It’s been a minute. I really hope every one of you has been doing well and the year’s off to a great start.

I’ve missed this. Not just writing, but thinking out loud about building products with you. The deep dives we’ve done here on How They Grow taught me so much about company building, and I kept feeling that pull to stop studying the thing and go do the thing.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. And I want to follow my own advice and start writing about it.

I’m starting something new called The Diff: a casual, build-in-public log where I share real notes from my fun little projects. Actual commits. Decisions. Tools and workflows. Data and progress. Mistakes when I make them (often). What I’m trying, what’s working, what isn’t. There will be a lot of putting to practice ideas and playbooks uncovered in the main deep dives we did and seeing how they apply to this new era of building things.

The idea: I’m building mini products as a solo, non-technical builder using tools that make me feel more technical than I should—like Cursor, Expo, Supabase, etc. Shipping almost dangerously quickly, sharing everything, and trying to get them to real revenue. Think of it as a field guide for anyone curious about making their own thing.

It’s lowercase technical and accessible, especially if you’re the kind of person who’s been watching all this AI coding stuff happening. If you know what Github, an IDE, and Add/Commit/Push are—you’re good I promise!

How They Grow will stay up as it has been as an archive, all those deep dives aren’t going anywhere. But my new stuff is going here now to The-Diff.

You don’t need to do anything. I’ll be sending The Diff from my email (Jaryd), so you’ll get it directly. First one drops tomorrow/Wednesday—I’ll walk you through day 0 of the first product I’m building and what I did in the first two hours.

Chat soon!
Jaryd

Wow, it’s been a hot minute.

This is a short but important email giving you all a personal update on where I’ve been, what’s been on my mind, and what’s coming next.

As many of you know, I lost my mom unexpectedly late last year. This got me thinking about a lot, and ever since, I’ve been struggling to write this letter and do the necessary work to go deep and bring you value—hence the crickets in your inbox.

I’ve been back and forth between New York and South Africa quite a bit these past few months, and whenever I’ve been back in Cape Town I’ve found myself spending most of the time just sitting on the porch, staring up at Table Mountain, doing absolutely nothing but thinking, doing some scrappy personal writing, and enjoying the stillness.

I got back a few days ago from my last trip, and I think I know where to go next from here—for me, and for you.

My mom had a difficult life. And like an increasing number of people, she suffered from severe depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Something I’ve learned from her is this: Understanding the world and trying to navigate a good and happy life, one where we feel a sense of true accomplishment, is hard.

For the past few years, I’ve been writing here about how companies and products grow. I’ve learned so fucking much doing that and it’s made me a better product leader, no doubt. I believe it’s done the same for many of you too.

But through a lot of grief, guilt, and processing, I’ve been inspired to think about what really matters to me, and where I can get the most leverage from my time spent learning and synthesizing stuff. And for me, that means how do I become a better person. Me as a person > Me as a PM.

So, I want to try write about something new with all of you—something similar from a growth perspective, yet very different in terms of what we’re talking about growing :) Something I feel very pulled towards, and as we’ve seen many times in our startup playbook’s, always listen to the pull!

How They Grow isn’t being shut down and will still be right here with all our deep dives archived. If I feel the energy again, I’ll come back and post right here.

But I want to shift my focus for now (in a separate place) away from companies, and towards people.

An evolution from How They Grow to How We Grow.

I know it will allow me to be far more helpful—at least where I am right now.

Not useful because I have the answers—I’m not here to preach anything to you. But useful because I’ll be learning from some of the greatest thinkers, unpacking and simplifying research, bringing clarity to complex ideas, and writing to explore my own thoughts and beliefs. This letter will be me openly sharing all of this with you—the research, concepts, and tools—in a non-bullshitty, non-superficial, and non-toxicly positive, way.

I’ve read a lot of stuff in this arena that overpromises, blows smoke up your arse, and is written from the perspective that there’s something wrong with you that needs fixing. Like you’re not good enough, and that “guru” preaching to you from their high horse has what you need. I hate that; my mom hated that. So, this new thing will never be that.

With that, I’ll introduce you to my new writing experiment…

Good Times is a biased, but researched, guide to improving ourselves. Readers get short & practical letters on self-discovery, psychology, work, life, philosophy, and other learnings about living a good life.

Every letter covers one useful idea, aims to challenge your thinking in some way, and will leave you with one or two actionable, purposeful, and simple things you could try out.

As you’ve come to see in How They Grow, I value clarity, relevance, research, practicality, critical thinking, open-mindedness, the curiosity to look inward, and the willingness to study and put into practice old and new ideas. If you see things similarly, I think you’ll get a lot out of these weekly letters.

Inner work that has pushed me to think a little deeper about myself and my life, despite sometimes being uncomfortable, has been some of the most rewarding and impactful work I’ve done.

I’m excited to keep writing and learning alongside you, with my simple goal of leading to more good times in my life, your life, and the lives of the people we care about.

There’s nothing for you to do from here—no action needed. As said, How They Grow is staying right here. But keep an eye on your inbox for an email from me on Friday from the new letter, Good Times.

Looking forward to hearing what you think of it! 🙏

Let’s let the good times roll…

I’ve written about why I invested in Athyna. Besides their team, product, and brilliant and unique growth drivers, they’re onto something super powerful, which is how they’re amplifying the undercurrent or super trend that is remote work.

I touched on the idea of going global in that deep dive, but there’s a lot more worth sharing. So I asked Bill who has nothing at all on his plate right now if he could find some time to help with this post. He happily said yes.

Pulling his insights from his experience with Athyna and its impact on the remote hiring landscape, here's a quick snapshot of what’s to come:

• A brief history of remote work

• How global hiring unlocks access to top-tier talent

• Why remote teams offer unbeatable cost-efficiency

• Common challenges of remote work (and how to overcome them)

• The pros and cons of going it alone vs. partnering with a recruitment agency

• Key tips on building and sustaining culture with a remote workforce

• Why hiring in LatAm (or other emerging markets) might just be the competitive edge you need

Unlike me, Bill does a better job at keeping things short. This morning’s letter is a 9-minute reader. ☕

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Today, we’ll be going deep into one of the most relevant trends shaping business today: remote work. Remote work is no longer just an option—it’s becoming the foundation for how great companies build their teams and grow efficiently.

I’ll walk you through why going remote (especially globally) is more than just a way to cut costs; it’s the way to find the best talent, unlock new growth opportunities, and future-proof your business. Let’s get started.

The evolution of remote work

The world of work has changed dramatically over the last few decades. From IBM testing telecommuting back in 1979 to the global pandemic-induced work-from-home revolution in 2020, remote work is now an integral part of business strategies.

Here's a quick timeline for context:

• 1970s-1980s: Telecommuting begins with small tests in companies like IBM and JCPenney. NASA coined the term “telecommuting,” but it was a niche concept.

• 1990s: The internet arrives, enabling broader remote collaboration. Enter the rise of outsourcing and offshoring, particularly in South East Asia.

• 2000s: Skype (2003) and Google Docs (2006) make collaboration across continents easier. Remote work starts to scale.

• 2010s: Tech companies like Automattic, Buffer, and GitLab build fully remote workforces, setting the stage for global adoption.

• 2020: The pandemic forces companies worldwide to embrace remote work—and many are now sticking with it.

The outbreak of Covid led to a mass, rapid adoption of remote working. In both the EU and the U.S., close to 100% of the jobs that could be done remotely transitioned to fully remote, with employees working from home. This shift caused an immediate boom in the use of remote work tools, as shown by Zoom's stock price surge. From January to March 2020, Zoom’s stock price more than doubled, underscoring just how essential remote communication tools had become to the new way of working.

Today it’s the new normal, and if you’re not embracing it, you’re missing out on massive talent pools, cost savings, and efficiency.

Why remote is a game-changer

So why should you go global and hire remotely? Let’s dig into four major reasons: access to high-quality talent, reduced competitive pressure, cost efficiency, and cultural fit.

1. High-Quality Talent, No Boundaries

Building a world-class team is all about finding superstars—and they aren’t all living in San Francisco, New York, or London. In regions like LATAM, companies are producing some of the best talent, with professionals who have experience at top companies like Mercado Libre (worth $86B) and Nubank ($62B).

The ability to hire someone with experience from these powerhouse companies, and pay them just 25% of what you’d pay locally, is an unbeatable advantage.

💡 Key takeaway: Why limit your talent search to one city or region when you can tap into a global network? Talent is everywhere, and remote work lets you hire the best.

2. Less Competitive Pressure

By 2030, the world is expected to face an 87-million-person shortage of tech workers. That means talent competition is going to be fierce—especially if you're fishing in the same small pond as everyone else.

Companies like OpenAI are paying engineers upwards of $900,000 a year. How can startups and mid-sized companies compete? The answer is remote hiring.

When you expand your talent search globally, you sidestep the hyper-competitive hiring wars of Silicon Valley, Sydney, or London. You’re no longer just a small fish in a big ocean—you’re fishing in your own pond, full of top-tier talent.

3. Cost efficiency without compromise

Let’s be real—business is tough. Everyone is trying to save money. And remote hiring, particularly in regions like LATAM, offers an incredible opportunity to find talent at a fraction of the cost you’d pay in traditional tech hubs.

At Athyna, we always ask ourselves: Will this person deliver four times the value by being based in New York, San Francisco, or London? The answer is almost always, no.

💡 Pro tip: If you're looking for cost-effective talent, focus on global tech hubs like São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bangalore, and Cape Town, where salaries are much more affordable. This doesn’t mean underpaying—it means paying well relative to local markets, and that’s a win-win for everyone.

4. Cultural fit and time zone alignment

One common concern about remote hiring is cultural fit. Will people halfway around the world really integrate well into your company? The answer is yes.

Take LATAM, for example. With a strong cultural alignment with the U.S. and Europe, plus the benefit of similar time zones, these professionals are perfectly positioned for real-time collaboration with your teams. And let’s not forget—there are now more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than in Spain. The cultural overlap is undeniable.

💡 Pro tip: Look for talent in regions with overlapping time zones and cultural alignment. LATAM is an excellent option for U.S. companies, while Eastern Europe offers similar benefits for European organizations.

Challenges of going global (and how to overcome them)

Hiring globally and remotely isn’t without its challenges, of course. Here are the key hurdles—and how to overcome them:

1. Building company culture

Some say remote work makes it harder to build a strong culture. At Athyna, we’ve proven that’s not necessarily true. With 93% engagement in our fully remote team, we’ve built a culture of trust, accountability, and collaboration.

But here's the deal: if you're already struggling with culture in the office, going remote won't fix it. Culture is a leadership issue, and if you can’t build it remotely, it’s likely your whole organization is on borrowed time.

But what are the pillars of good company culture? Communication. Clear, intentional communication is key. Many remote-first companies adopt a “less is more” approach, reducing the number of unnecessary meetings and focusing on written communication. Atlassian, for example, uses its own tools like Confluence to ensure that communication is clear, transparent, and easily accessible to all team members.

Additionally, companies often implement set ‘core hours’ where team members are online at the same time for essential meetings.

💡 Pro tip: Define communication guidelines for your team. Specify which tools are used for what purpose—Slack for real-time updates, email for formal communication, and project management platforms for task tracking. This structure reduces noise and helps the team focus on meaningful communication.

2. Managing time zones

When you're working with a team spread across different time zones, scheduling can become tricky. Teams often find it difficult to coordinate meetings, deadlines, and even casual catch-ups. The issue is exacerbated when there's little or no overlap between the working hours of team members, leading to delays in decision-making and collaboration.

How to overcome it: Successful remote companies like Zapier and GitLab embrace asynchronous communication to mitigate the challenges of time zone differences. Asynchronous work means team members don’t need to be online at the same time to contribute effectively. Instead, they document everything—from project updates to decisions—in shared platforms like Notion, Trello, or Google Docs, where everyone can catch up and contribute on their own schedules.

Take GitLab, which has a strong asynchronous culture. Their public handbook outlines how team members can collaborate across time zones without needing everyone online simultaneously. They focus heavily on clear documentation, task ownership, and setting expectations for response times, ensuring projects move forward smoothly, regardless of where people are working from.

💡 Pro tip: Use project management tools like Asana, Monday.com, or Slack alongside document-sharing platforms to create a digital paper trail, so no one misses out on important information, regardless of when they log in.

3. Security standards in a distributed workforce

Security is a major concern for companies operating with remote teams. When employees are working from various locations and using different networks, the risk of cyber threats increases. From data breaches to phishing attacks, ensuring that sensitive company information is protected becomes a top priority.

How to overcome it: Leading remote companies implement strict security protocols to mitigate risks. This includes enforcing VPN use, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and secure password management tools like LastPass or 1Password. Additionally, companies conduct regular security training for employees, teaching them how to identify phishing attempts and handle sensitive data securely.

Deel, for example, prioritizes security in every aspect of its operations. They use encrypted communication tools and require all employees to access company systems through a secure VPN, ensuring that remote work does not compromise the security of their data or operations.

💡 Pro tip: Regularly audit your security practices and update them as needed. Make use of cybersecurity software, and don’t forget to train your remote team regularly on security best practices.

How Athyna does remote right: Internal and external success stories

At Athyna, we practice what we preach. Our internal team is made up of rockstars from companies like AWS, Nubank, Uber, Meta, and more. And we help our clients build high-performing remote teams by placing top talent from LATAM in key roles, from cloud engineers to marketing specialists.

Athyna has taken its recruitment strategies to the next level with its “AI-for-talent” approach, leveraging cutting-edge technology to streamline talent sourcing and improve hiring precision. This strategy is supercharging what’s already working, making it even easier to connect clients with the best global talent. Let’s take a look at how this works...

Our internal talent

Our team at Athyna is a powerhouse of talent, with key hires from:

• AWS & Uber: Our sales and leadership team members have worked at some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

• PedidosYa: Our Head of Talent was a Director at this LATAM giant.

• Nubank: One of our CSMs honed her skills at one of the most successful fintechs in the region.

This talent allows us to compete—and win—against some of the biggest players in the industry.

Client success stories

We’ve also placed top-tier talent with our clients. For example, we’ve helped tech startups build teams of engineers, designers, and content creators.

One client, a friend of the newsletter Tom Alder, hired one of our content assistants to help scale his operations, while larger enterprise clients have built entire cloud engineering teams with our talent. The talent is out there. You just need to know where to look.

How to hire globally: Options for success

So how can you get started with global remote hiring? You have a few options.

Option 1: Go it alone

You can choose to hire globally on your own. This works well if you have an internal recruitment team with experience in international markets. You’ll also need local expertise or boots on the ground to navigate hiring laws and compliance. While this is the most cost-effective option, it can be a tough road if you don’t have the right resources.

Option 2: Find hiring partners

If you want to save time, effort, and risk, you can work with a partner like Athyna. We handle the hard stuff—compliance, payroll, benefits, and sourcing top talent—so you can focus on building your business.

Our recruitment fee model is simple and transparent. Depending on the role, we charge a fee of ~$8-10k for remote hires. And with our 37% blended margin, we offer competitive pricing while delivering top-tier talent.

Final thoughts: Why remote is the future

So, why should you go global and hire remotely? The talent is there. The cost savings are real. And the ability to build a high-performing, culturally aligned team is no longer limited by geography.

Companies like Athyna make it easy to access top talent from emerging tech markets like LATAM, enabling you to grow your team efficiently and effectively. So what are you waiting for? The future of work is remote, and the best teams are out there—just waiting for you to tap into them.

If you’re ready to build a global team, we’re here to help. You can book a call with our team and see how we can help you grow.

Thanks, Bill!

Once again, if you want to learn more about how Athyna can help your company grow, you can learn more here or just book a call directly with them. If you say you came from How They Grow, you’ll get the VIP service, I promise you. 🤝

If you have any questions for me or Bill…drop them in the comments!

As always, thanks for spending time with us here today.

Until next time.

— Jaryd ✌️

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Further Study

• Building an all-remote company from scratch

• The Most Successful Remote First Companies

• Why the Bay Area Times Hires Remotely

• The Latin American Talent Revolution: Why Top Executives Are Turning South

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Friends, I’ve been looking forward to writing about today’s company for a while.

There’s not one company I’ve ever seen…not one…that has so many incredible resources available for people like me to read up on and study. I had a call scheduled with the founder/CEO for this piece but ended up canceling because I could find everything I wanted to know through their documentation.

PostHog is truly an open book about everything. And that, to put it plainly, is the bedrock of their strategy: Open-Core everything.

They want you to know how and when they fail. They want you to know how their teams are set up. They want you to know how they get customers. They want you to know how they upsell their customers, and what their strategy is. They want you to know everything that goes on inside.

You might not have heard of PostHog before. If that’s the case, this is all you need to know: PostHog is the analytics platform for product engineers.

I know, we’ve covered a few analytics companies before. But we’re not talking about analytics products today. You know what these companies offer at the core level, and most of you are not building a directly relatable product. Everything we cover today can apply to you…the lens I’ve written through here is all about universal ways you could build and grow whatever you’re working on.

They’re just doing so much right that I had to give you a breakdown.

And if you want to see what PostHog does (product/web analytics, Session Replays, experiments, feature flags, surveys, CDP, etc), take a scroll of their site for a minute and come back. It’s worth doing even just to peak their unique legendary design/brand system and meet their hedgehog, Max.

Hedgehog!? Show me.

Expectations for today 🧠 🛠️

• Part 1: Along came a hedgehog (and their first 1000 users)

  • A story of 6 pivots

  • The first 1000 users

  • Playing for Product-Market Fit

• Part 2:

  • A laser-focused who

  • The open-core growth strategy

  • How this hedgehog does sales

  • Not boring

  • Selling microservices (and breaking up a monolith)

  • Nine ways this hog builds for speed

Reading time: 29 minutes 

I. Along came a hedgehog (and their first 1000 users)

PostHog’s path to product-market fit was defined by a series of rapid pivots.

Over nine months, founders James Hawkins and Tim Glaser built six distinct products, each addressing different challenges they encountered in their previous roles. They learned from each pivot too, going well beyond refining their ideas to sharpening their understanding of product-market alignment.

So without further ado, here’s how each iteration shaped their journey.

A tale of six pivots

#1: Sales territory management tool

The Idea: Inspired by James’ experience as a VP of Sales, their first product was a predictive analytics tool to help sales teams prioritize deals. By pulling pipeline data from CRM systems, the tool analyzed past deal data to predict the probability of success and flagged low-performing deals for removal.

What Happened: They secured interest from 15 sales leaders who agreed to test the product. But only one clicked the sign-up link. Still, the idea resonated conceptually, but it was overpowered for small teams and a poor fit for big ones who needed vast data sets to make it work.

Lesson Learned: → Confusion is costly. Targeting a large, mixed audience led to a disconnect between the product’s complexity and user needs. They learned that a good product needs a very well-defined customer profile. Without clear audience alignment, even a sound idea can fall flat.

#2: CRM with predictive analytics

The Idea: After seeing a friend replace their CRM with PostHog’s sales tool, they wondered if simplifying the CRM experience could be the solution. They built a CRM with predictive analytics, targeting small companies in need of a lightweight, intelligent CRM system.

What Happened: Getting meetings suddenly became a problem. The market was flooded with CRMs, and adding predictive analytics wasn’t how PostHog could sufficiently differentiate themselves. They secured one customer at $20 per month who ultimately didn’t even pay the invoice.

Lesson Learned: → Don’t enter crowded markets without a unique differentiator. By creating another lightweight CRM without a clear edge, they learned that relying solely on popular buzzwords or marginal features falls flat when creating product-market fit. Differentiation needs to be specific, clear, and rooted in a genuine user need.

#3. A 1:1 tool with predictive analytics

The Idea: Shifting their focus to help managers prioritize their team’s tasks, they built a 1:1 meeting tool inspired by Andrew Grove’s High Output Management. The twist? The tool included predictive analytics that highlighted deals worth discussing, adding context to performance meetings.

What Happened: They saw some early excitement, but only one out of 10 teams actually used it post-login. They hadn’t gone deep enough during discovery into whether users actively searched for a 1:1 tool, or if the problem of unstructured meetings was truly painful for them.

Lesson Learned: → Ask “why not?” before building. By failing to validate whether users actually needed or prioritized the tool, they built something that ultimately didn’t solve a pressing problem people would cough up for. This pivot reinforced the importance of asking whether a target user has actively gone out looking for solutions or workaround methods. Why? Because if not, there may not be real demand.

#4: Technical debt monitoring tool

Our idea was to help engineers manage technical debt. It didn't work out, but we realized the power of treating growth as an engineering problem. We also knew that many engineers struggle to understand the impact they have on the people who use what they build.

There are plenty of product analytics tools out there, but all the alternatives are SaaS-based. While they're powerful, they can be frustrating for developers. From our perspective, these tools can be problematic because:

• We don't want to send all our user data to third parties

• We want full underlying data access

• They don't give you choice and control over pricing

— James

The Idea: Aiming to tackle tech debt, a pain they knew from experience, they built a tool that prompted developers to log delays and frustrations after each pull request. This feedback then generated a “technical debt heatmap,” showing where in the codebase debt was slowing progress.

What Happened: This tool resonated the most. Enough to get them 600 users and a foot into Y Combinator. However, while teams found the tool helpful, the obstacle of tech debt remained. Product teams ultimately dictated priorities, limiting the tool’s influence and value.

Lesson Learned: → Focus on action, not just insights. People want more than insights alone. The best products empower users to take action or solve a problem. For tools targeting workflow or technical bottlenecks, it’s not enough to simply show users where their problems are—they need to show how to solve them.

#5: Engineering retention tool

The Idea: The 5th idea was a tool meant to spot disengaged developers early, allowing companies to address potential issues before they became critical. This idea came from conversations with advisors and targeted retaining engineering talent by monitoring team morale. 

What Happened: This was the shortest-lived pivot, getting canned in just five days. Engagement was low, and user response was indifferent. A conversation with a CTO who said he “didn’t have any big problems” underscored that their audience still didn’t see this as a high priority. Also, maybe a little Big Brother, no?

