Strategies for Saying No

Opportunity → Costco for B2B SaaS

Framework → Strategies for Saying No

Tool → Ariglad

Trend → Ping Minimalism

Quote → Team Building Regrets

🔗 Houck’s Picks

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The three natural competitive advantages of early-stage startups (Link)
The stages of a bottleneck in every business (Link)

Opportunity: Costco for B2B SaaS

Two weeks ago I mentioned why Charlie Munger says Costco uses a membership model.

He explained it was to avoid the wrong customers.

Someone should apply the same principle to B2B SaaS.

Link to X

There are a lot of benefits to focusing on higher-ticket clients or users, one being fewer support tickets. If you can condense the sales cycle, you can also scale revenue more easily.

There’s been a rise of companies selling “boilerplates” for engineers to get the backend of a new product set up super fast.

My favorite is ShipFast, built by a Product Hunt maker of the year, it combines the right tools, templates, and webhooks to get up and running in literally a few minutes.

But I haven’t seen anyone try this strategy outside of engineering. Worth a look!

🧠 Framework: Strategies for Saying No

When you’re in the idea maze, say yes to everything.

Once you find a problem to solve, say no to everything else.

The problem is that saying no can be hard.

When things are going right, everything can seem like an opportunity. And when things go wrong, everything can seem like a way out.

But founders need to say no. Spreading yourself too thin will stop you from making progress on any one thing.

Lenny Rachitsky shared some great strategies for saying no that are applicable to anyone, but particularly founders:

🛠 Tool: Ariglad

I’ve been putting off building a proper help center for Megaphone for too long.

We have support docs, but with a fast changing product they get outdated fast and maintaining them becomes an easy-to-forget chore.

Ariglad is automating that with AI, it reads your support tickets and how you answer them, and updates your help center accordingly. Pretty useful since you have to answer the support tickets anyway.

📈 Trend: Ping Minimalism

There are times where I get 10 pings per minute.

Slack, text, email, X DMs, Telegram, WhatsApp… it gets crazy.

I’ve started keeping Do Not Disturb on for most of the day. Otherwise the switching costs would drain so much time that it’d be hard to be productive.

With AI, outreach will become less human and more frequent. I expect there will be a trend of adding friction for people and messages to get in touch with you, and tools and services that support this.

💬 Quote: Team Building Regrets

If you ask founders what the most important thing that made their startup successful, many would say the people they hired.

I know that’s true for me.

A big reason we were able to grow to millions in revenue and raise a Series A in 2 years was because we hired some incredible people (here are my tips for what to look for).

And a big reason the company ultimately failed was because we made some bad hiring decisions too.

Another example: Stripe’s founders allegedly remained part of the interview process for their first 1,000 employees.

The bottom line is that your people determine your culture. There’s nothing more worth investing your time into.