Opportunity → Internal AI Skill & Prompt GitHub
Framework → Value Proposition Canvas
Tool → LightSprint
Trend → Founders Are The Happiest People In Tech
Quote → The Biggest Risk Is No Delusional Goals
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Brent Fulfer on the shared trait between the best founders he’s backed (Link)
Karri Saarinen on how to approach fundraising (Link)
Growth
Steven Cravotta shares everything your paywall needs to make $10k/mo (Link)
Gabriel Jarrosson on what hiring decision kills startups slowly (Link)
Adrian Partain on the #1 lesson learned that transformed how he builds (Link)
ICYMI
Generate leads, convert website traffic, or hire sales AI SDRs (Link)*
Gloria Lin’s founder dating playbook (Link)
Ayman Al-Abdullah on the 3 things you can’t delegate (Link)
Paul Graham on how to make startups AI-proof (Link)
Opportunity: Internal AI Skill & Prompt GitHub
Basically every startup uses GitHub.
It’s a no-brainer. If you’re reading this and have any background in engineering, I don’t need to extoll the virtues of version control, not to mention GitHub’s collaborative platform.
It’s just what you use to host your codebase.
And every startup has a codebase.
Well, soon (if not already), every startup will have a need to host their agents’ proprietary skills, and their company’s prompt library.
GitHub was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. If you believe making markdown files easy to use will be anywhere near as valuable for companies as code, the opportunity here is massive.
When you consider that the actual userbase for this tool would include a significantly larger percentage of the company than GitHub can reasonably touch, it gets pretty exciting.
🧠 Framework: Value Proposition Canvas
This week’s framework offers a simple tool (thanks to Mooncamp for the share!) to design products and services that customers actually want by mapping their reality against your offer.
On one side, you have a value map. This includes what you offer, how you reduce customer pain, and how you amplify their success.
On the other, you have a definition of your ICP (what job they’re trying to get done, and what pain and successful outcomes look like for them in the first place).
The goal, when mapping this out, is to identify where the “fit” is between what you’re able to offer and their priorities.
Here’s a simple way to use it:
Pick one customer segment
Map their customer profile (stack rank their pains and “gains”)
Identify gaps or misalignments in your current offerings to ideally address these
Decide which gaps to address
🛠 Tool: LightSprint
You don’t just want your engineers shipping code all the time anymore. Instead, have them managing a software factory.
YC-backed LightSprint makes it possible to dramatically increase product velocity while even making the development process more collaborative with non-technical folks (engineers can argue whether that’s a good thing or not).
It’s basically a full product development platform that covers the full lifecycle and helps you plan and ship together using tons of agents.
📈 Trend: Founders Are The Happiest People In Tech
My pal Lenny Rachitsky surveyed 8,200 tech workers about their happiness (and other things, it’s a good read).
While you might think the cushy button-color-changing product managers at Google are the happiest among us, you’d be wrong.
It’s actually us, the founders. In fact, founders are the only group in the survey who were growing more optimistic about the future as well as outranking everyone else in overall workplace well-being.
We also reported the lowest burnout.
These things go hand-in-hand. A high sense of purpose, fulfillment, clarity, belonging, and excitement directly leads to happiness.
A $400k+ big tech salary can’t compete when you feel like what you do doesn’t matter as much.
Also, let’s be honest, even though we have the most responsibility on our shoulders and surely deal with the most stress, we’re built for it. We’ve self-selected into this life.
💬 Quote: The Biggest Risk Is No Delusional Goals
A friend (who was mentored by Elon Musk) told me he believes the difference in effort required to build a unicorn and an SMB business is actually not that different for the founder.
They’re different, sure, but the argument was that it’s not like they are multiple orders of magnitude different.
Honestly, building any business takes a ton of effort and time. We all know this.
And the most successful people I know set really big, “delusional” goals.
Take a second and think about the biggest thing you’ve ever seen someone accomplish.
Then remember they are just a person, like you.
They simply set out to achieve something extraordinary.
It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to forget that we each have the ability to bend the world to our will.
So if that’s true, you might as well go after something huge and audacious, right?