Lesson Learned: → Don’t chase ideas that lack founder conviction. Since this pivot didn’t originate from James and Tim’s firsthand experience or own insight, it was harder to articulate the problem and make it value for users. As you know, going after ideas that come from your team’s unique understanding is where the real winners come from. Speaking of real winners…

#6: Open-source product analytics platform

And on the 6th go, they found their home run play.

The Idea: Annoyed by relying on third-party tools to track their own product usage and the subsequent lack of developer control over data sent to these servers, they decided to build an open-source analytics platform for themselves…developers.

What Happened: This time, the pull was immediate. Within a month, they had hundreds of users, real community engagement, and positive feedback from the developer community. Unlike the previous 5 tries, they saw adoption and usage without extensive outreach.

Lesson Learned: → Listen to recurring frustrations to find product-market fit. This final pivot was rooted in a pain point they had felt firsthand and seen among other developers. By aligning deeply with a community need and solving it in an open-source way, they hit something with a very high ceiling of opportunity.

Learning from their pivots

1. Refine customer fit: Each pivot helped them refine their understanding of user fit, showing that not every “good idea” aligns with the right user profile.

2. Validate depth of pain points: They learned to find out whether their target market had any history of actively looking for a solution to a problem. This was how they learned to see if people genuinely wanted to solve something.

3. Actively leverage insights: Valuable products empower users to take action on insights, not just learn about problems. Insights without tangible next steps offtered can limit traction and retention.

4. Stay true to convictions: The most successful pivot was one they believed in most, and that addressed real, recurring challenges among developers.

The first 1000 users

PostHog’s first 1,000 users came from a mix of organic growth and community-driven engagement. Here’s how they made it happen:

1. Launched in public spaces: PostHog’s Hacker News launch didn’t jus thelp with visibility, but it got people talking. The first inkling of community. Posting on GitHub, where developers naturally congregate, allowed them to tap into a thriving ecosystem of developers already looking for new tools.

2. Focus on open-source: As an open-source project they appealed directly to the developer community. GitHub stars served as a key social proof metric, and the open-source format encouraged users to fork, modify, and contribute, creating organic growth that didn’t require any heavy marketing.

3. Transparent communication: By sharing their journey publicly and actively engaging with users, PostHog built trust. They frequently shared updates, responded to GitHub issues, and encouraged contributions. This all helped build on that growing community around the product.

4. Co-building with the community: PostHog treated its users as co-creators, making user feedback integral to the product roadmap. This two-way relationship allowed users to feel super invested in the product. And that’s how they turned users into advocates who happily spread the word.

Playing for Product-Market Fit

PostHog saw product-market fit as an always-moving target.

The team treated PMF as a cycle of building, releasing, and watching how folks users the product to figure out which features hit best with their audience.

Their journey to PMF included three core strategies:

1. Feature expansion based on real demand: Instead of overloading their MVP with features, they launched with a lean product and expanded based only by following clear user pull. Early feature additions like product analytics, feature flags, and session recording were all driven by many people asking for it, making sure they only added what clearly added to the product’s value.

2. Close monitoring of usage data: PostHog used its own product to track how people engaged with the features. By closely tracking adoption patterns, they were able to shape their roadmap in real time, focusing on high-impact features while deprioritizing (and unshipping) low-impact ones. 

3. Broadening reach to adjacent markets: PostHog’s product was designed to be versatile—supporting startups, scale-ups, and enterprise teams. This meant they could attract a broad range of users while retaining the flexibility to expand feature sets according to different segment needs. Meaning, that they could iterate their way to PMF across various user bases rather than getting locked in on a single corner of the market.

The big thing to remember here is that PMF isn’t a once-off goal you just get to—it’s an always-moving target. Product-market drift is absolutely a real thing.

II. How this hog has gone wild

A laser-focused who

PostHog has always gone for precision when defining their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This was largely about doubling down on a very specific audience with high standards and influence: product engineers at high-growth startups.

Defining the ICP

Their ICP isn’t just any engineer or PM—it’s the ambitious, skilled product engineer working on high-craft products at high-growth, engineering-led startups. These startups typically fall between Series B and IPO, with 15-500 employees and revenues over $100K per month, and are backed by top-tier investors. They’ve already hit product-market fit and are growing at a good clip, with teams that build fast, ship often, and depend heavily on data.

The power of this ICP is that it creates a great feedback loop: PostHog builds for high-performing engineers, attracting more of them over time, which, in turn, sharpens PostHog’s product focus and keeps it ahead of less technical analytics tools.

Why product engineers?

There are analytics tools that cater to the flip side of the market (non-technical generalists), but PostHog saw a future in engineering-led product teams.

This positioning reflects a strong belief the founders have—that engineering-led product development is the future of high-growth tech.

By building for technical power users, they’re aligning everything they do to meet the demands of engineering-driven cultures and the people who understand the data at a deep level.

Learning from High-Expectation Customers

PostHog’s positioning around these high-expectation engineer-first customers works for a few reasons:

1. Demanding standards: These users have high standards, which pushes PostHog to improve and create new products continuously.

2. Influence in the industry: The ICP that PostHog focuses on acts as a “key opinion leader” within the tech ecosystem. By winning over respected product engineers, PostHog earns credibility that trickles down to other potential customers, including technical founders and high-potential startups.

3. Word-of-mouth growth: Building for a specific user with an influential voice drives organic growth. Engineers have always been community-centric, and they regularly discuss and recommend tools to each other in engineering circles, which translates into referrals, broader adoption, and brand trust.

Avoiding feature creep

Like any good strategy, 80% of the substance is about what not to do. Related, a core part of their ICP strategy is knowing who not to build for.

They’ve deliberately chosen not to dilute their focus by catering to less technical users or non-core teams like marketing. Instead, they concentrate on making PostHog highly functional for technical folks. The rationale here is clear: by doing one thing exceptionally well, PostHog attracts users who would rather switch to PostHog for its tailored power than rely on feature-heavy tools built for generalists.

This focus on a single ICP comes with the discipline of saying no. PostHog resists adding features that would cater specifically to marketers (and expand their TAM), as this very likely would add unnecessary complexity and compromise the usability for product engineers.

Features are built for marketing teams only if they increase company-wide adoption, create cross-functional value, and enhance the core product experience for engineers.

The strategy beyond engineering teams

The company stage component of PostHog’s ICP doesn’t just stop at high-growth startups; it also includes high-potential startups and influential hobbyists.

The idea is that by serving the “next generation” of high-growth startups early, PostHog will become the default choice as these startups grow up. These high-potential companies—those backed by accelerators or led by former big-tech talent—use PostHog to inch toward product-market fit. PostHog’s goal is for these small, high-potential teams to adopt the tool as a foundational part of their product stack.

Hobbyists also play an important, if auxiliary, role in PostHog’s growth strategy. Engineers working on side projects or passion projects are often influential within tech communities, sharing tools they like with colleagues and online audiences. By providing a “free preview” of the product to engineers in this category, PostHog earns a steady flow of organic awareness and word-of-mouth promotion

The open-core growth strategy

PostHog’s open-core model isn’t just a feature of their product; it’s the foundation of their entire strategy. For an analytics company, this approach is unusual and ambitious, but it’s precisely this differentiation that makes PostHog so compelling to engineering-led product teams.

By creating an open-source product and leaning very heavily into a transparent company ethos (more so than any other company I think), PostHog positions itself as a highly customizable and trustworthy alternative in a market traditionally dominated by closed tools.

Here’s how PostHog’s open source strategy works as a growth engine, why it resonates so well with their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and how other companies can adopt key elements of this playbook.

Why open works

Product engineers often want control over their tools, which includes having access to source code, customizing it to fit their needs, and running it on their own infrastructure. By choosing open source, PostHog offers several distinct advantages:

1. Data privacy and control: Traditional analytics tools require companies to send data to third-party servers, which can create compliance and security concerns. PostHog allows users to self-host, giving companies complete control over their data—a huge advantage for privacy-conscious organizations.

2. Transparency and trust: PostHog’s open-source model allows users to see exactly how the tool works. For engineers who value understanding their tools deeply, this transparency builds trust and a sense of ownership. As a result, PostHog becomes not just a tool but a trusted part of the team’s infrastructure.

3. Customization for technical teams: Engineering-led product teams often need unique customizations that aren’t possible with SaaS analytics solutions. With open source access, PostHog’s users can extend and tweak the platform to fit their precise needs, creating a powerful advantage over tools designed for broader, less technical audiences.

Open Everything…the PostHog Handbook

An open-source platform is cool and all, but what stands out most to me is that they are open everything.

One of the most striking elements of PostHog’s open-source ethos is the comprehensive, public-facing PostHog Handbook. This document isn’t just a set of guidelines; it’s a living, breathing resource that captures every part of the company’s approach—from product decisions to operational strategies. Built after their first hire but before their second, the handbook became an internal compass and a powerful external signal of PostHog’s commitment to transparency.

Here are a few of my favorite documents they share openly:

• Compensation Calculator

• Share options

• Company strategy

• Business Model

• Roadmap

• Their side gig policy

The PostHog Handbook serves multiple purposes:

• Signaling maturity: When PostHog launched on Hacker News, the handbook helped them appear more established than they actually were. In a competitive market, this signal was crucial to gaining trust with developers who were hesitant to adopt an unproven tool.

• Attracting talent and users: By documenting their values and playbooks, PostHog has attracted talent that aligns with their building ethos. This approach helps bring them people who are truly excited about open source and committed to the mission.

• Living documentation: The handbook also acts as a centralized resource where team members and the community can suggest improvements. This collaborative approach ensures that PostHog’s processes and values evolve in real-time with input from those closest to the product.

Their public content strategy

PostHog’s open-source approach extends beyond the product into its content strategy. Rather than a conventional content playbook focused on SEO keywords, PostHog’s content marketing prioritizes honest sharing about what’s going on inside the hog nest.

By sharing their journey, decision-making processes, and product experiments openly, they create a best-in-class “build in public” narrative that appeals to its core users.

This build-in-public play doesn’t just build credibility though; it builds pipeline. According to co-founder James Hawkins, transparency was essential in the early days to gain traction as unknown founders in a crowded space.

Around 70% of their initial growth came from recommendations, with the other 30% driven by inbound content marketing. By continuously sharing valuable, transparent content, they built a feedback loop that has driven tons of growth.

My favorite layer of their open content is their newsletter:

Product for Engineers

Helping engineers and founders flex their product muscles

By PostHog

Here are the key components of their content strategy:

• Build-in-public: Sharing detailed updates, product decisions, and outcomes openly builds trust and interest.

• Always give actionable insights: By targeting their content to product thinkers, PostHog’s posts resonate with their ICP and drive inbound traffic from relevant audiences.

• Don’t sell: None of PostHog’s content tries to sell you on anything. They know content is about warming people up to the idea of one day buying. The goal is simple: add lots of free value, and keep people interested in our opinions.

• Engage the community: From their “community newspaper” to their newsletter Product for Engineers, PostHog uses content to keep their community engaged and involved in product development.

You, too, can be more open

For companies considering some level of an open-core strategy, PostHog lays out a few actionable steps we can take to use open source as a differentiator, regardless of your specific industry.

1. Find the right market fit for open source: Not every ICP values open source equally, so it’s important to ensure that open source is a benefit for your users.

2. Build trust with a public handbook: A public handbook has the potential to be a golden asset for you. It helps you outline your own thinking, it gives the team insights, and it’s a talent magnet. Companies can follow PostHog’s lead by documenting their principles, processes, and values, then sharing them openly. This not only helps you look more mature but also allows potential hires and customers to see if they align with your values.

3. Establish a build-in-public culture: Transparency doesn’t stop with a handbook. By sharing wins, failures, and lessons openly, you create a brand that feels accessible and trustworthy. PostHog’s content shows that technical audiences are hungry for real stories and actionable insights rather than polished corporate messaging. For companies starting out, consider sharing your journey.

4. Use open source as a product feature: If your ICP values customization, consider how you can make open source a core component of your product, giving your users the power to adapt and extend your tool to meet their needs.

How this hedgehog does sales

PostHog has built a developer-first approach to sales. One that’s built on transparency, speed, and user control. Unlike many SaaS companies that hide pricing and push multiple qualifying calls, PostHog leads with clear, usage-based pricing right on its website and a process geared for self-service.

If prospects need a demo, they skip the SDR gatekeeping and get a personalized call with a technical account executive who dives straight into the product, no fluff.

No hidden costs, just straightforward options

Hidden pricing or features bundled into opaque packages to maximize profit on each customer are all too common. PostHog cuts the curb here and offers utility-style, usage-based pricing that’s clear, flexible, and openly displayed. Customers see exactly what they’ll pay based on their usage, eliminating guesswork and building immediate trust.

It’s so worth checking out how they show their Pricing and Packaging. As you scroll, keep in mind how perfect this is for their ICP.

PostHog’s unique twist? Pick-your-own discounts. Customers who commit to longer contracts or higher usage levels can select a discount tier directly on the website—no back-and-forth haggling, no hidden negotiations. This approach removes friction and puts control back into the hands of the user, letting them make cost-saving choices without a sales pitch.

See their public “Choose your own discount” picker here.

From demo to deployment in days, not weeks

PostHog’s sales flow is designed for speed and minimal touchpoints. If prospects have questions beyond the website or pricing, they can book a demo directly with a technical account executive who can answer them. No layers of SDRs, no discovery calls for qualification—the focus is on value from the get-go.

PostHog aims to move users from demo to deployment in less than a week, offering shared Slack channels for prospects spending over $20K annually and setting up quick trials to get them hands-on immediately. Users get a direct line to experts and are encouraged to jump right into implementation—streamlining their path to value.

How to Apply This: Reduce your barriers between prospects and the product. Bypass qualifying calls and let technical prospects speak directly with product experts for faster onboarding.

Usage-based, modular pricing

Instead of bundling features into rigid packages, PostHog offers a modular approach that lets customers select only the products and usage they need. Customers are charged by individual products and usage, so they don’t overpay for features they don’t use. To further control costs, customers can set spending limits on certain features, like session recordings.

By allowing customers to start small and add products as they need them, PostHog creates a model that scales naturally with growth. This way, users don’t face large price hikes or restrictive tier upgrades as their usage grows—they can manage usage and costs on their own terms.

One contact from demo to deployment

Traditional SaaS models often hand customers off to various departments throughout the sales cycle, leading to a disjointed experience. PostHog assigns a single point of contact—a technical account executive—who works with the customer from demo to deployment. This continuity makes it easier for customers to get answers, understand the product deeply, and feel valued throughout the process.

To recap; here’s how they’ve made a dev-first sales model

1. Be transparent with pricing: Make all pricing information publicly accessible and straightforward.

2. Streamline sales for speed: Avoid multiple qualifying steps, letting prospects book directly with experts who can answer detailed questions.

3. Adopt modular, usage-based pricing: Charge for individual features or products based on usage to allow for more flexibility.

4. Assign consistent points of contact: Minimize hand-offs and ensure customers have a knowledgeable, single point of contact.

Not boring

PostHog stands out with a distinct, almost eccentric identity that’s instantly memorable. From the moment you see its quirky hedgehog mascot and vibrant, unapologetic design, it’s clear PostHog isn’t interested in playing it safe. They way they see it, brand is more than just a polished logo—it’s about amplifying their personality, reflecting their audience, and embracing the unconventional through honest weirdness.

As James Hawkins put it, “We’re going to have a weird, unusual style because we are the weird and unusual one that’s joined [the analytics market], and that’s how we'll win.”

A mascot that matches the mission

PostHog’s brand story is rooted in creativity and some eccentricity. The inspiration for their unique brand voice came from a chance Twitter encounter, where designer Lottie Coxon caught their eye with her unconventional portfolio. This led to the iconic hedgehog mascot—Max, a quirky figure that’s as memorable as he is unusual—and a visual identity that fits PostHog’s open-source, community-driven ethos.

It’s a brand where weirdness isn’t just tolerated; it’s celebrated and built into the DNA.

Early iterations of PostHog’s branding were more experimental than polished. Lottie describes how the initial brand look took shape: “The hedgehog mascot was somewhat of a happy accident. We wanted something that genuinely reflected who we are, and hedgehogs somehow just felt right.”

This happy accident was emblematic of PostHog’s core philosophy: sometimes, leaning into quirks reveals a brand’s true character better than any polished branding exercise ever could.

Consistent and memorable

Unlike most brands that tone down the oddities to appeal to a broad audience, PostHog leaned in. And they do it in big and small ways. Beyond the mascot, their website, product, and communication style have an irreverence that feels more like a zine or a fan club than a B2B software brand. Even their product copy avoids the safe, over-polished tone of typical SaaS. It’s unfiltered, often humorous, and directed squarely at engineers.

This is a company that isn’t afraid to be a little “too much” because it’s exactly what endears them to their user base.

One example of this is their FAQ section, which includes playful quips and refreshingly blunt responses like “Yes, we do hate bureaucracy too,” or “You’ll hate PostHog if you like lots of sales calls and qualifying sessions.” This voice is consistent across every touchpoint.

It’s obvious they’re not interested in being everything to everyone (remember—who they are not for)—they’re proudly the choice for the rebelliousness engineers. If it repels some, so be it. That’s design, and it’s PostHog’s way of keeping its community aligned with its culture.

Kill marketing-speak

“Marketing-speak” is the worse. More and more, it’s got a growing negative connotation.

Most companies avoid the quirky and opt for bland, broadly accessible branding out of fear it could alienate potential customers. PostHog’s knows, and has proven, this isn’t the right strategy today.

Being weird isn’t just a style; it’s a differentiator that helps them stand out. PostHog’s approach has built a tribe-like following, where customers feel aligned not only with the product but with the spirit of the company.

PostHog’s weirdness goes beyond its public image. Internally, the company embraces fun as a core value, from team Slack emojis to custom merch items (they started with a T-shirt, and now they’re experimenting with everything from shower curtains to collectibles).

When founder James talks about the role of fun, he refers to an insight from his executive coach: the most successful billion-dollar founders aren’t just in it for growth—they genuinely love what they do. That spirit permeates PostHog, creating a team that’s as excited about their brand as their customers are.

Selling microservices (and breaking up a monolith)

We’ve somewhat touched on this with the pricing stuff, but there’s more to explore here.

Most SaaS companies bundle all their features into one platform, then sell that platform in one subscription. Let’s call this monolithic selling.

PostHog has taken another route, approaching each feature as its own standalone product. With each tool sporting an independent roadmap, team page, changelog, and even separate pricing, PostHog essentially functions as a suite of “micro SaaS” products housed under a broader data and analytics operating system. This is their “microservices” approach—a term more commonly seen in architecture but brilliantly applied here to software.

Here’s why it works, and how other startups might consider adopting similar principles.

Why not just bundle?

Most companies offer their features under a single product umbrella. It's simple and can be easier to sell. But simplicity in packaging doesn’t always translate to a better user experience. PostHog recognized that by allowing each feature to operate as its own product, users gain more flexibility, personalization, and freedom to pick what they need—whether it’s session replays, heatmaps, or advanced analytics.

Take Lempire another company known for selling microservices. By creating independent tools for each function (e.g., for email outreach, personalization, and lead management), they offer users a very modular experience that lets them pay only for what they need. Each product gets treated as it’s own startup with growth and commercialization metrics, and it becomes easy to establish a playbook for expansion—just launch another startup and give it the resources from the parent brand.

PostHog’s model is similar, allowing technical users to piece together an analytics stack rather than forcing them into a one-size-fits-all tool.

I absolutely love this approach, and if I ever build a software company again I’d want to build it this way. There’s just something very neat about having each product you build be its own siloed thing.

Why microservices work so well for PostHog

This approach plays to PostHog’s strengths and user needs:

1. Flexibility for power users: By making each feature a separate product, PostHog caters to technical users who appreciate control. Each tool can be turned on, off, scaled up, or scaled down as needed, giving users a developer-friendly modular experience.

2. More control and value for each product: PostHog can refine and improve each product independently, focusing on specific use cases and iterating faster. This allows the engineering team to prioritize enhancements within individual tools, leading to an overall platform that feels far more tailored and high-quality.

3. Differentiated pricing for developers: Each tool has its own pricing structure, which means users aren’t locked into an all-in-one model. They only pay for what they use, which fits the developer mindset of “don’t waste resources.” This approach lowers the barrier for users to start with PostHog and then expand as needed.

4. Maximizing market reach: The microservices structure gives PostHog the ability to enter new markets by creating entirely new products without impacting their existing ones. This approach has allowed them to rapidly expand their toolset, testing, and iterating on new products as they go. With each new product, PostHog increases its addressable market while keeping costs under control.

Building wide, operating small

This strategy is supported by PostHog’s organizational structure. Instead of one large engineering team, PostHog splits its workforce into smaller, startup-like units, each responsible for a specific product. These “mini-startups” are given autonomy, with teams free to make decisions and ship improvements without layers of management approval. It’s a refreshing model that prioritizes speed and autonomy and keeps PostHog nimble even as they expand their product suite.

…

For early-stage companies, the microservices model may not make sense immediately, but it’s definitely something to think about as a growth strategy once you’ve validated product-market fit for your first product. '

Here’s how you could start implementing a similar model

1. Design each new feature as a potential product: Treat each new feature like its own micro product, with a clear ICP, positioning statement, clear user outcomes, a roadmap, and metrics to gauge impact. This helps teams assess if the feature has the potential to stand alone, and if it resonates with users who might just want that one function.

2. Hire for product ownership: Look for hires who thrive with end-to-end responsibility. By hiring product leads who operate with a startup mentality, you create a culture of ownership, accountability, and entrepreneurship.

3. Think of your homepage as a storefront. If you’re selling microservice products, think of your main brand as the front-of-shop store where people can buy your products. Scroll through this site to see a good example.

