Opportunity → AI Tour Guide
Framework → The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework
Tool → Anvil
Trend → LLM SEO Searches
Quote → Get people to care
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Don’t hire another average assistant, get a Chief of Staff and ex-top consulting PM, working remotely from LATAM for $3,000/month (full-time). (Link)*
Greg Isenberg’s playbook for building profitable companies in the AI age (Link)
Rohan Paul on how top YC AI startups prompt LLMs (Link)
Alejandro Cremades on how to evaluate your startup idea (Link)
Ben Lang on YC’s hidden top-notch content for early-stage founders (Link)
Opportunity: AI Tour Guide
Don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers.
That’s the message Stripe’s Patrick Collison was sending with this product idea:
While it might not be practical for when you’re rushing into the office in the morning, there is actually a market for this.
If you’ve ever gone to a zoo or an aquarium you’ve probably seen those highly structured audio tours you can pay to do.
The information is good but the delivery is rough.
Even more interesting, imagine an Airbnb Experience where you don’t actually need a human host.
Or a more informative audio broadcast about the football game you’re watching.
Or an app that helps new hires at your company get all the info they need without needing to loop in other teammates.
There are a lot of potential markets for this. Impossible to know where the winning one will be without trying it out.
🧠 Framework: The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework
Sequoia’s Arc program (basically their own YC competitor, they call it a “company building immersion”) released their own framework for recognizing PMF.
They break it down into three “paths” to PMF:
Hair On Fire → Solves an urgent customer need in a competitive market with a standout product and fast market entry.
Hard Fact → Tackles an accepted problem with a novel solution, needing market education to shift customer habits.
Future Vision → Pioneers a new reality, overcoming disbelief with strategic pit stops for long-term impact.
In particular, I like how they describe the reason products following the “Future Vision” path can fail to find PMF:
Future Vision products that fail to find PMF are often described as being “too early.” For instance, 11 years after Google Glass launched, augmented reality still hasn’t gone mainstream. This is precisely why finding pit stops with commercial traction along the way is so critical.
Assuming your vision is correct and you can find a viable path, time is on your side with the Future Vision archetype: You can amass an insurmountable headstart while the world comes around to your paradigm.
But finding the right pit stops can be difficult. You must act with imperfect information, “live looking forward,” as Kierkegaard said, and the pitfalls are always more obvious in hindsight. Oftentimes finding the right path means embracing unexpected turns, both with the technology you produce and the market you serve
The key for founders to remember is that none of the paths are “better” than the other two. All three are viable provide a unique journey to reach hypergrowth and beyond.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out which path you should take:
🛠 Tool: Anvil
SEO is dead.
At least that’s what you’re probably hearing.
The truth is closer to the opposite… it’s changing, and there’s a massive opportunity to capitalize.
Getting discovered through LLMs requires a different approach than last-gen SEO, where Google was the priority, did.
Anvil is one of a handful of tools that are already helping founders understand this new frontier. They’re backed by Y Combinator and, while they seem to mostly be targeting late stage companies to start, their tools could be applicable to anyone who’s already investing in SEO.
📈 Trend: LLM SEO Searches
You can see why YC is funding tools like Anvil, companies are increasingly aware of, and interested in, the value of SEO targeted towards LLMs.
The fact is more and more people are finding new tools and getting most of their most trusted recommendations from LLMs, so it naturally follows that people will look to optimize for that channel.
The two biggest differences?
LLM queries are much longer and more specific than Google searches. Therefore, content on your site that caters to longtail keywords will help you stand out via LLMs and be seen as authoritative.
The way you write content needs to change, instead of relying on jargon-y keywords, you’re better off writing in a more conversational tone while still focusing on demonstrating expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
💬 Quote: Get people to care
Sam Altman says that the degree to which you’re successful with your startup is equal to the degree to which people want to tell their friends about your product.
This, of course, isn’t easy.
To do it you need to not only know how to build a functional product, you also need to understand the wants and needs of your potential customers deeply.
Turns out getting people to care is the hard part.
getting people to care about your thing is way harder than building it. spend more time thinking about how you can get people to care vs what feature to build next.
— The Boring Marketer (@boringmarketer)
1:22 PM • May 27, 2025