Opportunity → Email Optimization Platform
Framework → Ansoff Matrix
Tool → Knowlify
Trend → CRM Management Tools
Quote → Keep Going
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Opportunity: Email Optimization Platform
Like I talked about in this weekend’s deep dive, not many marketing channels are working well right now.
The exceptions are GEO and audience building + creator partnerships on social (PS, I can help with both, grab time with me here).
So, naturally, any tool that can change that for businesses that are already devoted to other channels is something they’d gladly pay for.
One example would be in the email marketing space.
Open rates are lower than ever. Inboxes are filled with AI spam.
Tools like Mocke are using innovative, simulation-centric approaches to help you have confidence in your emails before you send them.
They’re focused on cold email, but the same principle could easily apply to promotional emails to warm targets.
Spotted on Ideabrowser
🧠 Framework: Ansoff Matrix
There are really only four things you can do when selling:
Sell a new product to a new market
Sell a new product to an existing market
Sell an existing product to a new market
Sell an existing product to an existing market
The Ansoff Matrix uses this simple framing to direct your overall strategic focus.
Of course, “diversification” isn’t really an appropriate term for most startups since you are typically building from nothing.
Instead, it’s more like market creation or market expansion.
Either way, the stage you’re at determines how to approach sales and marketing.
You already know which you are doing. If you’re struggling to find resonance with your target customers, consider whether your messaging could use improvement.
If you’re not speaking the language that’s congruent with where you’re at and what you’re actually attempting to do, you’ll hear crickets.
🛠 Tool: Knowlify
When Loom first came out, it wasn’t immediately obvious it would be valuable.
At least to me.
Screen recordings with voiceovers didn’t seem like that big of a deal.
In retrospect, it was all about the form factor. Loom made the process of making and sharing useful screen recordings much easier and more personal.
And they reached a $975M exit as a result.
I don’t want to make the same mistake twice, which is why Knowlify is interesting.
They use AI to turn anything (your codebase, a Notion doc, etc) into an explainer video you can share.
The unlock here is that it achieves a similar goal as a Loom, but you don’t even need to spend the time recording the video.
Explainer videos serve a slightly different purpose than screen recordings, but that doesn’t mean the market for the tool is any smaller, it’s just different.
📈 Trend: CRM Management Tools
CRMs have been around seemingly forever.
But here are two weird observations about them right now:
AI’s usefulness is causing people to not feel like maintaining a CRM is worth their time or something that they should have to do
Teams are more open to niche CRMs rather than more classic one-size-fits-all options
I don’t have any hard data to back those up, but they’re consistent trends in anecdotal conversations I’ve had over the last year.
It’s natural, then, that an opportunity that arises from this would be tools that help you manage your CRM (via overlays, add-ons, or companion platforms).
The bottom line is that CRMs increasingly feel like a chore rather than a value-add.
Not because they’re not useful, but because the work to maintain them feels low-value.
Tap into that. Make it easier for people to get value out of their CRM.
💬 Quote: Keep Going
Founders aren’t dumb.
They can’t be.
They have to understand something about the world in order to deliver value.
But they also don’t need to be geniuses.
I’d go as far as to say they don’t even need to be particularly smart (but it helps).
What they really need is relentless.
They need to keep going.
One of my favorite Paul Graham essays is about this, the defining characteristic of successful founders is being relentlessly resourceful.
Not smart.
Not their resume.
So just keep going.
The best founder trait that I’ve seen isn't IQ or experience.
It's the ability to keep going when everyone else would have quit.
— joher khan (@joherkhan)
4:21 PM • Sep 16, 2025