The microservice model isn’t for every startup, but it’s a smart choice for those looking to serve a diverse range of users and scale product complexity without adding operational drag.

10 ways this hog builds for speed

This is more along the lines of how PostHog builds product, but that does directly tie into how they grow, because speed often = growth.

So I’ll, quickly, share a few things they do to ship fast.

1. No design by default: PostHog’s engineers don’t wait on designers to get started. Engineers design the UX, especially given a well-established design system. While a designer is available, they work reactively to support ongoing work without holding up the release.

2. Minimal product management: Product engineers take full ownership of user feedback, roadmap decisions, and metrics like revenue and costs. They’re empowered as “product engineers” rather than relying on traditional product management. There’s one PM who steps in only if a team needs extra support.

3. Hiring for autonomy: Every hire is screened not only for skill but for how well they work independently. Most are highly experienced and can self-manage, a key asset for PostHog’s all-remote, autonomous culture. New hires even work on a real project during hiring to gauge their independence/resourcefulness.

4. Small, startup-like teams: PostHog organizes teams around each product as mini-startups. Each team of up to six people has complete control over product decisions, including marketing and pricing, allowing them to ship quickly without waiting on cross-company approvals.

5. Engineering-led org: PostHog keeps overhead minimal, with most roles tied to engineering. Outbound sales are off the table, and the company’s marketing team is lean. The focus remains product-led, keeping development in line with user-driven product demand.

6. No meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays: To give engineers as much time as possible for deep work, PostHog avoids meetings twice a week. This focus on fewer, shorter meetings helps maintain productivity, with asynchronous updates and only essential synchronous catch-ups.

7. A late mover’s advantage: PostHog only builds products in markets with proven demand, where there are $1B+ competitors. This ensures demand while giving PostHog the opportunity to integrate tools in ways competitors can’t.

8. Strategic venture capital: With thoughtfully raised venture capital ($3M seed, $9M Series A, and $15M Series B), PostHog maintains a well-paced runway for building new products without excessive spending.

9. Trust and feedback over process: PostHog minimizes rigid processes, preferring to trust its teams and provide direct feedback when needed. The aim is for maximum autonomy, with a strong focus on trust rather than bureaucracy

10. Documenting everything: Writing things down saves time, eliminates scheduling headaches, and keeps the team aligned. Information becomes accessible to everyone, from onboarding to product strategy, and it helps to avoid endless meetings and gives everyone a clear sense of direction

Go down the rabbit hole

• Non-obvious behaviors that will kill your startup

• How PostHog operates

• The companies that shaped PostHog

• Navigating Growth and Retention: Lessons from PostHog’s CEO

• The habits of effective remote teams

And that’s a wrap on our PostHog deep dive! I hope you learned something new and are walking away with some inspiration to bring to your own product.

I’ll see you next time.

—Jaryd

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Today's letter is brought to you by LiveSession - Think product analytics, but simple. Non-technical teams get fast insights. Implement in 5 minutes now.

Friends, Happy Friday! ☕

Today is a special edition, with insights across product, startups, growth, and mistake-making, all from the newsletter. As I said last time, I’ve been reading all their stuff because it’s just that good, and I thought I’d share a few bits from the mountains I’ve been learning from them.

We’ll cover…

• How to do sales with no experience

• Why you should sell features, not benefits

• How first-time founders fail

• Nonobvious ways to write great job ads

• Avoid this mistake: Believing people want to solve their problem

Let’s do it.

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action

(#1) Selling as a first-time founder is hard, but you are the best salesperson for your product because you get the what and why behind everything. Some advice for founders on how to do the call…

“Don't make it painful for the customer to interact with you. You are leading the meeting because you asked for it, so lead. Start with some friendly rapport, then lay out a plan for the meeting:

"Hey, so there are three things I hope to run through with you in this meeting. First, I want to get a grip on your company and priorities; second, I'd like to cover [X] problem space a bit; third, I want to talk about our product and show you a few relevant bits of it. Is that a good use of the next 25 minutes for you?

Keep the call light hearted, be energetic and funny if you can manage it. You are talking to a human being, not a robot. Gossip about the tech industry, whatever you might have in common.

Introduce yourself properly at the start of the call:

"Hi, I'm James, I'm one of the co-founders, I'm working on [your company] because I kept seeing [the problem you’re solving] in my last company and couldn't help but to go out and solve it! I'm an engineer originally, but here I am doing sales, wish me luck."

Use your lack of sales experience as an advantage. It’s disarming to know you’re dealing with someone who isn’t a sales ninja, and people will appreciate the honesty.

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: You have one job as a founder: get to product-market fit. Outsourcing your sales will make this harder. You need to be the one in the trenches getting meetings and running sales calls.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Using your lack of sales experience can be an advantage, and so can emphasizing that you’re the person who built the actual product. It’s authentic and cool. The key is to own it and try to be confident (even when you’re not). Tone, as James says, is almost more important than what you're saying. Everything you say and do should make the customer confident about working with you.

• 🥇 Applying it: James lays out some dos and don’t

Millions of data points in one user session*

• 🫰 Why it matters: Many product teams either overcomplicate their analysis or make it too simplified. And when it comes to product decisions… what fascinates me is this contrast ↓

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Millions of data points collected, yet one user's session recording can reveal more than all. The hard part is being able to combine both. That's why I was impressed with how LiveSession approaches this

• 🥇 Applying it: They've found a way to blend unlimited event tracking inside user session recordings all tied to custom dashboards.

(#2) When it comes to selling and positioning your products, is traditional product marketing advice, which tells you to focus on the why (the product benefit), and not the what, wrong?

“Marketing lore tells you to focus on the why, not the what. "No one buys a CRM, they buy a way to increase their revenue". I disagree strongly if you are working on a developer-focused product, and perhaps anything.

Why?

Because this language has become so ubiquitous, it feels tired and out of touch.

Developers are especially sensitive to vague language when evaluating products. Hacker News provides a clear example of this – many new startups launch there, and a common criticism is "I have read the homepage and don't know what it does".

I think it's because developers have to figure out how products work, to plug it all in, so details matter. Benefits language makes me feel like I'm being sold to, by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.”

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: Benefits are why someone would use your product.

  Features are what your product does. But benefits-heavy and feature-light language makes it hard to know what you're actually buying. Most things are easy for folks to evaluate for themselves on how something will benefit them if you show what your product does, and how it compares to other products.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Generally, users do know the product category they're interested in. If I’m looking at an analytics product, for instance, I know the benefits of using one (hence being in the market). I don’t need to be told the value of understanding users. I want to choose one that suits my team, so here, show me how your features stack up, not how you'll help me "make smarter decisions, faster". Benefits don’t make comparing usefulness easy product, and it can easily come off as manipulative.

• 🥇 Applying it: Remember The Golden Rule: Customers are smart. Be crystal clear about what your product does, and spend less time trying to woo them with fancy benefits copy.

(#3) There are many failure modes for first-time founders—one of them is cheating your metrics

“Don't be seduced by vanity metrics, like app downloads or signups, that make you feel good. Instead, "find a metric that truly indicates PMF." For Supabase, it's “monthly active databases,” which indicates both growth and real usage.”

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: Founders are often obsessed with scaling, but expansion is worth nothing without product-market fit. And if you scale prematurely, it’s very easy to get caught up in the whirlpool of vanity metrics that are going up and to the right.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Before you spend time thinking about scaling anything and looking at numbers like signups or downloads, you have to know what your special metric is that shows people are getting value. It’s often a % that’s not correlated with your size.

• 🥇 Applying it: What is your product’s most vital metric that tells you things are really working, even if just for 100 people? Find that, and don’t let other metrics that may be getting better cheat you out of obsessing over that PMF one at all costs.

(#4) Make your job ads more interesting and differentiated—by being very genuine (or even weird)…

“I'm a big believer that a well-written job ad is just as important to your company as a great blog post or homepage copy. Especially if you advertise on LinkedIn, your ad will be seen by thousands of people – potentially more than visit your website every week.”

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: Job applicants are sometimes reading dozens of ads in the course of their search, so cutting through the noise is really important.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Tell a story. Your ads don't have to follow the exact same structure every time – engineers care about different things to designers. Sometimes you will want to get super specific about exactly what you want the person to do. Other times you may have a vague sense, but you need help figuring out the role – both of these are ok, but the ads should be written differently.

• 🥇 Applying it: Perceived best practice' is to make job specs as short as possible because the internet has wrecked our attention spans, but I think that just optimizes for total application volume over quality. The right candidate will spend lots of time reading and re-reading your spec because it's full of all the things they care about, and in turn, you'll probably get fewer, but higher-quality, applications.

(#5) The road to growth will come with many mistakes; try avoid this one—Believing people want to solve their problem

“Talking to users is hard, especially when you’re trying to validate a problem exists. James and Tim once spent weeks building a tool to solve a problem 15 potential users insisted they had, and enthusiastically wanted to solve. Not a single one even tried the product when it launched.”

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: If you build what people tell you they want, you can easily end up burning time and resources. Great builders see beyond what people believe they need.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Someone admitting they have a problem and them wanting to solve it aren’t the same thing

• 🥇 Applying it: When talking to users, always ask why they haven’t solved their problem. Some problems are just not important enough for people to solve them. If they’ve never tried anything in the past, there’s a good chance they won’t in the future. Apathy is a bitch.

So much great stuff here from the Product For Engineers newsletter. Keep learning from there here…

Product for Engineers

Helping engineers and founders flex their product muscles

By PostHog

3 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/3) Tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Open for guided meditations. I like to test new mindfulness apps out, and this is one that’s really been sticking with me. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my AI notetaking co-pilot. I hardly write notes anymore during meetings, and it’s a beautiful thing. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity as my new defacto search. I very seldom Google something anymore, it all goes into Perplexity. (Learn more)

(2/3) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/3) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• Quick Loot: The power of play

• The Happiness Lottery

• The Truth About Self-Deception

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

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Otherwise, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

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Friends, Happy Friday! ☕

Before jumping in, I’ve been going ham reading this newsletter by the team. It’s one of my new favorites. It’s called , but I’m no engineer and it’s packed with valuable info. If you’re working at an early-stage startup, which is most of you, I'm sure you’ll get a ton out of this letter. It’s 100% free, and very much worth subscribing below. Trust.

Product for Engineers

Helping engineers and founders flex their product muscles

By PostHog

A few pieces of theirs I loved: Why you're bad at giving feedback; A/B testing mistakes I learned the hard way; How to get a job at a startup; How to do sales with no experience.

Otherwise, here’s what’s on the docket for today:

• How not to be boring

• Steve Jobs: How to design insanely great products

• Productivity anxiety

• Choosing “who”

• Why companies want more high-output generalists

Let’s do it.

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action

(#1) Your website and brand are your first and most important opportunities to not be boring. Consider going weirdly hard on them…

“The world would be more fun if most startups hadn't undergone a personality bypass. But, sadly, most software companies look and feel the same. Founders have no end of excuses for this. It’s more important to build your MVP and validate it, or you need to find product-market fit and make money so you can survive. Creating a cool website won't help with either, right? …. Wrong.”

— (Founder/CEO of PostHog)

• 🫰 Why it matters: Your website is the cover of your book product, and never forget the fundamental law of humans (no matter what we all say)…we all judge books by their covers. If your website is boring, the market will think you and your product are boring. Nobody wants that.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Templated, generic, and/or just plain dull websites signal to people at the deepest level that the team behind the product isn't very strong, and that the product may not exist in a few months. The pages and ideas inside your book don’t matter if nobody flips past the cover.

• 🥇 Applying it: Spending time on your marketing website might seem "superficial" when you should be building a core product, but you need to put energy into your appearance. And when you do, it’s not just about polish, it’s about bringing personality into how your ICP experiences your brand. As James says, “A lot of design or brand work has an increasing marginal return. This is because a great brand's purpose is that you stand out. You don’t stand out by being average! So, if you're serious, go nuts on your brand. Go weirdly hard.”

(#2) Related to the above idea, from the man with the greatest product sense of all time, “Obsess over every pixel, every corner, every transition”.

(Click the image to expand)

(#3) Ever feel stressed from the feeling that you’re not being productive enough? That’s productivity anxiety, and it strikes often when you are doing more than enough…

“Productivity dysmorphia is the false internal perception that you’re not being productive enough. People have been dealing with productivity anxiety for a long time, but I believe that the age of social media has brought on widespread feelings of productivity dysmorphia.”

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: Despite running this newsletter, having a 9-5 as a Director of Product, maintaining several hobbies, waking up at 5 am, and being a husband, friend, and brother, I routinely (usually in fact) find myself dealing with productivity anxiety. Ironically, the times I feel productivity dysmorphia the most are when I’m actually getting the most done. It’s like this ironic force that stops me from being in flow and leads to distractions and procrastination. It’s an anxiety that comes from overwhelm, and unfortunately, it’s the internet that often causes overwhelm in all of us. We live with constant comparisons being shoved in our face…we see other people starting a business, growing faster than us, or getting a raise, and we feel we need to do more. Overthinking from this comparison though is what will actually stop you from getting to your real goals.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Even if you’re doing plenty of work and being more productive than the average person, it’s very normal to still feel like you’re useless and barely getting by. But it’s important for your actual productivity to notice that feeling when it arises and to remind yourself that you are being productive enough in order to protect both your mental health and your actual productivity.

• 🥇 Applying it: One thing that I’ve found to help, and so does Dr. Dan, is to spend less time on our phones and binging media. Obviously, we see content related to our interests, and we often see people with “more” than we have. This almost always creates unhealthy comparisons and leads to productivity dysmorphia and anxiety. Two other things that help: Meditation, and practicing Freudenfreude—where we find joy in someone else's joy, happiness, or good fortune

(#4) The most powerful questions we should be asking start with “Who” because the “Who” we choose usually always has a bigger impact than the “What”…

• 🥇 Applying it: The next time you’re about to ask a question, frame it through the lens of “Who". Not “What do I want to be doing in 5 years?”, but “Who do I want to be, and who do I want to be doing it with?

(#5) Companies are looking for high-output generalists who can move projects (and the business) forward fast and with limited resources

“I need progress speed, not perfection. I need a plan to align around. I need someone willing to make judgment calls or decisions with imperfect information. And I need a narrative to get others engaged. So I need a high-output generalist.”

— Greg & Taylor from

• 🫰 Why it matters: High-output generalists know how to drive ambiguous and unstructured things forward. They can be dropped into any situation and have the breadth and enough depth of skill/specialty to make quick progress.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: The hallmark of a generalist is their ability to combine 5 key skills, usually being excellent at 2/3 and good at the others. They are Speed, Self-sufficiency/Resourcefulness, Calmness in Chaos, Prioritization, and they know how to Get to V1 fast. Generalists are great at navigating The Work In Progress, and especially for companies tackling something new with lots of open questions, bringing in a generalist is becoming the go-to move.

• 🥇 Applying it: If you want to be more of a generalist yourself, use those 5 traits as a rubric to assess yourself and then level up on areas where you may be weaker. But if you want to hire a generalist—who are hard to spot with general interview questions—the place to do that is the takehome assignment. As Greg & Taylor say, “I’m focused on making take-home assignments even more challenging and representative of the realities of work today – tight timeframes, incomplete information, and open-ended questions. It’s the best way I’ve seen (so far) to get a sense for high-output generalist skills like speed, self-sufficiency, and getting to V1.”

3 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/3) Tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Open for guided meditations. I like to test new mindfulness apps out, and this is one that’s really been sticking with me. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my AI notetaking co-pilot. I hardly write notes anymore during meetings, and it’s a beautiful thing. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity as my new defacto search. I very seldom Google something anymore, it all goes into Perplexity. (Learn more)

(2/3) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/3) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• Say Their Names, by

• 5x3x5 : Books X Concepts X Action Points, by

• Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula

• How to Win Arguments and Manipulate Managers

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

Subscribe now

Otherwise, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

Subscribe now

Friends, it’s good to be back with the deep dives. I know it’s been a minute.

We’re returning with a breakdown of June: The new kid on the analytics block that is growing with such a neat strategy.

We all know the saying…Keep It Simple, Stupid!

I’ve known KISS for ages—we all have—but it’s one of those things we know yet easily and often forget.

I’ve been passively thinking about startup ideas, and one of my main criteria for an idea is a solution that can lean LESS, while everyone else has indexed on MORE.

Something that cuts the frills and just excels at solving some fundamental need in a basic way.

We’ve covered many times in this newsletter how platforms (MORE) always win. But my definition of winning has been changing, and I’m warming up to the idea that simple and elegant tools (LESS) that are cash-flowing and profitable (perhaps with smaller valuations) are a fantastic way to win.

Of course, you can still be incredibly valuable with simplicity. The ceiling, as it is in June’s case, is very high by indexing on LESS.

There’s a lot June is doing right to wedge in and grow in a crowded market, and we’ll cover all the actionable stuff, but the big play that differentiates them from pretty much every other analytics company out there is that they’ve built for simplicity. And to be more specific…simplicity for generalists.

It’s such a sharp strategy, especially when you zoom out and realize they’ve stacked a series of micro tactics together to shape one cohesive play.

Expectations and snackable insights 🧠 🛠️

I’ve packaged 20 hours of research/analysis into a 32-minute read. Here’s the gist if you’re short on time:

• Founder-led marketing is the future of brand building. June’s founder/CEO, Enzo Avigo, turned his personal brand into a narrative-first marketing engine—an engine driving millions of monthly impressions on LinkedIn. In short, faces (employees) beat logos (the company) because we trust people over brands.

  • Key insight: As icky as you might think it is, go and invest in building your personal brand. When you have a product to market, it will be your lever for authentic and value-driven content.

• Radical simplicity (generally) beats radical flexibility. Most of the analytics tools you can think of are geared toward specialists with complex and customizable features. But June zags while others zig, and they obsessed over simplicity through an opinionated product that makes data accessible to generalists. This strategy has allowed them to capture a large and underserved segment within an entrenched/mature market.

  • Key insight: You can grow not in spite of, but because of stripping your product down to focus on the core, and constant, needs of your market.

• Strategy doesn't have to be one big thing—you can stack a series of micro strategies. June combined three key chess moves—simplicity, company-level insights, and targeting generalists—to build a unique and defensible position in the analytics category. I like to call it a holistic strategy of opposites.

  • Key insight: Stacking complementary strategies can amplify your product’s impact and unlock a compounding advantage that’s more than the sum of its parts.

• Focus on Minimum Remarkable Products (MRP), not MVPs. June challenged the outdated idea of shipping bare-bones, buggy MVPs. Instead, they focus on shipping polished, remarkable products that delight users from day one.

  • Key insight: The bar for "viable" is higher than ever. People have no time for subpar experiences. And by making something aesthetically remarkable from the get-go is how you can catch and keep people’s attention…setting you up to create long-term relationships

Let’s get cracking!

Part 1. Starting June

Why so serious?

Analytics, as boring as it might sound, has been behind decisions since the days of the ancient Egyptians. They used early forms of measurement and tally systems to track goods and resources for trade. And build the pyramids?

Fast forward to the 1800s, and analytics makes a big progressive leap with the introduction of the Tabulating Machine and the punch card—that little piece of paper with holes in it developed by Herman Hollerith to process data for the US Census.

This step change in analytics laid the first piece of groundwork for the rise of computers, which of course led to modern digital analytics.

Now, as users of software, we can’t escape having every interaction we take tracked, and as builders of it, we can’t escape the constant fire hose of data coming at us. So much of it we don’t even know what to do with most of it.

That’s just a basic problem that many teams face: Tons of data; very few people able to use it effectively.

I literally see this all the time at my company. We have the best tools and so much analytics in place, but overall we tap into just the tip of what’s possible, meaning we pay for a lot more than we use.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I love Amplitude. I use it all the time, it’s a fantastic product, and I’ve praised them widely. But it’s advanced, and only a handful of folks at the company are able to use it well enough. Amplitude, like many of the other analytics companies, are geared at data-ish specialists within an organization.

It’s ironic because you’d think with such sophisticated software more people would be diving into the data. But most teams are still sitting on a mountain of info they never fully leverage. In fact less than 10% of employees in most companies actively use analytics.

And even though the number of data points is exploding (for better or for worse…maybe worse…), we’re still relying on the same small set of specialists to interpret it all.

It was this insight, spotted as a direct point of frustration while working at Intercom, that compelled Enzo Avigo and Ferruccio Balestreri to build something that flipped the script…something that could empower everyone on a team to be data-centric…something refreshingly simple and fun.

Extrapolating out an insight

So, in a very crowded space filled with more features, more graphs, and more complexity, June said, “Let’s build for the other 90%.”

But as Enzo experienced this first hand and observed it across Intercom, he didn’t rush off to immediately build something. Instead, he focused on honing his insight to see if more people experienced the same problem, as well as to try to connect what he was noticing to broader market inflections.

There’s a great lesson in that: Spotting an opportunity requires you to not only understand the problem but to attach it to a broader shift—the best insights come when you can align a personal frustration with an external inflection, allowing you to see where the market is heading before others do.

Here’s how you can do as Enzo did…

1. Hunt for 1st or 2nd degree frustrations. We all know the advice of following your own problems, but if you’re working for a company, another source of startup ideas could be actively hunting for inefficiencies that your colleagues/team might experience. You know your team isn’t a 10/10. So whatever the delta is between your ranking and a perfect score, what’s a problem people are ignoring because it’s simply a mission to solve? Once you find it, ask yourself, “Is this unique to us, or could it be more common?”.

2. Study the ecosystem: Before you can have an opinion on how to win in the market, you first need to know where to play. And that’s not just picking a market that looks promising; it’s about deeply understanding the landscape, the players, segments, the segments within segments, and what the opportunities potentially sitting right beneath the surface are. The only way to do that is to immerse yourself in the ecosystem and ramp up on knowledge. People often say founders who build in a domain that they are familiar with is crucial, but the opposite can be equally true. Being unfamiliar means you’re not jaded to schleps and inefficiencies, and if you learn the state of things correctly, could well be in a better position to spot opportunities. All you need is a framework for learning fast and smart.

