You Asked For It

And why you might want to be on a tiny team

Michael Houck
February 18, 2025

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

Opportunity → AI Influencers… as a Service

Framework → Betting on Cost Reductions

Tool → Wispr Flow

Trend → Tiny Teams

Quote → Sahil Bloom’s “You asked for it…”

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

Cody Schneider on how personal brand building impacts fundraising (Link)
Martin Tobias on the stacking SAFEs at different caps strategy (Link)
Life Sciences fundraising activity is at its lowest level since 2012 (Link)

Growth

Steven Cravotta's 🧵 on mobile apps (Link)
An SEO keyword tip (Link)

ICYMI

Tax season is right around the corner. Afino was built to help founders manage their bookkeeping & taxes with ease (Link)*
Alex Lieberman on how pivoting should be more celebrated (Link)
Jack Altman on how problems are always fixed by getting sleep (Link)
Dickie Bush on how to tighten feedback loops (Link)
A reminder to SaaS founders on what people do & don't buy (Link)
One thing almost every $100k+ MRR app has (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI Influencers as a Service

For better or worse, AI influencers are going to be huge.

Link to Post

There are a lot of unanswered questions here, like how they’ll coexist with human influencers or whether they’ll simply dominate the market, but ignoring them entirely is likely a mistake.

But who’s going to sell the picks and shovels?

Rather than trying to build an AI influencer for your startup, consider building the ability to easily create, deploy, and manage them.

🧠 Framework: Betting on Cost Reductions

When there isn’t excessive regulation in an industry, advancements in technology make things cheaper over time.

We’re seeing this in hyperspeed in the AI world right now (like I wrote about in LLMs are Over), and there are no signs of slowing down.

So… why not bet on that?

Link to Post

If the cost of doing something with AI were dramatically cheaper, what new experiences could you unlock?

What could you make happen faster, that today doesn’t use AI?

Even if the costs aren’t viable yet, they likely will be soon

🛠 Tool: Wispr Flow

Typing is so 2024.

You’ll move much faster by talking into your computer than writing out long messages.

We all know this, but we don’t do it because we either don’t trust the transcription quality or don’t want to burden the person on the receiving end with having to listen to a voice note.

Wispr Flow solves both issues and works across most, if not every, app you likely use on a daily basis.

📈 Trend: Tiny Teams

You’ve probably heard the story about how, in the earlier days of the mobile era, small teams like Instagram with 13 people and WhatsApp with 55 people turned into billion-dollar acquisitions.

However, those were the outliers among the outliers.

In no way was it normal, even for a hypergrowth startup.

That’s starting to change, though.

AI tools allow teams to do more with less and, combined with the extreme level of interest in AI products, we’re already seeing an entire class of startups do millions in revenue with small teams.