What Does Your Product Replace?

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• How to find creators to promote your app on TikTok (Link)

• Guide to starting a US company as an international founder (Link)

• 5 strategies to scale yourself as a manager using AI tools (Link)

• How to find good ideas for a micro SaaS (Link)

🔥 Hot Take: Tech Companies are Getting Scammed

This one got some hate when I posted it, so I’ll add some pre-emptive caveats:

• I’m not talking about all engineers

• I’m not talking about startups

• I don’t believe AI is replacing engineers directly

Phew. With that out of the way… here you go.

What I’m saying is that some big tech companies that move too slowly and have too much red tape to notice are getting scammed but some bad actor engineers who are barely working or, even worse, holding multiple jobs (see here).

And if engineers are able to do more due to AI, then expectations will rise and these folks will be at risk.

New Case Studies

• COVU ($22.5M raised) → Former investor on how he built momentum to go from 0 to 5 competing term sheets.

• Endless West ($92.7M raised) → Unique story of how the founder got his existing investors to come back to the table for another round by presenting a competing term sheet.

• Precision Livestock Technologies ($2.85M raised) → Another former VC turned founder gives his hot takes about VCs to help other founders.

Get full access to our library of 80+ case studies here. It’s growing every week.

💡 Opportunity: Corporate Insurance

I’ve been in multiple major car accidents.

My car has been wrecked.

I still think insurance is usually a massive scam. Not just car insurance. All insurance.

Why?

Most insurance policies have so many clauses that allow the insurance company to make it difficult for you to be reimbursed. And that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

(Not to mention the inherent incentive misalignment in the industry’s model.)

With the possible exception of medical insurance, nowhere is that more obvious than corporate insurance.

This is a space with minimal innovation, inefficient corporate structures, and huge profits that can be undercut with AI.

🧠 Framework: No Hellos

Most of the frameworks I share are related to products, leadership, strategy, or something else.

This one is about… talking on Slack. But it’s surprisingly useful.

When we send Slack messages, we probably want answers quickly.

So… ask the question.

Don’t slow the conversation down. It isn’t polite to greet someone first on Slack. YOu’re actually forcing them to spend more time answering messages rather than doing their work.

📈 Trend: AI Life Coach

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably making a higher percentage of correct decisions than the average person.

But what if you could raise the likelihood of your decisions being correct, without needing to wait for the benefit of hindsight?

Some people turn to life coaches for this. But if you can’t afford Tony Robbins, now there’s AI (or, at least, that’s how it’s being sold to people).

The thinking here is pretty clear — AI can more quickly process context that’s hidden around the internet, or your own private data. Therefore, it can help you make more informed, unsentimental decisions.

At this point, I think we’ve all seen that AI isn’t perfect for complex tasks like this, and adding in enough context for the advice to actually be helpful often takes a while. But there’s a lot of organic interest in this, so it’s worth exploring if a viable product exists to help people improve their decision making.

💬 Quote: What Does Your Product Replace?

When I talked to James Evans recently (full convo here), he doubled down on the idea that founders shouldn’t try to create new categories — they should disrupt existing, proven ones.

Basecamp’s Jason Fried offers a companion thought — just build a product to replace something people already do, rather than ask them to do something new.

These are simple, but often forgotten ideas. Founders who want to change the world think they need to change the world. But they don’t — they just need to use new technology to do something (considerably) better than previously possible.

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