3. Map out the market inflections: We’ve spoken several times about the shifts that create a new wave of opportunities. For June, one of the biggest inflections was the rise of product-led growth and the increasing importance of being data-informed. Yet, the tools to support this shift were still tailored to specialists, not the broader teams who needed access to insights. One tactical thing you can do here is to…

   • Look for contradictions: What’s something that everyone believes, but might be wrong? The idea that analytics had to be complex and tailored to specialists was a core assumption that June challenged. Finding these contradictions in your market can often lead to the biggest opportunities.

Gaps in the market…markets in the gap

Just because you find a gap in the market does not mean there’s a market in that gap. Or less poetically said: solving a problem doesn’t mean people are willing to pay you for it.

So, with a seemingly strong insight and a sound vision/mission to follow through with, June’s next step was to increase their fidelity on what the product to get there would look like—a product that resonated with the market and that people would pay for.

They started with a series of smaller, lower fidelity, bets—testing their assumptions with quick low-effort-high-learning prototypes. Each experiment wasn’t a pure linear progression of the product, rather they approached the problem through a different lens. Each time, giving them a sharper focus on what the right framing was.

Here’s a breakdown of what they did. A simplification, of course…

• The first prototype: Their initial product was a no-code layer on Google Tag Manager. It allowed teams to track events without needing a developer. While it was a step in the right direction, the feedback was clear—it solved a small part of the problem but didn’t offer the simplicity they were aiming for.

• The second prototype: Next, they built a plugin for Figma that allowed users to annotate design files with tracking events. Another experiment focused on improving collaboration between design and product teams. It solved the problem through a different lens, but it still didn’t resonate with their core audience.

• The third prototype: The inflection for them came when they built a Google Analytics-style tool, specifically designed for startups. This version simplified the data, offering clear insights without overwhelming users with unnecessary complexity. It resonated deeply with their audience.

While the initial observation and insight remained consistent (the gap in the market), it was only through these iterations that they learned what people really needed (the market in the gap)—an analytics tool that provided value right out of the box, without complex setups or overwhelming dashboards.

Part 2. How June Grows

The other day on YouTube I came across this excellent Mint Mobile ad. In 30 seconds, Ryan tells us that Mint does the opposite of Big Wireless.

It’s such a crisp narrative that paints a clear picture of how Mint differentiates itself. Give it a watch below.

Ryan says…

• “They charge you a lot” → “We charge you a little”

• “They put their names on arenas” → “We put ours on my lower back”

• “They’re raising their prices due to inflation” → “We’re deflating ours due to not hating you.”

There are only a few words to shove in an ad, but I was thinking afterward, What else does Mint do differently from the other carriers? E.g:

• They have physical stores → Mint is digital only

• They have longer post-paid plans → Mint offers short-term prepaid plans

What I noticed was that Mint was threading together lots of little inversions to create a more substantial: “Our differentiator is doing the opposite of what the market has come to expect.”

June has done the same thing.

It’s a strategy that isn’t just a single move—rather, it’s how they’ve stacked these opposites together to create a larger, cohesive offering that stands out in a market that’s easy to get lost in the crowd.

Let’s cover three of their main “opposites”, plus 5 other takeaways from their growth story.

June has been an ongoing sponsor of our 5-Bit Friday’s for a while. So I’m giving them another punt here (because clearly I think they’re doing something very right). As a HTG reader, you can get 25% off June.

Try June

1. Simplicity, opinionated software, and growing with less

🫰 Why it matters: There’s too much complexity in the world. I think for a long time, the tech ecosystem has indexed on more flexibilty. But, having an opinion as a team and turning that into opinionated software for your audience is a great way to make a happy customer. Just think about how you (probably) like it when a waiter gives you a recommendation at a restaurant and the menu is a single-side print, saving you from an overchoice spiral.

🥇 Applying it: Unship features, rethinking your UX/UI, and regularly ask the question: How can we help customers get what they want with fewer steps and clicks? Simplicity isn’t about doing less; it’s about doing what matters most better.

Let’s go deeper…

Most analytics tools are built for people who are comfortable working with data. They’re dense on features, can be customized in so many ways, and have complicated and timely implementation phases to even get to the point of seeing value.

This has made using data for the majority of users who just want actionable insights more difficult.

This is where June zigged while the rest of the market has been zagging.

Simplicity, to state it simply (🤘), means being easy to understand, use, clear, specific, and actionable. It’s where the confusion is low and intuition is high.

And simplicity sells. Here are some numbers for you to prove it:

• Simplicity drives love: 64% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand because of simple experience.

• Simplicity drives growth: Since 2009, a stock portfolio made up of the simplest publicly traded brands (as defined by Siegel+Gale) has outperformed the market by 686%.

• Simplicity drives sales: 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for uncomplicated experiences.

It’s not just because it always works, but more fundamentally, we crave it. Our brains always opt to use the least amount of energy to understand something. So when we’re fed jargon, confusion, or complexity we resist them.

Like it or not, we’re apes that look for simple alternatives.

One of the most prolific examples of success through simplicity is Apple.

Jony Ive, Apple’s Design Guru, spoke about how Jobs pushed relentlessly the iPod to be free of clutter and complexity.

Apple has continued this core tenet and makes its UX engaging by eliminating features. Features are always added with thought and consideration in updates, only once the user is ready to receive more. It’s a strategy that allows users to get comfortable with the current experience and then train them to be fluent in using the product.

I truly believe simplicity should be the metric that drives brand, design, product, and business objectives. It is probably one of the most reliable levers to pull to bring about consumer happiness and loyalty. IMO, simplicity deserves a place in strategies.

In June’s case, by eliminating the unnecessary and building for intuitiveness and structured opinions across the product, they’ve crafted a product that offers equivalent or even more value by zeroing in on the fundamentals.

It’s been the basis of their GTM. And just looking at other onboarding experiences, you can see how they’ve nailed it:

• Setup in 30 minutes. June asked the question, “How do we save companies hours of typical instrumentation?”. And the answer was to give companies a single snippet to add to their website. It takes just a few minutes. That’s all they have to do.

• Automatic dashboard: June asked the question, “How do we show companies valuable information ASAP?”. The answer was to take the onus of chart building off the user and give them instant dashboards and reports, showing them insights without them having to navigate any product learning curve.

In short, June saw an underserved segment of users who were frustrated/limited by the unnecessary bloat and leaned into it to create their first opposite position.

A quick look at emerging disruption strategies

I’ve touched on the broader playbook here already—disrupt by doing the opposite of what incumbents are doing.

It’s about spotting the things that the major players are either unwilling or unable to fix and then countering by offering a product that specifically addresses those pain points for either a smaller niche or a larger majority.

I wanted to call this out again because as I was writing the above, a few other examples of emerging ways startups are differentiating via opposites came to mind.

• Chrome → Arc: Chrome dominates the browser market with mass appeal, but Arc disrupts by counter-positioning itself with bespoke design norms and craftsmanship. Arc isn’t for everyone—it’s for innovators and tech-savvy users who crave something radically different.

• Gmail → Superhuman: While Gmail serves the masses, Superhuman disrupted by going premium, offering a luxurious, high-speed email experience for CEOs and busy executives who can’t stand the inefficiencies of traditional inboxes.

• Pendo → CommandAI: Where Pendo does onboarding by pushing information to users, CommandAI inverts the use case norm by pulling users to information when they need it, becoming the ideal product for teams who hate disruptive pop-ups.

• Amplitude/Mixpanel/Heap → PostHog: PostHog is another incredible analytics company that I’ve been learning about, and their differentiator from both the incumbents and June is they are open source. A similar play to Meta and beehiiv countering Apple and Substack’s closed ecosystems.

In June’s case, the first opposite is simplicity. Let’s move on to the second.

🔑 Bottom line: Customers appreciate, and really do pay you at the end of the day, for you opinions. That often means keeping what you sell them simple and making the right recommendations for them. Just minimize any thinking or their part.

2. Inverting the use case norm

🫰 Why it matters: Pretty much every analytics tool you use focuses on behavioral data at the individual level. AKA, the expected use case is understanding users. June (surprise) has done the opposite. They’ve prioritizing company-level insights. And for B2B SaaS companies, understanding how a company behaves—rather than just individual users—is often far more actionable.

🥇 Applying it: Consider what the standard workflow in the market is. How does, at the fundemental level, the core JTDB get solved? Then consider whether this is because it’s the perfect way, or whether inertia has just kept the status quo in check and nobody’s thought to invert it. Often by taking the usual approach and flipping it, you can address underserved needs and unlock value where others aren’t looking.

Let’s go deeper…

In the golden age of B2C, companies like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel created a culture where understanding individual users—what they clicked, how they navigated, and where they churned—was the holy grail of insights.

But as the shift toward B2B SaaS accelerated, this model showed some cracks…and Enzo saw them

As you know, selling to businesses vs consumers is a different beast. When Notion the company is your customer ($100K+/year), vs Joe who works at Notion ($100/year), you need to understand the whole picture through a different lens.

Rather than looking at isolated user actions, you need to understand how entire companies, or accounts, are engaging with your product. The dynamics are different when you have multiple stakeholders, decision-makers, and users all interacting with your software in different ways.

But you need to know how the company as a whole interacts with your platform because, without that clarity, it’s more difficult to drive expansion, reduce churn, and increase the customer’s overall success with their team using your product.

But that lens is tricky to get right when the paradigm is individual-level data first.

Round peg; Square hole.

This is where June saw an opportunity to invert the analytics use case. For instance, their platform automatically creates profiles and reports on each company customer. These reports give rapid instant insights into activation, retention, and expansion at the account level, making it easy for teams to understand which accounts are doing well, which need attention, and who’s ready for an upsell.

Also, instead of overwhelming people with endless graphs and dashboards, June just cuts to the chase with a one-click feature analysis that provides a curated set of graphs telling the story of how an account is engaging with the product.

How to steal this tactic

Even more so than simplicity, inverting the use case norm is likely June’s biggest micro tactic within their larger Strategy Of Opposites.

Being simpler is great, but competitors can copy that more easily than changing the foundation of how they solve the problem.

Of course, it’s not impossible for others to, say, layer in a B2B portal like this to compete with June, but then they’re just making their already complex products more complex. Meaning, people will likely prefer June’s simplicity even more.

This is an oversimplification, but you can see how the one tactic supports the other to create deeper levels of defensibility.

This kind of inversion strategy can be incredibly effective in any market. Here’s how you can try it, even as a fun thought experiment.

1. Identify the dominant use case: Start by understanding the norm in your market. What are the incumbents focusing on? What is their product designed to solve?

2. Find the gaps. Reframe the problem. Look for underserved or frustrated segments of users within that market. You might find that the dominant use case in your market leaves out an important segment of users whose needs aren’t being met. Think about how the problem could be solved differently by taking the opposite approach.

3. Flip the script: Take the dominant use case and invert it. For example:

   • If incumbents are focused on single users, focus on accounts or teams.

   • If they’re focused on one-off transactions, build for ongoing relationships.

   • If they’re delivering complex, multi-step processes, streamline them into something that can be done in fewer clicks.

4. Build for the next wave: June didn’t just invert the norm for the sake of it—they did it because they saw the next wave of growth in B2B SaaS. Identify where your market is headed, and build your product around where things are going, not where it is today.

🔑 Bottom line: Inverting the use case norm is often a way to reach underserved, on the fence, customers.

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3. Go narrower or go wider…and commit

🫰 Why it matters: When picking your target customer, you can can either niche down and specialize, or widen your aperture and build for a generalist. Whichever you pick for your GTM, the key is making that decision with conviction and aligning your product with it. Playing both sides is tough.

🥇 Applying it: After identifying a gap, you need to understand the scale of the market within that gap. The audience you choose defines your product’s complexity, messaging, design and brand, and growth strategy.

Let’s go deeper…

June’s decision to target generalists with soft data skills instead of specialists with hard data skills was very strategic.

Generalists have a different Job to Be Done. They’re often wearing multiple hats and don’t have the time to spend hours configuring dashboards or interpreting complex metrics. They need quick, actionable insights that are relevant to their role. They can’t be blocked by data when making a decision.

Most analytics tools (think Amplitude or Mixpanel), are designed for more technical PMs with solid data skills or entire data teams. Tools like Looker and BI platforms are aimed at professionals who have some technical savvy to navigate their complex interfaces.

Google Analytics is user-friendly-ish, but it’s more of a jack-of-all-trades across B2C and B2B that isn’t great for teams beyond marketing.

By widening their aperture, June expanded their TAM significantly. But more importantly, they catered to an audience that had been largely ignored.

Advice on when to Zoom In or Zoom Out on your target market

So, when do you follow the classic advice of defining an even more specific customer, vs being a more generally appealing product?

1. What’s the complexity of the problem you’re solving? If the problem is complex and unique to a particular vertical, it often makes sense to start narrow. If your product can be easily understood and used by a variety of roles without customization, a broader market might be the way to go.

2. What’s the current landscape? If a market is saturated with niche tools, there’s often room to zoom out and target a generalist audience that’s overlooked. The reverse also applies. This is similar to the concept of “innovating” by bundling (generalist) vs unbundling (specialist).

3. What’s the breadth of your product’s use cases? When testing your product in the market, pay attention to who gravitates toward it. If you’re naturally seeing traction with different types of users across various industries, you might have a generalist product on your hands. However, if adoption is strongest among a specific segment, lean into that and double down on the niche.

4. Think about scalability and product requirements. Going broad means your product will need to be versatile and simple enough to meet various needs without extensive customization. On the flip side, a focused approach allows for deeper, more specialized features, which are usually less scalable to a general audience.

5. Does your market scope match your resources?
   Appealing to a broad audience can mean more resources for support, product iteration, and marketing. For earlier-stage teams, starting with a tighter focus can lead to tighter learning and the building of stronger relationships with a specific type of customer. Often, that’s a more sustainable path to early traction.

The power of stacking strategies

To put a bow on these three sections before moving on, we can see June combined three micro strategies to create a larger, cohesive GTM advantage.

Any one of these strategies could have been effective on its own, but by combining them, June created something much more defensible and unique. T

• Move 1: Simplicity, not bells and whistles and deep customizations.

• Move 2: Company accounts, not Users

• Move 3: Generalists, not Specialists.

I like to think about this as a “strategy of opposites” which has given June a distinct edge. By stacking all three together, they made it difficult for competitors to replicate their approach and have created their own micro category within product analytics.

Another example that comes to mind is Slack. Their early micro strategies were:

1. Team communication: Slack didn’t invent workplace messaging, but they refined it with seamless, team-based communication that replaced email threads with channels.

2. Any team: Originally marketed as a team messaging tool for developers, Slack quickly shifted to focus on a more generalist audience: all teams needing better communication, from marketing and sales to HR and design.

3. Developer ecosystem and integrations: They created an open API that allowed third-party integrations, letting teams connect their workflows from different tools directly into Slack (e.g., Google Drive, Zoom, Jira).

4. Consumer-grade UX for enterprise: Slack prioritized a simple, user-friendly design that felt more like a consumer app than an enterprise tool, making it easy for teams to adopt.

Their Stacked Strategy: Together, these created a highly sticky product that not only solved communication problems but also became a hub for generalist team collaboration.

In short, whether or not you’re playing a game of opposites like June, Strategy Stacking can be a really helpful mental model.

One piece of advice here is this: Not all strategies stack well together.

You need to test for compatibility. How do tactic A and tactic C interact? Do they reinforce each other, or do they create friction? The goal, of course, is for your product strategy to feel cohesive and intentional

🔑 Bottom line: Commit to your audience, whether niche or broad, and align every part of your product and strategy around that choice. If you’re stacking strategies, ensure they’re compatible and reinforce each other to create a cohesive and defensible market position.

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4. Obsesses with minimum delightfulness

🫰 Why it matters: While all analytics tools feel serious and “professional”, June has leaned into a playful and approachable design. Their focus on delighting users—through colors, fonts, and an overall fun factor—creates an emotional connection that competitors often overlook. This isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about ensuring that every interaction feels easy, light, and enjoyable.

🥇 Applying it: Easy, delight users. Delight users. Ask yourself before signing off on designs…How could we delight users more? It's not enough to have a functional product anymore; people want products that make them feel good while using them. This means investing in design, user experience, and overall narrative, even (nay, especially!) from early versions of the product.

Let’s go deeper…

From their vibrant colors to their friendly font choices, June has created an aligned brand tone and product experience that is very approachable—a quality that might seem minor but makes a huge difference in user adoption.

Another deliberate tactic that reinforces their larger stack of opposites (Serious/Dry → Playful/Lively).

This approach echoes an important concept from one of Enzo’s reflections as a founder…great brands are built on unrecognized truths.

One such truth is that analytics tools don’t need to feel heavy or overwhelming to be powerful. By focusing on making the product approachable and delightful, June is redefining what users expect from an analytics platform.

The commitment to being at least minimum delightfulness, as Enzo told me, reflects in every release. What goes out must a) Add value and b) Add joy.

That’s a philosophy that for sure sets them apart, and is something that has personally inspired me to push for more joy in my releases. As product leaders, don’t discount holding a higher bar for delighters.

You’ll build more emotional connections with your users.

Evolving from MVP to Minimum Remarkable Product

June’s product philosophy also challenges the outdated idea of shipping a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

The advice you’ve had drummed on you for decades has been if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve shipped too late

And that advice has created a huge amount of enterprise value. I’m not knocking it. But I am saying (in agreement with over here) that advice gets dated.

Scrappy first versions of a product worked great when the comparative solution was pen-and-paper, Excel, or phoning and waiting for ages to get a taxi.

No matter what you launch today, the alternative (at least in the consumer’s mind) isn’t something outdated, it’s a modern software product.

As Kyle says: “It’s increasingly easy to build software and increasingly hard to distribute it. It’s especially hard to distribute a product that isn’t ready for primetime. Once you lose someone’s trust, it’s nearly impossible to win them back – let alone ask them to share your product with a friend.”

This creates a new norm: The Minimum Remarkable Product (MRP).

As we saw already with June’s early days, this shift doesn’t mean it’s not important to move quickly and test hypotheses, it just means quality is now non-negotiable.

If your product lacks polish, doesn’t feel dependable, or fails to delight, users are unlikely to return or recommend it to others.

How to elevate product quality without slowing down

It’s easy to read all this and feel caught between the need for speed and the pressure to release a polished product. But minimum delightfulness doesn’t have to mean scope creep and long development cycles.

You can raise the quality bar without delaying your product releases…and you should…

1. Start with delight in mind: From early planning and design, think about the emotional impact your product will have on users. When using some feature, what do you want the end user to feel? This doesn’t require perfection, but it does mean focusing on key moments that can delight users—whether through design, interactions, or quick wins. Prioritize those elements in early development, even if other features are still minimal.

2. Scrap quickly, build carefully: Use early, rough experiments to test your ideas (like June did), but don’t confuse those experiments with your actual product. Once you’ve validated your concept (say through iterative Figma prototypes), focus on building a version of your product that meets a higher bar of quality.

3. Polish selectively: You don’t need to perfect everything at once. Start by polishing the parts of your product that users will notice most. What’s the biggest surface area of your product that reaches the most people? That’s your biggest opportunity to leave a first impression. For example, focus on a seamless onboarding experience, clean user interface, and bug-free core functionality. Very small touches can raise the perceived quality of your product.

4. Invest in design early: If you’re a founder starting a company, hire a great product designer. Index very heavily on design as a first-class citizen—like Dovetail being a design-led company. And if you’re a PM, bring designers in as early as possible to your process to give them as much context as needed to think about how to add delight points.

5. Launch softly, iterate fast: Launching a polished product doesn’t mean you should slow down your feedback loops. It’s good to soft-launch to a smaller audience to learn some stuff, but users should never feel like they’re using an unfinished product.

🔑 Bottom line: “Good enough" just ain’t good enough! Delight matters more than ever, especially in early product versions where you’re trying to hook people in.

5. Going beyond metrics and truly caring

🫰 Why it matters: Metrics can only tell you so much about your customers.

🥇 Applying it: Build relationships better than anyone else in your market, and make yourself more accessible than any customer would expect. Then, be there and treat each one as a partner.

Let’s go deeper…

My buddy from might slap my wrists for this one…but metrics like LTV, NPS, NDR, or CAC are not the determinants of customer success.

These numbers have become the default for understanding customer relationships. But metrics can’t replace relationships. In fact CJ did say this: “I know I’m the metrics guy and all, but here’s something I believe: When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”

Anecodates come from interactions and interactions come from having relationships. But relationships often get deprioritized because it takes far less time to pull up a chart that tells us if our customers are happy.

Be careful of the numbers.

As an analytics company, you’d be right to guess June is incredibly data-driven.

But as I spoke more with Enzo, it became clear that it isn’t numbers and charts that drive June—it’s their obsession with customer care.

Enzo set out to take a radically human approach to understanding and connecting with customers. What stands out most to me is how Enzo and his co-founder share their personal WhatsApp numbers with their customers, extending them direct, ongoing access to the founding team.

It’s not about 24/7 availability though—it’s about building genuine trust and a constant line of communication that feels personal.

This is amplified on June’s “Customers” page, where they share stories from their customers in an interactive WhatsApp-style chat. A very cool design pattern that shows the intimacy of these behind-the-scenes conversations.

Enzo says this approach is based on a simple principle: caring more.

As a startup, you always have the power to do three things:

1. Move faster

2. Take bigger risks

3. Care more

Only #1 is a variable of how much money you raise, meaning anyone from day one can choose to win customers by caring more than the competition.

For June, it’s a mindset that goes far beyond the transactional dynamics most companies fall into. Enzo sees every customer as a partner and makes their customers’ problems their team’s problems.

One way they do this is with a customer map.

"Download" your Customer’s Map

At the heart of June’s approach is what Enzo calls the customer map—an internal tool that helps teams understand not just what a customer says they need, but what truly motivates and challenges them.

