Worthless Ideas

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Auren Hoffman on Series A portfolio company raise statistics (Link)

Growth

• Marketing Max's marketing hack (Link)

• Eric Lay on the advice that helped him scale to 500k ARR in 3 months (Link)

• How Austin Rief’s Oceans scaled to $15M ARR (Link)

ICYMI

• Don’t miss out on the most relaxing sleep ever with Magnesium Breakthrough by BIOptimizers. For an exclusive offer, go to bioptimizers.com/houck*

• Harley Finklestein on IKIGAI (Link)

• Stella Garber on what she does as a founder who's raised $5M (Link)

• Jonathan Swanson on the silent killer of 10x companies (Link)

• Anand Sanwal on how to find startup ideas (Link)

• Tim Denning on learnings from an 8-figure entrepreneur (Link)

• Brian Feroldi shares great advice on selling (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Native Vibe Coding App

Last week I talked about the rise of vibe coding — where engineers are letting AI write 95% of their code in order to be able to ship faster. Maybe they’re making a quality tradeoff, but the speed gains are often worth it.

Cursor and the rest of the new avant garde of IDEs support a vibe coding workflow — often side by side with a traditional workflow — but is there an opportunity to go even farther?

“Coding” by voice from your phone and having products actually be built that way would be pretty interesting for testing MVPs.

Imagine being on the phone with someone for a user interview and then sending them a finished MVP version of the product you wanted them to test, with their ideas incorporated, minutes after the call.

I’d use it!

🧠 Framework: The Give-Get Framework

Sales is a skill that every founder needs to have.

It can be hard to master for some founders, but one of the most straightforward and tangible things to learn is that in most cases you shouldn’t give without getting something in return:

📈 Trend: Startup Build Speed

Does it ever feel like time is moving faster than it used to?

That’s normal, right?

Sam Altman mentioned this a while ago:

So it’s all perception… right?

Not really.

At least in the case of startups, things actually are happening faster:

This makes sense:

1. AI is making it easier to build products

2. Users and companies feel more comfortable trying new products from startups

3. Startup knowledge (especially around growth) is more widely available

4. The Silicon Valley ecosystem has institutions like YC that help get the word out

Really though, there are a few early winners like this from each hype cycle. How quickly we forget the early favorites of the last crypto boom cycle that were doing millions in revenue within similar time periods.

Ultimately this is a case where both things are true:

• Overall, startups are growing faster than ever before

• It’s not quite as drastic a ramp up as it feels like right now

💬 Quote: Worthless Ideas

When I was applying to colleges at 17 or 18, I remember I had this little notes file on my phone where I kept all the ideas I’d had.

Some of them were business ideas, others were for creative work (music, writing, etc).

I was convinced I was going to work on them all over time and that they were interesting and valuable as a result.

It was like I was pleased with myself for having the idea.

But when I went on campus at colleges for interviews, they’d ask what I’d accomplished that I'd want to mention. They were looking for interesting things about me that weren’t in my transcripts.

And it hit me — I’d accomplished absolutely nothing.

They were looking for what I’d done, and I was excited about what I claimed I was going to do… what was I waiting for?

I had all of these ideas that I found interesting, but nothing to show and no actual reason to believe they were valuable outside of my own, untrained, 18 year old intuition.

Don’t let time go by with a list of ideas locked away in Apple Notes.

They’re worthless until proven otherwise.

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