Don't Worry About Anyone Else

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Troy Kirwin on writing a memo for investors after your first meeting (Link)

• Mike Vilardo on why hoarding equity is not a good strategy (Link)

• Nick Katz on what investors are actually evaluating (Link)

Growth

• Inkko on how to get people to actually use your app (Link)

• Hunter Isaacson on the importance of onboarding (Link)

ICYMI

• High-impact accounting and CFO services that scale (Link)*

• Anastasia Zik shares a trap you don’t want to fall into (Link)

• Saïd Aitmbarek’s advice to first-time founders (Link)

• Ross Hendricks on LLM negative unit economics (Link)

• Guillaume Moubeche shares startup lies (Link)

 Opportunity: Compliance Automation Platform

Legal requirements are a lot easier to add to most industries than to remove.

As a result, every year there are more rules. More compliance checks that need to be done. More tedious work.

There are companies that help with ensuring you’re compliant, but what about knowing when you need to become compliant in the first place?

There’s an opportunity for a platform that alerts you to any new compliance requirements, or any deficiencies in the way your company is operating, automatically with LLMs.

Founders won’t catch the edge cases themselves, most likely, but they will pay for something that does (as long as it doesn’t take up a lot of their time).

🧠 Framework: GAIN Framework

One of the most challenging parts about getting feedback from users is interpreting it.

And that’s because most people suck at giving feedback.

It’s not their fault, most of them aren’t trained in how to assess feedback, so they don’t know how to give feedback that’s actually useful and easy to understand.

So one of the biggest 80/20 things you can do when interviewing users is briefly teaching them how to give good feedback during your session, at the beginning.

And the GAIN Framework can help with that.

Instruct your users to:

1. Goal → Focus primarily on future potential improvements, not current pains. This is counterintuitive for them since they probably don’t believe you’re aware of the pain points and, frankly, they just want to be heard. But what’s more valuable for you is hearing about what would make it better for them, not just that it exists. Push the conversation in that direction.

2. Actions → Include observations of actions and their impacts, rather than judgements. This is where you take it one step further and try to understand what actions you’ll need to take in order to get them to their goal state. Be specific here.

3. Impacts → Once you’ve identified the actions you’ll need to take, you need to understand how this will benefit users. You’ll need to make the case to your team that this is worth doing, after all. Ask the user about a perfect world scenario and what that would enable them to have happen, and why that’s important to them.

4. Next → Close with clear, concrete next actions. Make this specific, who will do what by when to start addressing their concern? This builds trust and is also useful for you.

📈 Trend: AI Product Management

Once upon a time, I was a Product Manager at Airbnb.

As most PMs will tell you, the role is actually kind of hard to describe even when you’re doing it (and can vary a lot from team to team).

In fact it’s sort of like this:

You’re being paid to take in a lot of varied inputs and use your taste to direct that energy into improving the product in specific ways.

This makes it an interesting role for AI tools to make an impact on, taste is one of the hardest things for AI to replicate right now, and giving it enough context may be a challenge.

Yet interest is growing:

But the truth is that there are tedious aspects of the job.

One tool I’ve liked is ChatPRD. A PRD is a long and detailed doc meant to outline the requirements of new products and features. It’s what a PM writes before handing it off to eng and design to build something.

While precision obviously matters with that process, a lot the docs are more paint-by-numbers than anything else and could likely be sped up with a tool like that.

Some other areas of the job that could be improved with AI:

• Context gathering

• Proactively flagging users who may be worth talking with

• Automatically disseminating strategy updates from execs to the rest of your team with relevant context for your product

With every other role getting AI superpowers, PMs should too.

💬 Quote: Don’t Worry About Anyone Else

It’s true you should listen to your users (most of the time).

But before you even have users, you’ll already be getting lots of opinions from folks.

And once you do, the non-user opinions will increase.

Something I see founders get tripped up on a lot: even smart people can give bad advice.

Even if they are well-intentioned and experienced, they aren’t in the weeds with you and it’s likely impossible to communicate all of the relevant context to them that you see.

I try to be cognizant of this when I’m advising founders, but it’s not really the outsider’s job to be.

It’s the founder’s job to distill what’s signal and what’s noise.

Some people would say that’s a good reason to never bother getting advice from outsiders, but I disagree.

They can provide value, even if it often isn’t exactly in the way they intend.

They may be trying to tell you how to do something, but what’s valuable might just be what they’re calling out as something to think more about.

At the end of the day, don’t worry about what they think, be aware of it, but trust that you know your market.