June’s team doesn’t just collect data on customer behavior; they work to understand each customer’s individual goals, fears, pet peeves, and broader business context.

To build these maps, you need to listen deeply to get to know your customers as people, not just users. This is what makes their approach so effective.

So many teams rely on support tickets or feedback forms to speak to customers. But as June does, the teams who care more do so by keeping the conversations flowing, be it through Slack, WhatsApp, or some other dedicated channel. And better yet, give key customers access to leadership—this builds a ton of trust and shows that you’re there for them.

If you’ve ever watched Better Call Saul, this was how Kim Wexler won her first big client, Mesa Verde, from the big dog, Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill (HHM). She showed her 1:1 personal dedication to their needs, contrasting it with the impersonal nature of a large firm like HHM.

Besides using “care” to win business, maintaining this kind of access to your customer, selfishly, means you get continuous feedback that’s much more nuanced than a simple NPS survey.

🔑 Bottom line: True customer-centricity boils down to caring more, and using that care to build real relationships. Metrics matter, but parternships with customers matter more. These are the kinds of interaction that transforms customers into co-creators, helping shape the product they rely on.

6. Make your founders face your brand

🫰 Why it matters: The future of marketing is people-based, not brand-based. We trust individuals over companies, and startups that start putting an actual face to their brand have a massive advantage. June is Enzo. Enzo is June.

🥇 Applying it: Founders and their teams should invest in building personal brands and authentic thought leadership. Rather than hiding behind a corporate logo, put the people behind the product front and center. This builds trust, connection, and curiosity, and ultimately draws people to the product through the value of the content they see from the team.

Let’s go deeper…

Traditional marketing is losing its impact. The song “Distribution is what matters”, and “Distriburion is what’s becoming more expensive” has been played on repeat.

Looking at emerging startups like Athyna (with Bill), beehiiv (with Tyler), Carry (with Ankur), and of course, June (with Enzo), and one commonality is the founders brand is a key marketing lever.

In the past it was always and only about building the company’s brand. PR played a big part of this. But increasingly, building an audience first is what the cool kids are doing.

While that might have been unreliable in the past (because if building an audience was that easy we’d all be paid travel influencers), it’s becoming more achievable especially thanks to owned channels like newsletters.

These channels, including LinkedIn, are leaning a) person-centric rather than brand-centric, and b) story-centric rather than information-centric.

That work super well because it captures the founder’s personality. It humanizes the company. And it’s far more authentic and real than a logo telling you what’s going on.

In short, people heavily gravitate towards founders being honest, vulnerable, and humerous/light.

Instead of relying on corporate accounts and promotional content, Enzo’s posts focus on sharing actual value—insights, stories, and behind the scenes lessons from building June—without constantly pushing the product. Enzo sees his content as a means to build curiosity around the product and establish some level of being helpful before people head over to see what June is about.

If you ship it, post it!

What’s more, when you ship product regularly and you building in public, you’re flexing an absolutle growth superpower. By just telling people online what you’re shipping (because most companies don’t)…it’s an incredible way to show off your ability to execute.

It shows your momentum, and that will attract customers, talent, investors, and help motivate/retain your current team. Why? Because when people see you’re consistently improving, they start to to believe in your ability to deliver value long term.

Take Tyler Denk from beehiiv…this dude is a savage when it comes to using social media to build hype.

It’s all about reputation—a reputation for reliability and innovation, which feeds back into your marketing efforts.

For June (and these other new startups creating their own playbooks) every new launch becomes a moment to deepen relationships with customers and show that they are listening, adapting, and growing.

🔑 Bottom line: Use your face to market your product (softly).

Adios, muchachos🫡

And that’s a wrap on our June deep dive.

A small startup making very big moves. They’re definitely one of the companies I’m watching in this new era of emerging startups that are having to be more resourcesful in how to grow in these increasingly more crowded markets.

If you want to learn more about how June can help your company grow—if you’re selling B2B SaaS—and save time and money, you can learn more here. 🤝

If you have any questions for me or Enzo…drop them in the comments!

As always, thanks for spending time with me here today.

Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️

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Friends, good morning. ☕

Three quick notes before we get started…

1. I want to apologize to all of you for how long it’s been since my last deep dive or From The Garden essay. My mom passed away unexpectedly, and I’ve been struggling to write and feel very creative over the past 2 months. Each time I’ve sat down for the long-form stuff, I’ve become quite overwhelmed. But, our next deep dive will be next week! And I’m feeling better about returning to our regular programming. Thank you for bearing with me.

2. On a lighter note…WE DID IT! Apple is scaling back production of their Vision Pro headsets. Some sources say they could stop making the existing version entirely by the end of 2024. For everyone who read my essay and call to action to stop the madness, Who even asked for spatial computing?…well, let’s take some credit for dampening demand. 🤝

3. A few months ago, I spoke to the GOAT of Finance () and the GOAT of media and newsletter businesses () in Reid’s new podcast. Two 🐐’s in one episode…well worth the listen if you’re curious about the mechanics behind how newsletters get started and grow.

Growth Croissant

The Making of Mostly Metrics with CJ Gustafson

Hello friends…

Listen now

2 years ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Reid DeRamus, CJ Gustafson, and Jaryd Hermann

Okay…today’s roundup covers:

• To Go Broad, Go Deep

• The "80/20 principle" for founders

• How Your Context Changes Your Life

• To Beat the Market, You Have to Outsmart Yourself

• 10 Simple Rules of Communication

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action

(#1) To Go Broad, Go Deep

“I asked Priscilla Chan about how she balances depth of impact vs. breadth of impact.

To go broad, she told me, you have to first go deep. When she was working at UCSF Medical Center, she said, she noticed something interesting: the number one determinant of whether her patients got care was a factor she wouldn’t have expected—it was whether the BART public transit system was running on time. If the BART was delayed, patients wouldn’t make the trip to the hospital and risk missing work.

That experience gave Chan an important insight: she should invest massively in improving the BART, which would have trickle-down effects through the city and the health of her patients. This insight informed her philanthropy and work with CZI. “I never would have had that perspective,” she told me, “if I hadn’t worked in the hospital. You have to go deep before you go broad.”

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: Depth creates unique insights that are hard to replicate and hard to fake. When you see something only because you went deep in a space/trade/domain, you understand the nuances and root causes of things that other “PowerPoint founders”—people who whiteboard out markets and look for opportunities—can easily miss.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: The more time spent in the weeds before zooming out is what gives you the necessary perspective to build what you know.

• 🥇 Applying it: Ask yourself, “What’s my unique lived or work experience that has given me an insight (depth), that could inform a vision for a broader business (breadth)?”

(#2) The "80/20 principle" for founders

Scrolling through LinkedIn yesterday and I saw this absolute gem by …

(#3) How Your Context Changes Your Life

“We are more than just our minds. In fact we’re more than just our bodies. What we do, how we think, and the way we feel are all intimately connected to the context in which we exist. But for so many people now, that context is reduced to a 5-inch screen, with serious neglect to anything further than an arm’s length away.”

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: When we feel stuck and caught up in our heads, it’s often because we actually are stuck—we’re stuck in the same context. We’re sitting in the same place. We’re doing the same daily stuff. We’re operating on autopilot. In many ways, as we conform to a standard week, we all fall into a very similar environment. Except, as Zan calls out perfectly, different minds thrive in different environments.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Often the antidote to fear, frustration, procrastination, powerlessness, or overwhelm (be that at work or in our personal lives) is taking action. Taking action can often feel like the last thing we want to do in that situation, but almost 100% of the time, it’s worth doing. Action changes the context you’re sitting in and operating from, and that can change everything.

• 🥇 Applying it: Ask yourself, “How can I, even briefly, change up my context and environment?” What little experiments can you take? Maybe that’s going to work at a coffee shop today if you never do that. Or planning a weekend camping trip if you haven't been outdoors in a while. Worth thinking about.

(#4) To Beat the Market, You Have to Outsmart Yourself

“The ‘scientific’ aspect of investing is alluring, even enticing—the prospect of a grand formula that can distinguish between good and bad investments might seem like the holy grail for a capitalist. 

However, at least in venture capital, it is a goal that continues to elude the smartest and hungriest minds in the field. Even if we get the science right, it’s only part of the formula of good investing.

The second world of study is inward-facing—the study of one’s own judgment, intuition, incentives, and our natural tendency to want to outsmart ourselves: We can fabricate rationales that we know we will accept because we know ourselves.”

— Chris Paik

• 🫰 Why it matters: While inward-facing study can seem less exciting than learning some new market or trend, especially considering if taken seriously it can bring up some uncomfortable truths, “debugging ourselves” is the most important thing we can do. If never done, your algorithm for navigating both internal and external obstacles can develop and run completely unchecked.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Every single person on this planet is subject to multiple mental biases. If you think you’re not…that’s a mental bias. And the more you understand and have awareness about what they might be for you (AKA, your meta-level dynamics), the more logical, consistent, and sound decisions you can make about everything.

• 🥇 Applying it: Would you let some software you built never be tested? Of course not. So, let’s not slip into a mental bias that stops us from doing that to ourselves. A good starting point is writing down a list of emotions, motivations, instincts, and behavioral patterns that you think go into your decisions. When you’re trying to find a meme coin to put $100 into, what’s driving that? Greed? Impatience? For me, it’s a combination of both of those things. As Chris says, “In order to strengthen the muscle of self-improvement, we must hold strong opinions but listen carefully for contradictory evidence.”

(#5) 10 Simple Rules of Communication

A very wise list of wisdom curated by . What would you add?

3 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/3) Featured tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Open for guided meditations. I like to test new mindfulness apps out, and this is one that’s really been sticking with me. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my AI notetaking co-pilot. I hardly write notes anymore during meetings, and it’s a beautiful thing. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity as my new defacto search. I very seldom Google something anymore, it all goes into Perplexity. A huge research unlock. (Learn more)

(2/3) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

Read the deep dive

(3/3) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• Why Valve has no managers

• The Meme to End All Memes: The Top 100 Reasons to Oppose Trump—in One Image

• How long can we sustain economic growth?

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

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Otherwise, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

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Friends, good morning! ☕

I’m sure some of you have seen Tesla’s unveiling of their new Robotaxi, Cybercab, Robovan, and household Robot. This was all announced at their event, “We, Robot”…a very original name for a very original design concept. I wonder what inspired crazy Elon for this project?

I truly think this man gets high watching sci-fi moves and then just Slacks his team requirements. Tesla’s stock is down FYI…

Anyway, today’s roundup covers:

• A Guide to Lifelong Learning—With AI

• Non-obvious behaviors that will kill your startup

• Finding Common Ground Versus a Common Goal

• On games again…the two types of them

• The emerging startup playbook

Let’s get to it.

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action

(#1) A Guide to Lifelong Learning—With AI

“LLMs are reading companions. The author is dead…but I can always continue the conversation with Claude and have it explain what’s going on.”
— Dwarkesh Patel

• 🫰 Why it matters: I think learning is the biggest superpower there is, and LLMs give us a way to give this superpower superpowers. It unlocks a new way to learn for us, becoming a partner that makes it easier to grasp harder concepts faster and connect the dots across domains. I’ve said it before, I don’t use Google anymore. I’m all about Perplexity because it makes pulling threads and chasing rabbit holes a natural user flow.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: AI is making learning easier—and most importantly—deeper. With LLMs, we don’t have to stay stuck in the weeds when reading something dense. We can use them to break down complicated ideas quickly, and then build on that to boost our knowledge in ways we didn’t think possible. Take Google’s new NotebookLM…throw a bunch of unstructured content in there and it becomes an on-demand teacher for you.

• 🥇 Applying it: Next time you're learning something new, throw that info into any of the models and ask it questions you’d normally need a subject expert for. Follow the suggested follow-up questions and see how much deeper you go.

(#2) Non-obvious behaviors that will kill your startup

“Judge people on what they ship, how often they ship, and the impact of their work, not on whether they “stuck to the plan.” People who feel like they must stick to the plan won’t bias for impact.” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: Sticking rigidly to plans when trying to move fast can mean missing the opportunity to pivot toward what truly matters—user impact. Likewise, delaying shipping something for the proverbial "Just one more week" quickly becomes a cultural thing, compounds, and becomes a big momentum-killer over time.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Plans are important, but they shouldn’t be your guiding principle—customer and business impact is. When something more valuable for your users comes up, be flexible and adjust quickly. And when you’re tempted to delay launching for perfection, ask yourself: What’s more valuable, feedback from real users and fixing something important to them now, or an extra week of polish?

• 🥇 Applying it: Focus on shipping fast and regularly. Don’t wait for perfection—use feature flags and launch in smaller, quicker increments. Get user feedback early and iterate based on real-world results, not internal expectations. And always track impact. As the PostHog team has come to learn: Judge your team's work by the value it brings to users, not by how well they stuck to the initial plan.

(#3) Finding Common Ground Versus a Common Goal

“As sound as this advice is, common ground plays second fiddle to a closely related cousin. Even more powerful for establishing relationships is finding or creating a common goal. When objectives or goals are mutually shared, the parties engage differently. They immediately understand how they might work together toward shared success” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: Sure, finding common ground is great for breaking the ice and starting some relationship, but common goals are where the real magic happens. When two people are both driving toward the same thing, it’s no longer just about chit-chatting; it’s about making things happen. It’s a shift from surface-level similarities to shared ambitions, and that’s what builds really strong and productive relationships.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Finding a common goal instantly changes the dynamic. Instead of hoping to find random connections, you’re aligning on something bigger. It makes conversations more meaningful and focused. Plus, once you’ve got that shared goal, other commonalities tend to naturally fall into place.

• 🥇 Applying it: Next time you’re building a new relationship—whether it’s with a colleague, partner, or mentor—skip the small talk and dive straight into discussing goals. What do you both want to get done? Ask them what they’re excited about or aiming for. Once you’ve found that common goal, everything else (like shared interests or background) will flow a lot more naturally, and you'll build a more meaningful connection from the start.

(#4) On games again…and three types of them

There are basically two games you can play with your career. Many people choose the wrong one, and end up losing at both.

• Game One is optimizing for company outcome. Focus all of your energy on finding the highest leverage problems in your company and fixing them.

• Game Two is optimizing for personal outcome. Seek external signals like title, scope, and team size. Make sure you’re on the right team and working on the right things.

—

• 🫰 Why it matters: There are two games you can play in your career—focusing on making the company better (Game One) or focusing on boosting your own image (Game Two). Too many people chase the wrong game, and it backfires. If you spend all your time trying to look good for promotions and titles, you miss the bigger opportunities that come from actually solving important problems. Play the right game and watch the doors open.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Playing Game One is, at least most of the time unless you’re at a Google or Meta, the smart move because when the company wins, you win. And there’s no better financial outcome or resume line item than being part of a company that was very successful.

• 🥇 Applying it: Stop worrying about job titles and start focusing on where you can make the biggest impact at your company. If you’re thinking about launching your own thing, start practicing the Game One mindset now. The skills you’ll develop will make running your own company smoother.

(#5) The emerging startup playbook

“People used to tell founders that they should be embarrassed by their initial product; otherwise, they’ve shipped too late. That was fantastic advice when the predominant alternative was pen-and-paper or Excel. Now the alternative is mostly other modern software products.” —

I love how Kyle puts it…build a minimum remarkable product.

3 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/3) Featured tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my new AI notetaking meeting buddy. I’ve never seen actionable summaries so good—neither has my team. 10/10. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity for everything. It’s my new Google search, my go-to AI tool, and my #1 research companion. A true game-changer for me. (Learn more)

(2/3) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/3) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• Burn the Playbooks

• Actionable metrics for mobile apps

• What Your Biggest Weakness Really Is

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

Subscribe now

Otherwise, have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

Subscribe now

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My favorite thing about June is how they make it so simple to know who your users are, what features they like, and where they're stuck. Plus, they’re the only analytics tool that give company-level data by default, vs typical user data. AKA if you sell SaaS to businesses, June is perfect for you.

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Friends, good morning and Happy Friday. ☕

I shared a letter on Wednesday letting you know I was having too much fun playing with Google’s new AI tool and turning my newsletters into mind-blowingly good and realistic AI-gen podcasts. If you missed the post, you can read it here. Or, just heck out this one I made from our Roblox deep dive!

Oh, and if you missed my latest essay…Do You Love The Game?…

“There’s unlimited content out there focused on “Accelerating your career!”. Unfortunately, there’s not enough around “Is your career worth accelerating?”. - Go deeper, read the full post.

Otherwise, today’s roundup covers:

• The product engineer growth hack

• Intuition is what makes a great strategist

• The power (and importance) of forced decontextualization

• How, and why, to try an unhinged job application

• Founder math

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action

(#1) The product engineer growth hack

“My metaphor for product leadership is less chess player moving helpless pieces & more party host. “You really should talk to so-and-so! I think you’d really get along.” Keep a sense of the mood of the party, where & how to intervene.” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: Teams always want to move faster and ship better products. To get both of those outcomes, as a leader/PM/founder, go and enable more engineers to be product engineers. This works because when engineers understand the context and nuances of what users need, they can make decisions and tweaks that have large outcomes. Also, seeing the impact of their work and hearing it from customers gives them energy, and this energy turns into velocity. Also, it puts them in a position to spot small/quick opportunities for features in conversation with customers.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: As a PM, don’t be scared/protective of having engineers talk to customers and think through a product lens. It doesn’t negate your job and value. The opposite in fact. It’s you creating more leverage, which is your main job.

• 🥇 Applying it: Think about bringing engineers and customers together. Start small. Bring them into discovery conversations to observe and ask questions, and add the team who worked on a feature to post-release feedback calls.

(#2) Intuition is what makes a great strategist

“You’re not trying to see many steps in the future. You’re just trying to get clarity on what is actually happening right now, so you can decide what to do next. And speed matters just as much as accuracy. You want to try to get these decisions right if you can, but you also want to give yourself as much time as possible to keep trying if you’re wrong. This means that the metric you are optimizing for needs to have both a direction and a velocity. It’s something like “good decisions per hour”. —

• 🫰 Why it matters: High-level strategy work (e.g: We should play in this space) that people idolize and want to make memos for is overrated—there’s just not that much of it to go around. But there are tons of smaller decisions that compound, and those small decisions (when fast and accurate) are what actually determine success.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: To be great at these decisions, there are 4 inputs (Intuition, Insight Generation, Solutioning, Synthesis). Intution is a key part of quick decision making because, as Dan put it, “It’s machine that takes in questions and outputs good hypotheses as to their answer.” Simply, intuition is your operating algorithm that helps you make sense of things.

• 🥇 Applying it: Intuition can be developed by improving your understanding of the problem space at three levels of fidelity: (1) Who the customer is and what they actually care about, (2) The market/industry structure and trajectory, and (3) the network of ideas and knowledge inside your own company.

(#3) The power (and importance) of forced decontextualization

“When we're in a routine, it's easy to ignore the things that are around us. Then, when they're disrupted, we feel a sudden need to reevaluate and reassess. As shocking as this process can be, it can also be freeing. It forces us to rethink the way we’ve done things and be intentional about how we do them moving forward.” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: Changing things around helps you see them for what they really are. When everything sits in the same place as it always has—in the same context—we can easily overlook ever getting rid of things, assessing what matters, changing what ought to be changed, and simplifying and/or repriortizing stuff around us. Decontextualizing is a forcing function that we can apply to our homes (i.e tidying up and reorganizing), relationships (i.e reinvigorating from a rut), and to our work/careers.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Decontextualized from their normal places, things that once seemed perfectly fine where they were now may seem out of place. Once-useful things could look like clutter.

• 🥇 Applying it: Related to work, if you decontextualize and find that if given the chance, you wouldn’t take the same job you have today again, then reframe and think about whether there’s anything you can change about it. For example, find new ways to contribute or things you can add to or subtract from your job. As Deb says, “Rather than just continuing on and being dissatisfied with the job that you have, decontextualize it to make it into the job that you want.” 

(#4) How, and why, to try an unhinged job application

“I believe there are 3 approaches to good applications:

• Stellar resume: If you have Stanford/Ivy League and big tech on your resume, you’ll get pretty far with generic applications. If you don’t have a stellar resume (if just because the impressive things you’ve done don’t work well on resumes), it’ll be hard — especially because a ton of roles get filled via referrals, not applications from strangers.

• 15 extra minutes: This is the 80/20 version: Spend a few extra moments recording a Loom video about the company’s product, website, etc. If you’re an engineer, maybe find a bug and outline a fix. If you’re a marketer, review the copy on the landing page. etc. This will set you apart from 90% of people.

• 15 extra hours: This is what I did — it’s where you do something crazy and spend a ton of time on a great application. This will set you apart from literally everyone else.?”

—

P.S you can see Finn’s application here for inspiration. Consider me inspired!

• 🫰 Why it matters: Standing out in a pool of job applicants is incredibly and increasingly hard. Run-of-the-mill apps that take a few minutes just won’t cut it anymore in this market.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: If there’s a company, especially an earlier stage startup, that you really want to work for and see a great fit—go so much further than anyone else to stand out. You don’t need a network introduction, you need a jawdropping differentiator that shows the team your passion to work for them. Even if they don’t have an open role, they may even add one for you if you do this right.

• 🥇 Applying it: Finn’s advice is perfect: The best way to ensure your best shot at getting a job is to apply by just doing the job. Act as if you already got hired and produce something. In other words make something relevant just for that company.

(#5) Founder maths

Below is a quick simplification for startup building. The only thing missing from this is focus and execution. In other words, to win, you must also…

1. Prioritize the most important things.

2. Remain focused on those priorities.

4 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/4) Featured tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my new AI notetaking meeting buddy. I’ve never seen actionable summaries so good—neither has my team. 10/10. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity for everything. It’s my new Google search, my go-to AI tool, and my #1 research companion. A true game-changer for me. (Learn more)

(2/4) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/4) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• 3 things I learned from owning plants

• Biggest Megaprojects Under Construction in 2024

• Your boring data is actually marketing gold (here's how to mine it)

• Let's evaluate Kamala Harris' entire economic policy program!

