Always Repeat Yourself

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Today at a glance:

💡 Opportunity: ChatGPT Store

You probably heard about OpenAI’s release of the ChatGPT Store, an App store for ChatGPT. Here’s Sam Altman building a “GPT” in under 4 minutes.

This looks like a MASSIVE opportunity. The Apple App store has over 1.8M apps and Shopify’s ad platform has over 33k apps — what’s to say that ChatGPT won’t have similar amount of applications built on it, or even more (eventually)?

I’ll be writing about how founders can take advantage of this opportunity in this coming Saturday’s deep dive, but the TLDR is that anyone can now build AI agents without any coding, list them on the store, and profit from revenue sharing.

Here’s an interesting, unique idea from Ben Tossell, the founder of Makerpad (acq. by Zapier) and Ben’s Bites:

As I wrote about back in March right after GPT-4 was released, data is the new currency and the best way to build a moat is now to have proprietary datasets.

An AI agent that finds unstructured, dirty data and organizes that data for consumption, at scale, could be very valuable. You could think of it like an on-demand data scraper, but it would be more like a suite of custom datasets that it sells access to.

🧠 Framework: Decision Making Speed

Founders could also be called CDO’s (Chief Decision Officers). Your startup is a result of a bunch of decisions you make. Who to hire, when to spend or raise money… it all boils down to how you make decisions.

And founders need to make a LOT of decisions.

I often talk about how speed in decision making is so important.

This week’s framework helps you put the importance of each decision you make on a scale.

The less important a decision is, the less time you should spend looking for information to help you make that decision.

It’s also a reminder that most decisions you make are reversible so they’re are not as important as you think they are. Therefore those decisions should be made quickly. Better to learn and be wrong than not learn and… not know if you’re right.

Your goal should be to invest the right amount of time on a decision relative to its importance.

📈 Trend: CCaaS

Haven’t heard of CCaaS? That’s ok, neither had I until recently.

It stands for “contact center as a service.” But interest in it is growing rapidly:

It’s a contact center that’s based in the cloud and routes inbound customer service calls to agents. Traditional customer service centers are expensive and hard to build because you have to maintain the hardware and employ in-house staff.

When I worked at Uber this always seemed like one of the most chaotic and challenging parts of scaling a startup.

CCaaS gives businesses more agility and scalability with their customer service operations and your only billed for what you use.

I wouldn’t recommend this for extremely unique or bleeding edge businesses (like Uber Eats was at the time we were building it) since you’d likely still have to spend a lot of time doing trainings.

💬 Quote: Always Repeat Yourself

How many times have you heard Jeff Bezos talk about being customer centric? I feel like he’s mentioned it in every interview he’s ever been in:

I can’t even imagine how many times he mentioned it to Amazon employees over his 27 years as CEO.

As a founder you need to repeat your core message constantly. In team meetings, in 1:1s, over Slack, over email, in your team’s Notion hub, on the wall of your office… you get the idea.

And this doesn’t just apply to your team. You also need to do it with customers. In fact you need to do it even more forcefully with customers because they aren’t thinking about your startup nearly as often as your employees are.

And your messaging needs to be crystal clear for it to resonate. Think about it like a commercial jingle, a TikTok, or a billboard on the side of the road. Make it stick in people’s heads — like the examples in this great post on X about copywriting.

Here’s an example.

That’s my fault — not theirs!

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