Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → Escrow Platform For Authors & Freelancers
Framework → 5 Layers Of Operational Excellence
Tool → Notion
Trend → Top 1% Exits
Quote → Hyper Delusion
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This is a paid advertisement for Green Coffee Company's Regulation CF offering. Please read the offering circular at https://invest.greencoffeecompany.com/. Timelines are subject to change. Listing on the NASDAQ is contingent upon necessary approvals, and reserving a ticker symbol does not guarantee a company's public listing.
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💡 Opportunity: Escrow Platform For Authors & Freelancers
Ever tried publishing a book?
A few friends have, and there are really two worlds:
When you land a deal with a big publisher, they help you out with an advance that gives you flexibility and freedom to explore and write what you want.
When you self-publish, you’re paying upfront and hoping for a payoff on the backend.
The problem is that sometimes those payments (for anything from cover design to ghostwriting to editing) don’t work out. And when it comes out of your own pocket, that can make or break the project.
Authors need to be protected in these scenarios. But the freelancers working for them need guaranteed payment.
Platforms like Upwork offer escrow options but have terms that tend to be less than friendly to one or both parties, and using them requires finding the freelancers there in the first place.
There’s an opportunity for a lightweight escrow platform that could, eventually, expand to other niches, but by starting specifically with self-publishing.
Traditional escrow platforms aren’t really set up for self-publishers either. Publishing and creative projects have specific milestones and workflows (unlike using an escrow platform for something like selling a used car), and you could also build in things like IP protection and dispute resolution that’s unique to the industry as well.
Spotted on Ideabrowser
🧠 Framework: 5 Layers Of Operational Excellence
When you’re in market discovery mode, operational excellence means doing whatever you need to in order to discover some truth.
When you’re setting up your initial growth channel(s), it means doing whatever you need to in order to get in front of the right people.
But once you have those things, and you’re ready to scale, operational excellence means having the right systems in place to be able to hold on for dear life.
Eric Partaker shared how he describes the 5 different layers of it in the scaling stage:
Standardization → Systems to follow (for a reason — they work).
Automation → Get rid of the repetitive tasks and free your team’s time for high leverage work.
Measurement → Be sure you’re tracking the right things and plaster them everywhere so the team is aware.
Continuous Improvement → More systems, these being focused on getting 1% better every day/week.
Innovation → You already have something that works, but don’t settle for that. Keep investing some time in discovery.
🛠 Tool: Notion
Raising capital? The Notion + Founding Journey AI Fundraising Kit helps founders organize and accelerate their fundraising.
Get access to Notion-powered fundraising agent workflows, including a 10K investor list, 50+ pitch deck examples, and ready-to-use templates.
Founders can also unlock $15K+ in startup credits plus up to 3 months FREE of Notion’s top business plan to run their company in one organized workspace.
📈 Trend: Top 1% Exits
Is this inflation?
The value of the top 1% of exits by US-based, VC-backed startups doubles every 5 years.
This trend has been true for over 20 years now.
It seems reasonable that upcoming exits like OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks will easily continue the trend.
Maybe we should begin calling it a law?
It’s interesting to think about from an investment POV — if the best exits double in exit value every 5 years, the startups raising their first round now should perhaps be evaluated by investors as if they have even more upside.
As an investor, the importance of getting into the right deals is even more important since one big win will return even more to LPs than you or they are likely modeling for.
💬 Quote: Hyper Delusion
I don’t care if you’re just out of high school and forgoing college to start a startup, or if you’ve been working a 9-5 for 25 years and finally think it might be time to.
No matter who you are if you want to achieve success, build a company, and create the life you want you have to be hyper delusional.
You are fighting the odds.
And you probably aren’t “ready” in terms of knowing what you need to know in order to pull it off.
A realist would tell you you’re probably going to fail.
So you have to be an optimist by default, too.
You have to trust you’re going to figure it out.
That nothing is “too big” or “too hard” for you to do.
Because you’re going to run into the unknown.
When when your possible future is exactly what you want, who would want to be a “realist” anyway?
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