(4/4) Latest posts from the newsletter ✨

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it…

• Um, this is nuts! 🤯

• Do you love the game?

• 🌱 5 new insights for product builders (#76)

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

Subscribe now

Otherwise, have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

I just stumbled on a new experimental tool by Google—NotebookLM.

It appears to be a personalized AI research assistant powered by Google's most capable model, Gemini 1.5 Pro. When you upload documents (websites, Google Docs, or anything else) that are central to your projects, NotebookLM instantly becomes an expert in the information that matters most to you.

Easy to see how that could be cool to PMs.

I’m still figuring out the full extent of what it does tbh, but I tried one feature and it turned any newsletter post (via URL) I gave it into an 8-minute AI-generated conversational podcast episode.

I clicked one button. Within 2 minutes I had a show, and the quality of the audio and the nuance between the two hosts truly blew me away. It’s so good.

I just listened twice, beaming over the table at my wife. She said it was because I liked hearing two people have a conversation about my work…but I just liked hearing two people have a conversation about my work. :)

It feels real. I’d love to know if this passed the uncanny valley test for you…it certainly did for me.

I tried it with two posts (one deep dive as well as my latest post). Here are the originals with the 8-minute episodes below.

P.S. Whether you’ve read the originals or not doesn’t really matter.

Original: How Nvidia Grows

The podcast…

Original: Do you love the game?

The podcast…

I’d love to know what you think because I can probably do something here with audio for older posts. Oh, and also for new ones as a teaser at the top!

Anyway, that was the highlight of my day. It’s the small things, guys. 🧘

Have a good evening, and yeah, do let me know what you think if you have an opinion!

—Jaryd

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P.P.S. Shoutout to for sharing his (and the tool) on LinkedIn

Today’s letter is brought to you by June, the best analytics product for B2B SaaS companies. Waste no time instrumenting product analytics—get instant reports with one snippet. As a HTG reader, grab 25% off your first year!

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Friends, there’s unlimited content out there focused on “Accelerating your career!”. Unfortunately, there’s not enough around “Is your career worth accelerating?”.

I want to start this piece by asking you to try watching this clip (it’s less than 90 seconds) from Adam Sandler’s ode to Basketball, Hustle, and not feeling something. I am not a sports fan, but I know I can’t.

Hustle is a basketball film, sure, but more so it’s a story about fighting for your dreams, overcoming your past, and putting in the reps to become a true professional. It’s an entertaining reminder that the path to self-actualization is a series of bets we take on ourselves. 

Changing careers or starting a company could be one of those bets. And if you’re going to do that—regardless of what scale you’re hoping for—you need focus, drive, and a lack of excuses.

Like a tripod, you must have all three. That’s nonnegotiable.

And there’s only one sustainable way to get that: You need to love the game you’re playing.

If you don’t, you probably won’t beat the next person who does. Or as Stanley Sugarman (Sandler) says, “If you don’t, don’t even bother.”

But, if you do love the game, then you’ll obsess and live it. And that is the most fundamental trait needed to win.

So, let me ask you….Do you love the game?

…and is your nonrefundable time being well spent playing the right one?

If you stopped reading right now and just really thought about the answer to that question, this would have been a minute of your time well spent.

But if you want to pull the thread a little more, below we’ll chat about:

1. Why do we play games we don’t love?

2. The result of playing these games; and the biggest opporunnity cost 🔒

3. How to change games 🔒

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1. Why do we play games we don’t love?

I turned 30 a couple of months ago, and a recurring conversation I’ve been having with friends is about changing games…like switching careers or starting something up in pursuit of finding more meaning in work.

I found it interesting that so many of my closest friends were, all around the same time, thinking about the game they were playing. As I thought about it, my take was two-fold:

1. Less interestingly: Turning 30—like January 1st—is an artificial inflection point or “new leaf” in life that probes us to think about change and how we’re spending our time. (Life hack: Any moment can be an equally compelling inflection…like right now if you wanted it to be.)

2. More interestingly: People often stumble into the first phase of their careers—being pulled into a job by following some initial opportunity or idea. When entering the second phase of their career (perhaps at around 30 y/o… although that’s just made up), they can choose to either keep playing the game they landed up in and double down, or decide to start anew, step into another one, and push themselves into a new and more conscious path.

Just thinking about me, my wife, and my immediate friends, that second point becomes very clear:

• I fell into product management accidentally through starting a company

• A friend fell into tech sales because the first real job offer he got happened to be in sales

• A friend fell into operational finance because he joined a brand new startup and that’s what they needed him to do

• My wife fell into content marketing because she was a writer and her first internship happened to be in marketing

I could go on, but you get the picture. It’s easy just to end up doing something because that’s what happened to us, versus doing something because we knew more than anything that’s how we wanted to spend our time.

When we start our careers, IMO, we loosely follow our skills and interests and tightly latch onto whatever pays us the most the soonest and makes the parents proud. I mean, at 21, the most important thing is just getting a job that helps us pay rent. I wasn’t exactly trying to answer the meaning of my life back then, and I know many face the pressure from family to pursue a "safe" or "respectable" career path.

The question though, as I’ve seen with my friends, eventually becomes Is that a game we actually love to play? Is this how we want to spend our unrefundable time?

And we must ask it. Because life is too damn short, as I’ve unfortunately very recently experienced with the unexpected passing of my mom, to play games we don’t love. Games that don’t fulfill us and give us joy, energy, and meaning.

Of course, there are plenty of people who found the game they love very early on and are lucky because they just get to keep playing it. You could well be one of them. But, there’s also a very big camp of people who keep playing unloved games.

Either they never ask themselves the question and just keep executing an infinite and unexamined loop until retirement—never having taken the time to truly reflect on what drives them—or they do ask it, but keep wasting time by falling victim to routine, not making any decisions, and keep playing out of two very sticky reasons:

1. Apathy

2. Hustle

Apathy 😑

When founders and PMs do competitive landscaping for an idea, they often fail to mention one of their most threatening competitors—people’s apathy to changing how they do things already.

Apathy = lack of care / awareness = lack of change. And that’s a very hard thing to break through because we’re all suckers to habit, inertia, and running on autopilot.

Applied to this concept of the games we play, apathy can reveal itself as a sunk cost (“But I’ve already put so much time in. Stopping would be a waste.”, just plain fear—fear of failing to do something new, fear of the unknown, or the fear of disappointing others—, or most scary, apathy can reveal itself as total lack of awareness to the problem at all.

Tell me…does this sound at all familiar?

Wake up at 7:30am. Roll out of bed, open up your laptop at 8am. Sit around in your sweatpants, make some coffee. Have a shower. Work for thirty minutes, then mindlessly scroll through some app. Play Wordle. Eat some leftovers for lunch. Stare at the computer until 5ish. Head to gym. Come home and shower. Whip up some dinner or order in. Watch a few episodes of whatever show. Scroll social media. Then go to sleep…because it was a long day.

And then you do that over and over and over again.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with that day. I’m merely calling out how easy it is to slip into weeks and months of rote/passive routine. Day after day we run on autopilot.

You can see how easy is is to not ever wonder whether the game we’re playing…and that game’s rules, norms, and expectations…are worth sticking to and sinking more of our time into.

That's the danger of an apathetic life…time will pass you by before you realize it.

Hustle 😵‍💫

The second big reason we stick to games we don’t love is out of the opposite to apathy…hustle.

Sometimes we find ourselves playing very lucrative games where the prize for winning is clear…money, ego, and social status.

And if we’re good at that game, it’s even harder to want to stop playing because money and future prospects cloud out the feeling of needing to change and spend our time doing something else.

Simply, it’s very compelling to just want to win the game we’re playing and know about vs to stop, learn a new game, and start again.

The thing is…hustle and apathy are two sides of the same coin.

With apathy, you are either too disinterested to pursue what you want out of life…or with hustle, you’re too vain to realize you are pursuing short-lived things.

Reading this and just knowing these two forces are at play gives you more awerness than most.

Unfortunately, the cost of ignoring either can be severe.

The last two sections of this post are for paid HTG members only. Consider upgrading to support my work, invest in yourself, and go deeper on this topic.

2. The result of playing games we don’t love games

Read more

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Today’s letter is brought to you by June, the best analytics product for B2B SaaS companies. Waste no time instrumenting analytics—get instant reports with one snippet.

Friends, good morning! Today’s roundup covers:

• The bucket theory of creativity

• Why we should stop innovating so much

• How to differentiate with your weaknesses during interviews

• How (and why) to use PEARL framework for interviews; and

• 12 clear signals you have a good leader

Right to it…

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action.

(#1) The bucket theory of creativity

• 🫰 Why it matters: As Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Buckets help you collect your thoughts, help with dot-connecting, drive pattern spotting, and ultimately help stir your creativity.

• 🥇 Applying it: Start by creating one bucket. For example, my buckets are newsletter ideas I have in Notion. Often just a headline. Find yours by writing down any big questions you’re wrestling with right now, or topics you want to dig deeper into. These could be single-word buckets. The simple act of defining a bucket will help you spot related information out in the wild.

(#2) Stop innovating so damn much

“ When you think about successful startups, you can think of differentiated product and growth strategies. But how many startups won because of their unique meeting philosophy? Which industry was disrupted because a startup used Discord, not Slack?” — James Evans (CEO/founder at Command AI)

• 🫰 Why it matters: When you innovate in fewer domains, paradoxically, your company becomes more innovative.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: By copying and stealing almost everything other winning companies are doing, you ultimately create the space to become more innovative where it matters—your product, growth model, GTM strategy, values, and culture. You won’t waste time and create unnecessary risk on inconsequential decisions like software, comp policies, rituals, etc.

• 🥇 Applying it: Inventing is fun, but do it very selectively. When you find your area to bet big on, go very deep on that point of differentiation.

(#3) Use PEARL instead of STAR to shine in your PM interviews

“The more your decisions were obviously right, the lower your level. In order to highlight your seniority, you need to focus on why your decisions weren’t obvious. You need to build up all the reasons that smart people thought you should do something different… until you came along with new insights that convinced them.” — Jackie Bavaro

• 🫰 Why it matters: STAR is the widely popular framework for telling a story during a job interview, but it punches below it’s weight for more senior people.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Highlighting the problem and your unique insight at the front of your story is the perfect setup to show your seniority, compared to a lower-level “Here’s what was happening and how I reacted”. Also, ending your story with what you learned gives you a chance to be leveled higher than how you performed in your story.

• 🥇 Applying it: Use the PEARL framework—Problem, Epiphany, Action, Result, Learning. Use it instead of STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to make sure your stories highlight your seniority.

The next bit relates nicely to this.

(*) Simplicity is what makes June so effective and powerful…

“Best product analytics tool I've tried. Recommend 10/10” — Jonathan, Co-founder at crowd.dev

• 🫰 Why it matters: Most companies overpay for, and underuse, their product analytics platforms; easily spending tens of thousands a year on analytics for products that are often geared toward more technical users.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: June gives non-technical users simple (yet powerful) product analytics that requires no setup. With a single snippet install, you’re all set! In just 15 minutes, you’ll have beautiful reports to start discussing.

• 🥇 Applying it: If you’re a B2B founder or PM, just test adding the JS snippet. At no cost, you’ll see what June reveals to you about your customers.

(#4) In a job interview, this is how to acknowledge your weaknesses

“One day, a young woman named Michele Hansen spotted a job opening that piqued her interest. She wasn’t qualified—the posting was for a product manager at an investment company, and she had no experience in financial services. Instead of trying to hide her limitations, she led with them:

‘I'm probably not the candidate you've been envisioning,’ her cover letter began. ‘I don't have a decade of experience as a Product Manager nor am I a Certified Financial Planner.’ Hansen got the job”—

• 🫰 Why it matters: Pure self-promotion isn’t the ticket to landing a great job. The evidence tells us another story. In one study, interviewers gave the highest ratings to applicants who were more concerned with being seen accurately than positively.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Knowing how to talk about your weaknesses, and using it to differentiate yourself, is a great way to become memorable.

• 🥇 Applying it: The next time you’re applying for a job, really think about what your biggest gaps are between what they’re looking for and your experience/skills. Then, instead of burying it and hoping they don’t see it (they will…), LEAD with it.

(#5) 12 clear signals you have a good leader

4 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/4) Featured tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my new AI notetaking meeting buddy. I’ve never seen actionable summaries so good—neither has my team. 10/10. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity for everything. It’s my new Google search, my go-to AI tool, and my #1 research companion. A true game-changer for me. (Learn more)

(2/4) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/4) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• Kamala Harris Did Something Unthinkable

• Yuval Noah Harari’s Apocalyptic Vision

• The Insane Scale of Europe’s New Mega-Tunnel

(4/4) Latest posts from the newsletter ✨

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it…

• 8 lessons from my first startup investment: Breakdowns on negative CAC, strategies of constants, creator squads, a brilliant cold email tactic, and more

• The simplest (and best) way to know if a problem is real: The new MVP (Meme Viable Problem), and a 3-step playbook to using it

• 100 books to help you Grow: The Power of the Paperback, a Database of the Top 100, and a Personal Curation

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

Subscribe now

Otherwise, have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

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Today’s letter is brought to you by June, the best analytics product for B2B SaaS companies. Waste no time instrumenting analytics—get instant reports with one snippet.

Friends, sorry for the late email today—I was recording a pod episode with a friend you may well recognize!

I’ll keep you posted when it goes live. It’s a gem.

Since it’s late, let’s just get right to it.

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action.

(#1) Bottleneck thinking

“The people who move the fastest aren’t doing more work, they are continuing to apply the right efforts to the right bottlenecks faster than anyone else.” — Dickie Bush

• 🫰 Why it matters: We like to procrastinate the problems we need to solve, and often delay the more ambiguous and complex ones for quick and gratifying wins. But, there’s usually one thing that should really matter at any given point—one thing that when solved could unlock the most value.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Business bottlenecks are everywhere and endless. But if you’re not working on the most important thing, the rest doesn’t really matter.

• 🥇 Applying it: You and your team’s momentum is all about leverage, and max leverage comes from you pulling your biggest lever within your biggest (and usually most upstream) bottleneck. So, ask yourself, what right now is your biggest bottleneck, and what one lever should you go pull?

(#2) The cost of apathy (and the problem with modern life)

“ The reality of corporate America is that if you follow the rules, do what you’re supposed to do, and maintain pleasant relationships with your coworkers, inertia takes over, and you can make a living wage while coasting through your career by answering a few emails, updating a few spreadsheets, and making the occasional presentation. But this ability to coast is dangerous.” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: Life is too short not to be intentional with your time. Do you want to spend your life not really doing a whole lot of anything, or doing a whole lot of the wrong thing?

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Jack says it perfectly—People are often “Either too disinterested to pursue what they want out of life, or too vain to realize they are pursuing short-lived things.”

• 🥇 Applying it: Passive routine is a trap; just getting up to do your stuff. To do your job. It makes it too easy to just coast by on autopilot. So, ask yourself if you like playing the game you’re playing. Because if not, the opportunity cost is your life.

(#3) Ryan Reynold’s marketing trick — ⚡ Rapid Advertising ⚡

• 🫰 Why it matters: If you didn’t watch the video, Ryan uses a technique for all his brands called Rapid Advertising. When something happens in the world, he activates his team to capture that chatter and buzz, and within a day or two, launch some zeitgeist campaign in response.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: The best marketing is relevant and timely. When moments in the world happen, don’t let them slip. Use them as an opportunity to link your brand to the conversation.

• 🥇 Applying it: Always be watching, reading, and listening to what’s going on. When pop culture events happen, even if they have nothing to do with your brand or product, ask yourself…how can you capitalize on that as a marketing angle?

(*) Simplicity is what makes June so effective and powerful…

“You don't need to spend hours configuring it or be an analytics expert to get value out of it” — Perrine, Co-founder at Reveal

• 🫰 Why it matters: Most companies overpay for, and underuse, their product analytics platforms; easily spending tens of thousands a year on analytics for products that are often geared toward more technical users.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: June gives non-technical users simple (yet powerful) product analytics that requires no setup. With a single snippet install, you’re all set! In just 15 minutes, you’ll have beautiful reports to start discussing.

• 🥇 Applying it: If you’re a B2B founder or PM, just test adding the JS snippet. At no cost, you’ll see what June reveals to you about your customers.

(#4) The 3 big mistakes that almost cost me a promotion

“The job at the next level that I wanted was different from the job I currently had. I had to demonstrate organizational impact across several teams. I couldn’t get promoted by impacting and influencing only the team I was currently on. Putting my energy into being an even better senior engineer wasn’t getting me closer to becoming a principal engineer.” — (ex-Principal Engineer at Amazon)

• 🫰 Why it matters: If we’re playing someone else’s game, then we win by climbing the ladder and leveling up. Yet as we play, this is a common oversight. Crushing it in your current role isn’t enough for promotion.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: What got you here won’t get you there.

  

• 🥇 Applying it: Go look at your company’s leveling criteria, learn what’s expected at each role, and then carve out a plan with your manager to demonstrate those responsibilities/behaviors. And as a manager, make sure you’re helping your team grow by doing the inverse here.

(#5) Life advice from Sam Altman

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4 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/4) Featured tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my new AI notetaking meeting buddy. I’ve never seen actionable summaries so good—neither has my team. 10/10. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity for everything. It’s my new Google search, my go-to AI tool, and my #1 research companion. A true game-changer for me. (Learn more)

(2/4) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/4) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• Turn ordinary moments into memorable ones with the ‘Last Time’ technique

• The Opportunity Cost of Everything

• Fever Feels Horrible, but is Actually Awesome!

• The Fall and Rise of Nicolas Cage: A Statistical Analysis

(4/4) Latest posts from the newsletter ✨

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it…

• 8 lessons from my first startup investment: Breakdowns on negative CAC, strategies of constants, creator squads, a brilliant cold email tactic, and more

• The simplest (and best) way to know if a problem is real: The new MVP (Meme Viable Problem), and a 3-step playbook to using it

• 100 books to help you Grow: The Power of the Paperback, a Database of the Top 100, and a Personal Curation

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

Subscribe now

Otherwise, have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

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Friends, I just made my first startup investment. Today’s deep dive is a tad different, where I’ll share what stood out most to me about the company’s approach. My hope is that sharing this will add to your mental model and inspire some ideas to help you with your own product.

For example, have you ever heard of negative CAC, a strategy of constants, or using a suite of brands to sell your product? Yup, neither had I.

I learned this from Athyna.

Athyna helps companies grow their full-time teams by unlocking great talent in non-obvious emerging tech markets like LATAM. They get rid of the headaches that come with building a distributed workforce, they use AI to match talent and companies ridiculously fast, and they add tons of value to both ends of an important equation: They help companies save money, while simultaneously helping the people working there make more of it.

But that’s impossible, Jimmy!

When industries mature, growth slows. And when growth becomes more expensive, efficiency becomes the name of the game. Efficiency means sustainability, and that means founders need to obsess over healthier profit margins.

This is just how the world works. As my favorite economist, Noah Smith explained it; this is where we’re at with the tech industry since most things on the internet have now been built.

The result of this maturity and cost of growth is real…startup failures in the US have jumped 60% over the past year. Also, according to Carta, the bankruptcy rate of startups is 700% more than in 2019.

Ultimately, startups fail when they run out of cash. And in tech, headcount is by far the biggest line item—often accounting for ~70% of a company’s budget.

Athyna is in the business of bringing that number way down without compromising on talent quality. In a time of expensive growth, Athyna helps make it affordable again, giving startups essential extra runway.

That’s a bet I can (and did) get behind.

What to expect 🤝

The rest of this piece will unpack 8 new ideas on product, growth, strategy, and startup building I’ve learned studying how Athyna grows. Here’s a peek:

1. The power of embedded media companies

2. Creator-squad growth

3. A strategy of constants

4. Mind the shiny object

5. The cold email growth hack

6. The sidecar product trick

7. A simple, but hard, superpower.

8. Build what you can consume

20-minute read.

If you want to learn more about how Athyna can help your company grow and save on your biggest cost, you can learn more here or just book a call.

Check out Athyna

1. The power of embedded media companies

💡 Big idea: Modern media companies (e.g. NYT) have a software company embedded inside. But, next-gen software companies will have media companies embedded inside.

🫰 Why it matters: Embedded media companies can create negative CAC and turn lead gen into a profit center. And with growth becoming more expensive, founders who don’t build a media/creator strategy may struggle with it in the coming years.

🥇 Applying it: An easy first step is investing in your personal brand. Social media or starting a newsletter is a tool to grow your audience and therefore your business. Or, you could consider buying a small newsletter/podcast.

Let’s go deeper…

People were confused when HubSpot acquired The Hustle newsletter and the My First Million podcast. What business does a SaaS company have buying two media companies?

Well…

1. HubSpot wants to grow in the SMB and mid-market.

2. CAC through traditional marketing and sales here is very crowded/expensive

3. That CAC is only going to increase as those channels get more saturated

4. Newsletters & podcasts are good at building large and engaged audiences for very little cost.

5. Those SMB & mid-market decision-makers read/listen to The Hustle & MFM

6. By owning them, HubSpot drives brand value and can reach them for free

7. Bonus: These companies will keep making money to pay back the investment

Unpacked like that, it’s hard not to see the brilliance of the strategy.

And it’s clearly worked. Since then Hubspot has built the Hubspot Podcast Network which now has 34 unique podcasts all focusing on at least one of HubSpot's ICPs. They’ve doubled down on this “Own your own media” play and are hoping to find the next MFM early.

They’re not alone.

• Pendo acquired Mind the Product—a PM community and newsletter.

• RobinHood acquired MarketSnacks—a financial newsletter for consumers.

• Mailchimp acquired Courier—a business magazine

• Zapier acquired Makerpad—a no-code newsletter.

