and there’s a lot of quality back-and-forth about its viability in the replies:

The TLDR?

There’s appetite on both ends of the market for a startup to address home issues.

The easiest place to start may be on the high-end of the market, but I’d be interested to see someone take this on from the assessment / certification angle as well.

🧠 Framework: Decision Checklist

Founders make hundreds if not thousands of decisions each day.

Most are quick, easy, and don’t even require much conscious thought.

But sometimes the right call isn’t obvious.

When that happens, use this useful framework from Shaan Puri:

📈 Trend: Opting-Out

When a post on X like the this gets 34,000+ likes, you know times are changing:

I mentioned dumb phones earlier this year, but I think there’s a larger trend happening here.

For the last 10-20 years, we’ve felt the increasingly rapid hedonic treadmill of dopamine, notifications, and empty validation.

There’s an undeniable shift away from all that happening right now.

Dating app usage is a perfect example:

How to capitalize on the shift?

Explore tools, platforms, and services that help people be bothered by less external buzzing.

The problem to solve: how to do that without reducing the level of detail and clarity of the information they get.

💬 Quote: Do you need more features?

What matters more: how fully fleshed out your product is, or how much users love it?

Clearly, the latter.

Adding one more or ten more features typically won’t change that.

In fact, they may weigh you down.

The more complicated your product is, the longer it takes to change.

This is tolerable if your product is growing steadily and with good margins, but it’s a death sentence if you’re still searching for PMF.

Imagine learning how to better serve your users but not being able to test it for 3 months because of the heaviness of your product and how many things you’d need to change to implement this new vision?

Your core value prop has to be attractive and deliver value. Making it more “robust” won’t fix that.

Keep things light for as long as possible.

💡 How I Can Help

🚀 Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 75,000+ founders.