Push the Urgency

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

 Opportunity: Shopping Agent for Consumers

Mercury bank’s founder/CEO had an interesting idea earlier this year:

One-click buy is a good selling point but the value here is actually in using this to try products without needing to set up recurring payments.

I never realized this before I started running a business but many people use services that create one-time use credit cards and email addresses when they sign up for subscriptions.

While annoying for merchants, this can be a good decision for consumers in case they either forget to cancel later and don’t want to go through the hassle of having to do so manually, or just don’t want to clutter their inbox by getting added to anyone’s email address.

A tool like what Immad ideated could also be used to supercharge this existing behavior by automatically switch to the consumer’s real email and/or credit card if it notices the purchase is actually being used on a recurring basis, or letting it cancel if that doesn’t happen.

🧠 Framework: Visualize PMF

I found this thread on X with what seems to be a completely original way of thinking about product-market fit.

Think about finding PMF like an equation, does your position in the market (based on how painfully your ICP feels the problem) and how effectively your product solves that problem, justify the price you’re charging?

Here’s a breakdown for Loom (one of my favorite SaaS tools):

I’d use this framework to understand how my product is perceived by others, it’s mostly a marketing-centric view on PMF.

It’s not as comprehensive as the PMF score framework I wrote about last year, but it’s still a useful exercise to run through.

📈 Trend: Freelance Visa

Let’s go back to 2020 for a second, remote work became a necessity and as the world opened back up digital nomadism was massively spiked. People wanted to make up for “lost” time.

Governments around the world saw this and, ever since, have been responding by increasing the amount of digital nomad-centric visas available for travelers.

Interest in these has continued to rise each year this decade and, if that continues, it implies that products, directories, and services targeted at digital nomads are a growth opportunity.

Some ideas that come to mind (none of these will likely be billion dollar businesses, but there are markets here):

• An AI agent built to apply for and manage various visas automatically. A true digital passport.

• AI-powered Find My Friends (for people you aren’t even friends with yet). A vetted network people opt into and get AI-powered alerted when others with similar interests are in the same city. High trust in the network is required for this to work.

• A directory for locations with reliable WiFi around the world, automatically maintained by AI whenever someone with the app installed connects to the WiFi.

• Group logistics services to get more of your creature comforts (and favorite products) from your homebase to be available for you anywhere

• Stateless insurance, though SafetyWing is already going after this market

💬 Quote: Push the Urgency

Every step of the founder journey should be treated like Day 1.

Even though your focus will be on different things as your startup grows you need to remain in the details, as Brian Chesky says.

You have the most skin in the game, so you need to be the one defining the pace that your team will work at every step of the way.

Run towards the hardest problems and emphasize speed of decision making.