• SemRush acquired Backlino—a marketing newsletter.

By owning these embedded media companies, these software companies are all enjoying what Bill calls negative CAC through this channel and organically integrating their brand in extremely valuable, non-salesy, content.

It’s such a winning move.

And Athyna is doing exactly that with the Open Source CEO newsletter that boasts a wild 40,000+ subscribers and sold-out sponsors.

The only difference is Athyna didn’t have to buy it because it’s written by Bill! With every email that Bill is paid to send, his media co. drives leads to Athyna.

To build or to buy…

If you’re a bigger company wanting to break away from expensive channels, you’re probably best off buying one because you’re getting the right audience instantly, vs being distracted and having to build one yourself.

As Kyle Poyar says,"Big SaaS companies with billion-dollar valuations can afford to treat media acquisitions as experiments and as an insurance policy against uncertain future outcomes. They don’t necessarily need to build a comprehensive business case with board-approved targets in order to get the green light on an acquisition. These types of acquisitions haven’t been proven out yet among earlier stage (Seed-Series C) or more cash-constrained companies.”

But as Athyna and Bill show us, startups can also invest in their own, independently branded and run, newsletters or podcasts to feed their core business. For instance:

• PostHog has Product For Engineers co-authored by the team.

• beehiiv has Big Desk Energy by founder/CEO Tyler Denk.

It’s not easy doing this while running a company, but Bill has great advice on how to do it.

We now know software companies owning an embedded media company get free growth. Bill saw how well it worked, and asked a simple question, “How we can 10X this?”

Instead of buying more media companies, Bill’s genius strategy was to get many media companies to buy a part of Athyna. Let’s pull the thread on this below.

🔑 Bottom line: Owning your own brand-independent media company is like having another business that gets paid to organically drive excellent leads to your main business.

2. Creator-squad growth

💡 Big idea: Go beyond paid creator/influencer marketing. Create a group of creator investors that will keep shouting your name.

🫰 Why it matters: People want to buy from other people, not brands. But an ongoing creator program can be expensive. One way to indefinitely tap this growth channel and grow while your creators grow for $0 in cash, is by raising a mini round that is creator-led.

🥇 Applying it: Think about a few “influencers” in your space that likely reach your ICP. Then test a lead-gen campaign with one or two of them. Get some data, and then model out what ~10-20 creators could do for your growth.

Let’s go deeper…

Athyna’s latest funding round of $2.5M was mostly led by 15 creators. Myself included.

The combined reach of this group is well into the hundreds of thousands of unique people, with many millions of monthly impressions. As investors in Athyna, we talk about Athyna.

The data? 40% of Athyna’s leads are now coming through this channel.

And importantly:

1. They aren’t paying any cash for this growth, allowing them to invest in other channels and R&D.

2. As these 15 media companies grow (which conservatively is probably a combined 50-100% a year), this channel becomes more effective vs how others become more competitive.

3. This growth all compounds in SEO over time given all the content is evergreen, with mounting backlinks and increased domain authorities of these growing creators

4. The word-of-mouth flywheel will spin faster.

I’ve seen more and more companies have a creator strategy, but they’re all based on paying the creators via direct sponsorships or affiliates.

I haven’t seen one besides Athyna leveraging creators by getting them to pay the company to talk about them.

It’s negative CAC on steroids.

Somebody Give Bill a Bells! 🥃

But while this idea was Bill’s baby, I must give so much credit to the team who do an extraordinary job creating a community around this group of creators. I won’t give away all the behind-the-scenes secrets to this brand-new program because Bill might slap my wrists, but here’s one thing that stands out to me.

• What they do: Athyna offers to help us with content, research, sponsorship outreach, and facilitating collabs. Plus, we all share lots of insights with each other in Slack on how to grow and monetize.

• Why they do it: Athyna wants their creator investors to be as successful as possible.

• The outcome: Growth in their creators means growth to Athyna.

Everybody wins.

The universal idea is this: Don’t be shy about giving away parts of your company to people who can have a direct hand in helping you grow it efficiently and sustainably. That’s employees. It’s key customers or partners. It could be creators…

💡 Bottom line: Every growth channel is going to become more expensive to play in over time. Investor creators could accelerate your negative CAC strategy and drive steady leads.

3. A strategy of constants

💡 Big idea: There’s a Bezos philosophy around strategy: Always focus on the constants. This means invest in the customer needs and wants that will never change.

🫰 Why it matters: It’s very easy to get caught up adjusting a strategy based on hype cycles. And, while you don’t want to stop lifting your head to see what’s changing and spot possible inflections, you mainly should focus on defining and building upon the things that endure over time.

🥇 Applying it: Find time to map out what your market’s fundamental needs are—the timeless principles that are unlikely to change in the future. Then check if your strategy clearly improves those things for your customer.

Let’s go deeper…

You can probably think of at least 5 products that have added some AI feature that feels unnecessary.

These are trend chases looking to add the Sparkle emoji to their homepage. ✨

But Athyna has based their AI strategy on the idea of constants; an idea first introduced by Bezos.

And you can always go deeper on solving your users’ constant needs.

For instance, the constants for:

• My newsletter’s are

  • Quality, novelty, and relevance of insights

• OpenAI’s are

  • Accuracy, speed, and cost of model

• Tesla’s are:

  • Battery life and price

• Boeing’s are:

  • Planes that don’t have doors flying off…

If those companies improve their constants, people will love them for it and they’ll grow.

This is all quite neat for anyone who does “strategy” work. It’s almost a cheat code for what to say Yes and No to.

Athyna had a pretty good idea of what their constants were, but to be sure, they started with a needs analysis. They mapped out the functional, social, and emotional needs of their customers and ranked them against how important and often they occurred, as well as from a solution POV how big and crowded the market was.

“Once we had our needs analysis mapped we started building. All product and features pitches needed to map back to a user need from one of our three ICPs” - Bill

It looked like this.👇

In the end, Athyna had 4 timeless needs:

• Quality talent - who doesn’t want amazing people?

• Accurate role fit - who doesn’t want the most qualified candidates?

• Fast time-to-hire - who doesn’t want to find a fit sooner?

• Low cost - who doesn’t want to save the bank?

Bill sent me this table showing how Athyna amplifies these constants—where all the constants, but most obviously those of Talent, Process, and Speed are improved with AI.

The typical recruitment process lasts 3 to 8 weeks. By using AI to search tens of thousands of profiles (quality) from markets like LATAM (cost), rate and rank them against job descriptions and various recruiter-enabled assessments (process), and push the best suggestions to recruiters (speed), Athyna gets recruiters and best-match talent speaking within 2 days.

The end result of using AI to improve the constants is their epic new product, Athyna AI.

So, what are your product’s constants? And are you investing in them?

Because the more I think about the companies we’ve covered, the more obvious it is: The companies that (1) are super clear on what their constants are, and (2) always do R&D around going deeper on them, will beat the ones who have loose understandings of them and easily chase shiny objects.

More on shiny objects coming right up…

🔑 Bottom line: The constants in your business should always be reflected in at least one of the pillars of your strategy.

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4. Mind the shiny object

💡 Big idea: Shiny Object Syndrom is a very common trap. It’s that irresistible pull toward new ideas, strategies, or projects that promise instant gratification and untold riches.

🫰 Why it matters: SOS is anti-strategy because it’s a reflection of indecisivness. If you keep chasing after something new, copying because a competitor is doing it, or just saying yes to all things that come to mind, you won’t ever make progress.

🥇 Applying it: No should be the default answer to new things. Until the evidence is clear that saying Yes clearly intergates with your strategic choice set—Where To Play, How To Win—shut that shit (politelly) down.

Let’s go deeper…

I was recently watching Dragons’ Den (the UK, and original, Shark Tank) and I saw a sad case of an entrepreneur having no idea he had Shiny Objected Syndrome (SOS). You can watch the clip here, but in short, this dude had invented over 40 things in his life—of which not one had ever made any money. He was pitching a product to the Dragons for a biodegradable cable tie, but he was also (1) writing a novel, (2) inventing a parachute for NASA, and (3) designing a new type of surfboard.

Poor Simon.

No need to tell you he didn’t get a nickel that day, and Simon’s trajectory has been eerily similar to this chart…

• Focus x Execution = up and to the right.

• Distraction x Execution = sideways (or often down) and to the right

Simply because no company can be all things to everyone. Narrowing down the strategic playing field is an absolute must. One quick pulse check you can do right now is to ask yourself (and answer honestly), “What choices have we made that have narrowed our competitive field across markets, segments, channels, categories, and ICPs?”

The tighter and more obvious the answer, the more strategically focused you are.

When you haven’t made a decision about where you want to play in the market, then hopping around to “the next best thing” like Simon is an easy slope to slip down. But, even when you have made choices, chasing the odd distraction that pulls you away from that focus (like a Sirens Song) is still possible.

This happened to me at my own startup, and this happened to Bill and Athyna. They were ramping up and seeing good growth, and got caught in the SOS whirlpool for a bit. It’s much easier than you think to fall into.

Their shiny object was to become an Employer of Record (like Deel).

They shopped this around in 2022 with top VCs when they were raising a $5M round at a $25M valuation. And they got very close to making this happen. Right in the end, the deal fell through due to a conflict of interest.

I think that was lucky. If they’d raised the $5M then, they probably would have gone down the EOR path. A hard and competitive route up against an incredible startup—Deel—that wouldn’t have charted a clear path to winning.

They ended up doing a bridge round of $500k, focused on their matchmaking marketplace which grew at 22% MoM last year, and now do $6M+ ARR.

Focus pays quick and big dividends.

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The best way to avoid SOS is to know what choices you’ve made and say no like a mad man to the things that don’t align with where you want to play, and progress how you will win in that market.

Three quick notes from me and Bill’s experience…

• Be careful of cool new tech that may provide no real value to your customer

• Be careful of entering new markets just because they are there

• Be careful of chasing ideas from investor feedback or one big customer

💡 Bottom line: You won’t grow by simply doing more things and playing in more spaces. You need to know when to go deeper on what you have, vs going wider.

5. The cold outbound email growth hack

💡 Big idea: Athyna went from sending 50 emails per week to a scaled outbound machine sending 1.2M emails per week. They did this using a suite of different sub-brands.

🫰 Why it matters: Outbound is a volume game, but, it’s hard to send a lot of emails every week because cold outreach is always going to be slowed and limited by how “warm” your email domain is. The more unique domains you use, the faster you’ll reach scale (and the higher your ceiling will be).

🥇 Applying it: If cold email is part of your GTM, consider buying a related domain, feeding it into your email machine, and ramping up its daily sends.

Let’s go deeper…

Outbound email is still one of the best ways to reach B2B buyers. It’s a simple equation—send more emails to more of the right people with the right message, and you’ll land more customers.

But getting to volume takes time because it takes about 3 months to warm up a domain to send any decent number of emails. Which is fair—that’s how we get spared from spam. Send too many too fast, and you’re digging yourself a hole.

But Bill isn’t one to dilly-dally. He had little patience to wait and slowly scale the power of the single Athyna.com domain. So, he took a play from Dr. Strange and launched a full suite of sub-brands that can each send 100K emails a day—like the little email workhorses of Athyna!

It’s quickly become their biggest growth channel, with 60 million emails being sent a year. And doing some napkin math, at $6M+ ARR, that’s an ROI of $0.1 per email.

As Bill said: “I don’t think you need that many channels to really be working to get to a big business. For several years, outbound alone accounted for 80% of our revenue. We’re still a small company, so being able to do this at our current scale leads me to believe we’re probably the best in the world at it.”

FYI, Brett Adcock sold Vettery (a talent marketplace with Athyna’s model) for $110M with the same strategy. For 4-5 years outbound was the only channel he used.

To replicate a strategy like this, simply:

• Buy more (cheap) domains

• Connect them to your outbound GTM machine (i.e Attio, Apollo, Clay)

• Start warming them up and ramping your sequences that all point to your core product

💡 Bottom line: If you’re playing the outbound email game, increase your surface area of success by using multiple domains via sub-brands to run sequences.

6. Tactical sidecar products

💡 Big idea: You can build free mini-products (AKA sidecar products) that solve a general, high-frequency problem for your ICP, some of who will then convert to the core product thanks to well placed CTAs.

🫰 Why it matters: These products are like honeypots; attracting new users to the core product with a free (and valuable) hook. They are great for PLG motions!

🥇 Applying it: Find an adjacent, wider use case that's relevant to your core product and customer, and then build a free tool to attract them.

Let’s go deeper…

I first learned of the term “Sidecar Product” when reading up on Snyk, which uses multiple mini products like The Snyk Vulnerability Database and Snyk Advisor to contribute to noticeable platform growth.

These products are not core to Snyk’s product, but they are:

1. Free to use

2. Useful to devs

3. Related to Snyks primary use case of dev security

These micro tools help build brand awareness and funnel the right people to the main lead gen motion since they always place CTAs that send people to the core.

Athyna is using a similar strategy with Ava—their AI-powered Chrome extension for job seekers.

Ava does two things:

• For the market, it helps anyone looking for a job (1) build a great LinkedIn profile, (2) tailor their job applications, and (3) get job suggestions.

• For Athyna—by creating massive, free, and related value for job-seekers—Ava connects Athyna with the perfect supply side of the marketplace: motivated tech workers who are comfortable with AI. This helps them (1) grow the depth of their talent pool, and (2) is a brilliant data play, giving them first-party insight into real-world job market data.

The second sidecar product Athyna is working on is a third-party job board. Like Ava, this opens another big door to grow the talent side of the market. Also like Ava, it doubles down on their data play. By aggregating tons of usage-based data points, they can build a really solid model that shows the state of labor and can inform where Athyna should invest.

Bill likes to compare this strategy of adding 3rd party employers to how Amazon opened its marketplace to 3rd party sellers. He even scribbled over Bezo’s 2018 letter about it.

This will drive Athyna’s core flywheel, just like it did for Amazon. That’s the power of sidecar products.

So, it’s worth thinking about what you could offer the market as a complementary onramp to your main product.

💡 Bottom line: If you build a sidecar product, make sure it aligns closely with your market’s main problem/needs map.

7. A simple, but hard, superpower

💡 Big idea: Being incredibly helpful to others eventually helps you.

🫰 Why it matters: Actually being helpful is hard. It means saying Yes to things that don’t directly progress your goals and following through. But if you can do a hard thing that other people won’t—the rewards are very high. People reciprocate, and you’ll expand your surface area of opportunity.

🥇 Applying it: The next time you’re catching up with a buddy, coworker, customer, or investor, expliclty ask them, “How can I help you most right now?”. If the answer is doable—do it.

Let’s go deeper…

What I remember most about meeting Bill, besides how flipping cool he is (he’s run with the bulls, patted lions, and swum with sharks!) was seeing a founder building and growing his business in a way that I wish I had.

A trait I quickly came to see in Bill—one that I think is a true superpower that infinitely expands one’s surface area for success—is that Bill does not stop being incredibly helpful. I’m not exaggerating. And not surface-level help, like actually really caring about how he can add value to everyone in his circles. He also asks for nothing in return.

In a world where we want to say No more often to protect our focus, offering to help and delivering on that help is hard to do. But like we saw with Stripe, if you can do a hard thing that other people won’t—the rewards are very high.

I asked Bill about how he manages to be so helpful to so many people while running a $6M+ ARR startup and building a rapidly growing media company, and if he had any advice. Of course, he was happy to help.

💡 Bottom line: Help yourself by helping others.

8. Build what you can consume

💡 Big idea: The most successful companies use their own product to grow. “Never trust a skinny chef!”

🫰 Why it matters: When you rely on your own product as a tool to be successful, it aligns the incentives with your customers, drives crafstmanship and attention to detail, and gives you ongoing feedback from being your own power user.

🥇 Applying it: Dogfood. Dogfood. More dogfood.

Let’s go deeper…

The US job market is crazy competitive, and comp packages reflect that. What’s more, predictions suggest by 2030 there will be a talent shortage in the US, particularly in the tech sector. And when things become more scarce, they become more expensive.

Athyna’s entire shtick is that companies should be growing with remote talent from underutilized and growing tech hub markets. I believe about 80% of Athyna’s supply side is the LATAM market—that’s Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.

People often think offshore talent just means India or the Philippines. That’s because most don’t really understand that the tech ecosystem in South America is as strong as any other ecosystem in the world, outside of the US.

Consider this:

• The cost of living in LATAM is significantly lower than in the U.S. This allows companies to offer competitive salaries (up to 40-50% better than local rates) that are more affordable (up to 80% less than onshore) without compromising the quality of life. Simply, offshore is an opportunity to pay a premium to talent at a discount to you.

• Emerging tech hubs in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City are producing highly skilled professionals, coming from very mature tech ecosystems.

• LATAM professionals operate within similar time zones to the U.S., meaning significant overlap (6 hours or more) for collaboration.

• Establishing a presence in LATAM can open doors to new markets and customer bases, driving business growth.

And while Athyna helps US tech companies access LATAM talent and hedge against the 2030 shortage, they themselves are also their own customer and favorite case study—using Athyna to build their competitive edge. As Bill says:

Internally, we have team members that are ex-Amazon, Uber, Oracle, Meta and more. We’d not be able to afford that type of talent had we hired them in the US, Australia etc. All of our team gets paid much more than they would locally and we give RSUs (stock) from executives to interns. So everyone is super happy.

It still makes me shake my head that people want to hire their entire team onshore, whether that be the US, Canada, Aus, or the UK. Salaries are 3-5x higher in most cases, and as Founder & CEO I need to make the best decisions for our shareholders.
So I need to ask, "Will this marketing, sales, creative, product hire add 400% more value because they are boots on the ground in the US?”. And the answer is almost always a “Hell no”. So it would be irresponsible for me to hire in the US.

Of course there are some exceptions, boots on the ground enterprise sales and CS, events, some high level comms that we will hire local to our target markets in the future but that’s it really. We are creating a huge, valuable company, that we are all owners of today and the best way to maximise that is to avoid hiring in the US.

This was definitely a factor in my decision to invest. I believe companies that spend time using their own products and building for themselves just as much as they build for their customers are low-key awesome drivers of growth, as well as craftsmanship inside the product.

How could you not care more when you’re also a power user?

🔑 Bottom line: The more that you and your team use your own product, the higher the quality bar (and customer empathy level) will be.

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And that’s the end of our Athyna analysis. I hope you found this post helpful and enjoyable, and appreciated the Smart Brevity I’ve been practicing! 🙏 s/o to for putting that book on my radar.

Once again, if you want to learn more about how Athyna can help your company grow, you can learn more here or just book a call. 🤝

If you have any questions for me or Bill…drop them in the comments!

As always, thanks for spending time with me here today.

Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️

Further study on Athyna… 🕳️🐇

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work

• The life of a tech CEO in a rocket ship startup

• Interview with Bill about his side hustle

• Bill’s philosophy on stock and compensation

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Friends, today’s roundup has some gems. We’re covering 10 hilarious and true startup lies (like how "We have a disruptive business model" is code for we're not making any money yet), as well as an observation on how just because there is a gap in the market doesn’t mean there is a market in the gap…plus more bite-size insights.

p.s I was listening to this deep house classics vinyl mix while writing this morning. So smooth.

5 big ideas; 5 calls to action.

(#1) Smaller companies using a new AI-native tech stack will no longer need to grow their team to scale and reach $10M+ revenues.

“Within a few years, small business owners will be able to pose simple questions to their data using natural language. Their business tools will advise on pricing, optimization for taxes, converting leads to sales, and will offer various forms of “autopilot” for operating a business. Small teams will be able to make sense of data and gain enterprise-grade security that was never possible without large teams.” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: Instead of growing (and adding costs) to scale, teams will refactor to what Scott calls an “intent-driven” AI tech stack, and with it, creativity driven by generalists will be more important than productivity driven by specialists. AI gives the small the advantages of the big.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: This also means we as consumers will demand smaller-scale, human-crafted, and more meaningful versions of things. Simply, as the cost to compete as a small business goes down, artisanal and story-driven products will stand out.

• 🥇 Applying it: Think about what new products must be built to support the “scaling without growing” era for SMBs. One example is new ways of hiring and incentivizing talent—exactly like what Athyna is doing.

(#2) Ship or die—and index on what you know is needed.

“A lot of founders are scared of criticism. The truth is, if your company is going to be successful, the users who encounter your product in the first few months are such a tiny fraction of all future users. I’d rather our first 10 users tell me why our product blows so I can fix it prior to onboarding the next 10,000. Giving access to a few dozen beta users was the greatest shortcut we ever discovered.” — Tyler Denk

• 🫰 Why it matters: beehiiv launches products ridiculously fast, and they had to when they entered a super competitive market. This has led to two operating principles that are tried-and-true levers of growth: Ship or die, and Speed over perfection.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: To help them manage a very long list of product ideas/gaps, they prioritized what to build, in this order, based on 5 pillars: (1) Their first-hand experience of what the market needed, (2) Preventing users from churning, (3) Unblocking potential new users, (4) Counter-positioning competitors, and (5) Direct user feedback.

• 🥇 Applying it: Notice how they focused on what they, as domain experts, knew the newsletter creator needed before ideas from customers. AKA don’t just build what people ask for.

(#3) Disciple is overrated. Build systems that minimize choice.

“In the context of a car, think of discipline as the safety break; it’s important to have in specific situations, but if you are using it all the time, you are not driving well. Instead, set yourself up so that whether you have good discipline or not, you are regularly making choices that will get you closer to your goal(s).” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: Most people lack discipline.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: With a good system, your discipline is largely taken out of the equation. This means less reliance on the will to do something, and more emphasis on making the way to do simpler.

• 🥇 Applying it: Spend time upfront figuring out the best way to get to your goal, then build a system that makes it difficult to fail. For example one of the most important things for me is to write great content and grow my newsletter— so I set up my system to routinely make the time.

(*) Grow as a leader with Sidebar’s curated network.

“I’ve sped up my own learnings probably five ot ten times as fast as I was before I was doing Sidebar” — Ashley Chang (Co-Founder/CEO)

• 🫰 Why it matters: Leadership challenges are universal. Whether it’s seeking advice or needing support, we don’t always know the right answers.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: You can experience huge personal and career growth with Sidebar (93% of their members say they saw significant impact) thanks to their exclusive network of leaders from FAANG companies, and epic startups like Canva, Athyna, and Gusto. It’s like your own personal board of directors.

• 🥇 Applying it: If you’re growth-oriented and ambitious and want a competitive edge, consider joining Sidebar to get insights and opportunities not found in your run-of-the-mill networks.

(#4) Your product is not their problem.

“As a young marketer, I made this mistake all the time— thinking that my product was a solution to someone’s problem—without ever understanding what problems the customers really had. And that I needed to have all the answers when in fact I didn’t even understand the questions.” —

• 🫰 Why it matters: If the market is not currently solving the problem your product does, it may not be a problem they’ll pay to solve.

• 🔑 Bottom Line: Just because your product has clear benefits, doesn’t mean they matter. Don’t underestimate apathy as a competitor.

• 🥇 Applying it: Once you spot a gap in the market, always make sure there is a market in that gap. To repeat it: Gaps in the market do not mean a market in the gap!

(#5) Ten startup lies

I saw this post by Guillaume Moubeche (founder of Lemlist, Lempire, etc) and just had to share. 🤣 I’ve pasted it below for convenience.

• “Forbes 30 under 30” —> I paid a PR firm $50,000 so my mum could be proud of me

• “We decided to raise less money for this round because we don’t really need it” —> We did a down round, and I now only own 5% of my company

• "We have a highly experienced advisory board." —> A few industry experts agreed to have coffee with us once.

• “Our sales team is crushing it!” —> About 25% of our sales team hit quota

• “We’ve been developing our own AI for years” —> We use chatGPT and have a nice UI

• "We have a disruptive business model." —> We're not making any money yet.

• "Our burn rate is under control." —> We're running out of money, but we're trying to sound optimistic.

• "We have a strong company culture." —> We occasionally order pizza and play ping pong in the office to keep morale up.

• "We're in talks with several Fortune 500 companies for partnerships." —> We had one introductory call with an intern at one of those companies.

• "We've growing 100% month-over-month" —> We have 2 users, last month we had 1.

What would you add?

Leave a comment

(Lesson from the Archives) Watch out for your blindspots that may lead you into a high-risk, high-reward, experiment to validate the most important thing underpinning your business.

“Having deep expertise in your domain as a founder is a massive advantage. By and large, that’s because it means you understand the market and customers deeply and are in a leveraged position to uncover a unique insight into a problem.

But, in Quibi’s case, the founding team’s vast experience and previous successes worked against them. Jeff and Meg’s conviction that this is where the market was going and what people wanted was so strong, that they simply did not accept the notion that they could be wrong. And if you’re that confident and sure in yourself, you can see how “building lean” and rolling something out more incrementally all seem like a waste of time.” — me

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4 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑‍🎓

(1/4) Featured tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my new AI notetaking meeting buddy. I’ve never seen actionable summaries so good—neither has my team. 10/10. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity for everything. It’s my new Google search, my go-to AI tool, and my #1 research companion. A true game-changer for me. (Learn more)

(2/4) How I can help you grow 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/4) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇

• The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack — one of the most vulnerable and honest pieces on mental health.

• Sinking Lego Ships — I have no idea why, but this video of a guy building LEGO machines to sink LEGO boats took me down such a rabbit hole.

• Training an unbeatable AI in Trackmania — another video that visualizes in such an entertaining and smart way how reinforced machine learning works.

(4/4) Latest posts from the newsletter ✨

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are three of the most recent editions.

• The simplest (and best) way to know if a problem is real: The new MVP (Meme Viable Problem), and a 3-step playbook to using it

• 100 books to help you Grow: The Power of the Paperback, a Database of the Top 100, and a Personal Curation

• How CommandBar Grows: A deep dive into a new layer of the internet

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or if you’d like to both (1) support my work, and (2) unlock premium essays like these, consider upgrading to paid.

Subscribe now

Otherwise, have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

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Friends, we’ve been overthinking what an MVP should be. And I’d like to propose a simpler, faster, cheaper, and more agile way of figuring out if your idea has any legs.

With this new style of MVP, you could have your problem validated within just a few hours from right now.

The Idea…💡

Start with a meme. Instead of building a landing page or a traditional Minimum Viable Product to test demand, focus on capturing your problem with a funny image. Then, share your meme with a community that you think has the problem.

This is the Meme Viable Problem, and the results are fast, high-signal, and easy to interpret.

Why it matters…🫰

Memes are one of the best modes of concise and thoughtful communication.

People think memes are just joke images, but don’t underrate them! What makes a great joke? A deep insight and commentary on something relatable that’s shared with great brevity.

Memes force clarity and simplicity and prevent you from overthinking the scope of an MVP. The process of making a meme (which is super easy) also creates an opportunity for you to check that you understand what the problem is and can articulate it in a way that resonates with others.

Traditional MVPs can easily focus on the wrong things. Memes get to the heart of your main assumption, and guide you towards (1) the right audience, and (2) speaking the language of that audience.

The bottom line… 🔑

If you can convey the problem you want to solve in a meme and people resonate with it, then the problem is real. If nobody cares for your meme, then either (a) it’s not a real problem, (b) you haven’t captured why people should care about it quite right, or (c) you’re wrong about who has the problem.

All are excellent and validating outcomes that cost $0.

Let’s go a bit deeper, covering:

1. Memes by the numbers, and why they matter

2. 2 problems with the traditional MVP

3. The 3-step Playbook to the Meme Viable Problem

The rest of this post is for paid HTG members only. All the other content in How They Grow is free—only the “Deeper” section of this one newsletter series is paywalled. Consider upgrading to support my work, invest in yourself, and get the juicier scoop.

Read more

Friends, not that anyone asked for this, but if any of you enjoy a good live set, I thought I’d share this one banging deep house mix I’ve been just playing again and again. I may be biased, but the backdrop is just gorgeous. Biased, because that’s my hometown—Cape Town! 🇿🇦

Onto the (more) serious stuff… I do have one quick question for y’all.

5 snackable insights

(1) If the internet is mostly complete…where does tech go from here?

🔑 Quote: “Fundamentally, I think the boom in tech returns was about the building out of the internet. And now that the internet has been pretty much built out, I think it’s not clear if any other effort — AI, deeptech, etc. — can offer the same kind of huge rewards for small commitments of capital.” —

• We’re in the zero-sum game of the internet. When everything has been built, and we have finite time to use these things, then the success of any new product will mostly come at the expense of cannibalizing the attention given to an existing product. This is just what happens in mature industries.

• This is especially true at the consumer layer. There’s no room for “We’re an app that…”, and a few geeks in a garage building a billion-dollar business is likely a bygone era.

🏃 CTA: In a world of slower growth (aka in mature industries), efficiency becomes more important than growth. The goal is bigger profit margins. 

👉 Read the full post by Noah Smith

(2) You really don’t have to be a manager…and perhaps we should stop making all the best ICs one…

🔑 Quote: “Unfortunately, many people see management as an inevitable part of a successful career. But as I learned the painful way, management is not just a title. It’s a skill—and not a particularly easy one.” —

• Being a great IC does not mean you will be a great manager, yet that’s how managers are chosen. And it results in a) losing a great contributor, and b) gaining a shitty manager.

• The people who really want to be managers often shouldn’t be. And the people who love IC work are often best rewarded for great work by keeping them on that track.

🏃 CTA: If you like managing people problems and mentoring, then perhaps management is for you. Otherwise, you can get the prestige and comp with a Staff of Principal role. And as a leader...normalize IC leadership!

👉 Read the full post by Elena Verna

Most companies overpay for, and underuse, their product analytics platforms.

It’s true…

They easily spend tens of thousands a year on analytics, but the products are often geared toward more technical users who need to know how to configure the data to get what they want. Meaning, there’s a big usage delta.

That’s where June comes in. June gives non-technical users simple and free product analytics.

By being hyper-focused on serving early-stage B2B companies, June does two unique things:

1. Instead of “user” based analytics, they focus on “company” level analytics…which is exactly what SaaS companies selling to other businesses need.

2. With just a single snippet install, you’re all set! Within 15 minutes, you’ll have beautiful reports to start discussing with your team.

If you’re a B2B founder or PM, I’m not saying switch right now. But give it a look or try—just add the JS snippet, and at no cost, see what June reveals to you.

Try June for Free

(3) Why are all the big tech companies (e.g. Netflix, LinkedIn, Apple) betting big on gaming?

🔑 Quote: “Netflix seeks to leverage its existing intellectual properties by creating games based on popular shows like "Stranger Things" and "The Queen’s Gambit." This strategy not only extends the life of its content but also attracts fans of these shows to explore new, interactive experiences, thereby deepening audience engagement” —

• Many companies that are in the business of holding your attention—whether through entertainment (Netflix) or information (NYT, LI)—are looking to expand their ecosystems to include the most attention-holding category there is. Games.

• The “game” is simple: Broaden the entertainment ecosystems with integrated gaming experiences that require no additional hardware or subscriptions. This is both an attention honeypot and a revenue diversification play.

🏃 CTA: I’d go read this brilliant post on the power of Mini-Games Marketing. TLDR—there’s an attainable opportunity in gaming for every business!

👉 Read the full post by Bandan Jot Singh

(4) How you can spot a Supertrend and find your next (big) idea?

🔑 Quote: “Finding and investing against the right supertrend may mark the difference between a lucrative career and one spent scrabbling for meager gains, battling against the tide of a dying sector.” —

• To find great ideas, you must become an information machine, consuming high-quality information at a high volume.

• One of the best ways to do this is to read books and other sources of well-researched and thoughtful writing. Other mediums (YouTube, Pods, etc) matter too.

• The trick though is to cover a wide range of interests and follow your curiosity. Because then, you can start drawing all sorts of unexpected connections.

🏃 CTA: As Buffet says, “Read 500 pages…every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

p.s If you missed my last post, here's 100 books to help you grow

👉 Read the full post by Mario Gabriele

(5) Oooh boy…are we entering an AI price-fixing dystopia?

🔑 Quote: “Instead of getting together with your rivals and agreeing not to compete on price, you can all independently rely on a third party to set your prices for you. Property owners feed RealPage’s “property management software” their data, including unit prices and vacancy rates, and the algorithm—which also knows what competitors are charging—spits out a rent recommendation. If enough landlords use it, the result could look the same as a traditional price-fixing cartel.” — Rogé Karma for The Atlantic

• Colluding with other companies on price fixing is antitrust 101 stuff, and goes against everything a free-market economy stands for—without price competition there’s no reason to innovate and add value.

• As a result, it’s a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine.

• But eerily, it seems AI may well be doing this, as algorithmic collusion appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it.

🏃 CTA: Cartels are bad, mkay? Just be very mindful of using any algorithms to set prices, ESPECIALLY if it ingests some non-public competitor data set. 

👉 Read the full post by Rogé Karma

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One lesson from the HTG archives

Besides being the best toy on the planet (I’ll die on that hill!), LEGO is also one of the most powerful brands. That’s why this will always be one of my personal favorite deep dives: How LEGO Grows.

🧩 When expanding from your core, you need to be crystal clear on a set of integrated choices…(1) What do you want to be, (2) What market do you want to play in, and (3) Why should you—and How will you—win in that market.

Why did several of LEGO’s bold bets that deviated from the core not pan out?

The trend was randomness, over extension, and a lack of cohesive innovation around a specific and emerging opportunity.

They didn’t identify some killer threat (like film was for Kodak, or streaming for Blockbuster) and go after it. They pushed into as many new markets as possible, and just wanted to diversify their channels/segments/products, etc. In this sense, it was like throwing spaghetti to the wall.

AKA, by trying to expand on all fronts, they took on too many big bets in a short period of time — losing the focus and disciple that got them there.

An excerpt from the LEGO deep dive…👇

Before we say goodbye…

(1/3) Here’s what I use to grow 🛠️

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Circeback as my new AI notetaking meeting buddy. I’ve never seen actionable summaries so good—neither has my team. 10/10. (Learn more)

• I use Perplexity for everything. It’s my new Google search, my go-to AI tool, and my #1 research companion. A true game-changer for me. (Learn more)

👉 View my full stack.

(2/3) How I can help you 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

(3/3) ICYMI ✨

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are three of the most recent editions.

• 100 books to help you Grow: The Power of the Paperback, a Database of the Top 100, and a Personal Curation

• How CommandBar Grows: A deep dive into a new layer of the internet

• The end of the homepage, sharing the right details, boring signup screens

And that’s everything for this week’s edition. If you enjoyed reading today’s letter, feel free to forward it to someone!

Otherwise, have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

Instead of our usual 5-Bit this morning, I’m writing with Doc (aka my buddy Bill Kerr)—founder of Athyna and author of one of my favorite newsletters—Open Source CEO.

Success in pretty much anything is going to be influenced by lots of factors—background, education, wealth, opportunities, luck, etc—but there’s one tool that plays a key role in being a universal equalizer: Reading a good ‘ol book.

Flipping the pages offers a gateway to knowledge, wisdom, and insights that can shape the trajectory of any business (or personal) journey, regardless of where it begins.

I say this because it’s done exactly that for both me and Bill.

Books have always been a cornerstone for both our personal and professional development. We’ve both started companies, we both write newsletters, and we both agree that stealing the hard-won insights from others has been a huge growth lever.

They serve as mentors, providing crystalized advice and lessons from some of the greatest minds across industries. For entrepreneurs, reading is not just a hobby; it’s a strategic advantage.

So, we’re sharing a curated (and trackable) database for you of the top 100 books in business. Use it to find your next read, or follow along with your own reading journey.

Subscribe here to Open Source CEO to enjoy the download.

Get the list

Below is a rundown of a few collections, as well as at the end, each of our personal favorites.

Let's see what the fuss is about

The Top 10

1. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

2. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl

3. Principles, Ray Dalio

4. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

5. Zero to One, Peter Thiel

6. The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss

7. Influence, Robert B. Cialdini, PhD

8. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

9. Shoe Dog, Phil Knight

10. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Bill Gates

• Shoe Dog, Phil Knight

• The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

• Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari

Every morning and every evening I block out an hour and a half for reading, and it's made me substantially better at my job. 

Oprah Winfrey

• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy

• Becoming, Michelle Obama

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Sam Altman

• The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

Melanie Perkins

• The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma

• Designing the Obvious, Robert Hoekman

Steve Jobs

• The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen

• Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

Brian Chesky

• High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove

• The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger

• Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh

Sheryl Sandberg

• Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling

• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

• Play Nice But Win, Michael Dell

I probably shouldn’t admit this since I work in the tech industry, but I still prefer reading paper books.

And a few from me and Bill

My recommendations

Non-fiction:

• Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling, Matthew Dicks

• I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Ramit Sethi

• Letters From A Stoic, Seneca

• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

• The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson

• Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt

• Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, Chriss Voss

• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan

• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Steven Pinker

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman

• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake, Steven Novella

• The Charism Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, Olivia Fox Cabane

• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, Kim Marbourgne

• Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor

• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker

• Hidden Genius: The Secret Ways of Thinking That Power the World’s Most Successful People, Polina Marinova Pompliano

• Principles: Life & Work, Ray Dalio

• The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, Peter Zeihan

And life is too short just to read non-fiction. So, I’m always reading at least a few just for fun books throughout the year. I’d suggest the same—don’t be boring.

Here are 5 that I loved:

• The Silo Trilogy (Wool, Shift, Dust), Hugh Howey

• This Perfect Day, Ira Levin

• The Stand, Steven King

• 1984, George Orwell

• Wayward Pines Trilogy (Pines, Wayward, The Last Town), Blake Crouch

Bill’s recommendations

Non-fiction

• Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson

• The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel

• Guns, Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond

• Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

• Principles, Ray Dalio

• At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Bill Bryson

• Shoe Dog, Phil Knight

• The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger

I also believe massively in the power of fiction. It’s great for me to be able to switch off but you can also learn a lot from the best fiction.

Fiction

• Ready Player One, Ernest Cline

• Project Hail Mary & The Martian, Andy Weir

• The Dune Series, Frank Herbert

• A Song of Ice & Fire, George R.R. Martin

• The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy

• 1984 & Animal Farm, George Orwell

I’ll leave you with this. Books are more than just sources of information or a way to shape your thinking. They’re a way to pull the thread and follow your curiosity down all sorts of unexpected (and delightful) paths.

My reading level has fluctuated over the years, but the best advice is to find some level of disciplined approach to reading and applying the lessons learned.

Honestly, reading is a flywheel. Once you get going it’s a very hard-to-break habit—and as the wheel keeps spinning, all the nuggets ingested compound until all sorts of wonderful dots connect.

Find your next read here.

Download database

Alrighty, that’s everything for today. If you haven’t yet, go swing Bill a follow over at the Open Source CEO newsletter—he shares stories from building Athyna, interviews with legendary builders, and just all around is one of the more helpful writers out there.

Until next time.
—Jaryd

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✨ The latest from HTG ✨

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are three of the most recent editions.

• Is this thing on?: A thought on the power of defaulting things to On

• How CommandBar Grows: A deep dive into a new layer of the internet

• The magic of small engineering teams, mastering the founder letter, & more

Happy Friday, everyone! ☕

Sorry this post is a bit late. I had an interview with a founder early this morning for an upcoming deep dive so my morning just got pushed a bit.

Fun update…I was on a billboard in Times Square this week. 🙃 More on that below! Also, I got a PlayStation this week. I’ve been playing Last Of Us, but if any of you have an account and play Call of Duty, let me know and we can jam. 🫡

Otherwise, let’s just get to it.

Try June for Free

5 actionable insights from this week

(1) Is the classic homepage out, and is immediate, ungated, and interactive value in?

As says in this essay

Users are searching less and less for specific solutions for their problems but get introduced to them through word of mouth, content pieces that link back to them, or channels. If this is true for your product as well, in that users are coming with a specific Idea, then you can just slap them in the face with your ungated experience, treating the Website as an optional support tool rather than an introduction.

• Leah argues that for PLG companies, ungated tools or interactive demos can be a more valuable first experience in getting people to try your product and share their email.

• Why? Because homepages are often just business cards telling people what you do, but as Leah noted, people are often landing on a page with more intent after learning about a product elsewhere.

• The best example of giving users the value they want over telling them what you do is Google. Imagine Google told you about itself first, and then you had to click a button to go search for something. That would be an awful experience. Here are another two examples of leading with interactive value:

  • Perplexity and Rows

(2) Attio pulled off an incredible influencer campaign by tapping their power users and putting their faces (including mine) on a Times Square billboard

This is an example of some brilliant marketing.

• Attio reached out to 50 influential users of their product, including creators and GTM leaders, and asked us for our opinions on how we thought AI would change the CRM landscape.

• They then slapped these insights along with our faces on a billboard.

• What’s genius, is that this campaign’s ROI had very little (perhaps nothing) to do with the actual billboard itself. Notice how their branding is limited and there’s no CTA? It was all about getting us to engage on social media and share our feature everywhere (because why wouldn’t we, our face was put in one of the most iconic places!). This brought them probably tens of millions of impressions.

(3) Use boring sign-up screens—the data tells us they generally win.

said this in his latest experiment analysis:

Even adding an illustration to an otherwise plain and functional sign-up screen is enough to hurt logins and registrations.

• When it comes to sign-up screens, there is often a tradeoff between functionality and delight.

• Fortunately, these are the easiest parts of a flow to test and get confident data on given the volume of traffic they get. And, the data shows that basic and boring screens outperform the pretty and playful ones.

• This is mostly likely because delight (think images/video/animations) is just distracting to users. Leave that for later in the flow.

(4) How to use the Market Problem Map Framework

This is the Market Problem Map, and it can be used to help you make sense of the market, its participants and their needs, as well as help you landscape all the potential segments of the market you could play in.

• In short, it works like this:

  • Vertically, fill out specific and actionable segments/personas in the market

  • Horizontally, list all the problems in the market

  • At each Segment <> Problem intersection, write down a concrete example of how that problem manifests for that persona.

  • Then, define the Level of Pain, Ease of Selling, Ease of Implementing

    • p.s Don’t get bogged down by the scores – most of the value is in relative comparisons and ranking.

You can watch a tutorial of how it works here, or grab this free Miro template to get started.

(5) Are you being too detailed in the wrong ways, and not detailed enough in the right ways?

said the following in this letter:

Too detailed in the wrong way, not detailed enough in the right way is highly situational. A detail in a certain context might be too much. But change the setting, and that same detail could become appropriate.

Why does being detailed in the right way matter? Because every detail adds cognitive load. Cognitive load means friction. And friction prevents people from doing what you want them to do.

• The wrong details slow you down and create confusion. The right details advance the conversation, create a deeper understanding, and lead to more productive discussions.

• However, sharing the right amount of detail takes an enormous amount of real-time judgment.

• Pro tip from Wes: If you think your audience might think you’re being too detailed, mention why those details are important to include.

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One lesson from the HTG archives

🧩 When demand is up for your product, build your position in the arena from a different point of view.

Study the market to spot emerging opportunities, don’t rest on your laurels, and study your competitors to understand their most important strategic decisions.

Then build a coherent strategy based on the following:

• An understanding of where you are

• A different point of view about what the big opportunity ahead is

• An honest analysis of the challenges/problems that stand in your way

• A fair assessment of your internal capabilities, and your advantages

Ask yourself, which industry rule can we challenge to generate a valuable, different position?

An excerpt from the Nvidia deep dive…👇

Before we say goodbye…

Here’s what I use to grow 🛠️

• I use Attio as my go-to CRM to manage all my newsletter sponsorships deal flow and learn more about my email network. (Learn more)

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Dovetail as our team’s customer insight hub, helping us spot patterns in feedback across channels. (Learn more)