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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.

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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

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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.

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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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

Today’s letter is brought to you by June, the best analytics product for the next generation of B2B SaaS companies.

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.

To see the magic of June for free, just add one snippet to your code and see all the reports/insights they give you. It’s wild.

Try June. Grab 25% Off.

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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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

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

✨ 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)

👉 View my full stack.

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 ↗

And that’s everything for this week’s edition.

If you enjoyed reading today’s email, feel free to forward it to someone! Or you can always hit the like button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack.

Share

Have a fantastic weekend. I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd

Happy Friday, everyone! ☕

ICYMI, I wrote about the power of Default On earlier this week—”If we focus on building (mostly) what we deem everyone wants On, we’re innately probably choosing the most important things for our customers.” It’s a short read, and if you want your next release to have greater adoption, usage, and impact for next to no effort…👇

This post is brought to you by … CommandBar.

The only platform for non-annoying user assistance, helping us product folks unleash our users*

CommandBar helps you help your users with the best onboarding layer, period. Their product suite comes with a stack of PLG powerups to help you grow, like:

• Copilot: Not just an always-learning chatbot; an embedded AI support agent.

• Spotlight: The Cmd+K shortcut that helps your users teleport anywhere.

• HelpHub: A gorgeous and personalized in-product help center.

• Announcements: Nudge with modals; use air traffic controls to never annoy.

• Questlists: Send users on fun, self-guided, interactive quests.

• Surveys: In-product feedback, from NPS to 😍🤮 and everything in between.

We’re busy buying CommandBar ourselves right now at my company. There’s no code required for any of it which is great, it integrates with all our tools, and there’s a 2-week trial period to feel the CommandBar difference.

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5 actionable insights from this week

(I) The magic of small engineering teams

I recently stumbled on the blog and it’s an absolute goldmine of insights. One POV from the PostHog team is that to keep your startup’s speed and agility as you scale, you need to keep a team that owns an area of the product or company to 2-6 people. As James Temperton says, “This startup-made-of-startups structure minimizes the number of centralized processes and the need for lots of layers of management. It biases to the maker’s schedule – and makers get shit done.”

Each team covers its own roadmap, speaks to customers, owns its metrics, figures out marketing, and manages support. They also have their own mission. If you look at the PostHog site and navigate to products, you’ll see how each product has its own team. I really like this!

Your call to action: 🏃 I don’t want to tell you to go shake up you entire process here. That’s a big deal. But I’d say just read the full post (link below as usual) and see which parts resonate with you. Ultimately, is there a way to keep the magic of a startup as your company grows?

[Go deeper: The magic of small engineering teams, by ]

(II) Mastering The Founder Letter

These are becoming more and more prevalent. 👇

It’s the founder’s letter—the long form, well-written narrative from the leader of a company—and my mate Bill Kerr (CEO ar Athyna) has an excellent deep dive on how to nail these. I’m going to grab 3 of the main takeaways Bill shared:

• Cutting through the noise with a founder letter. Founder letters can create emotional connections and stand out in a crowded market.

• The sales-led landing page. Founders are using long-form letters to sell products, by highlighting powerful problem-solution narratives.

• Annual letters to shareholders. Annual shareholder letters build trust and attract, or retain, investment.

Your call to action: 🏃 Find the strongest story you want to tell about your product, company, or vision. Then sell it passionately with the written word.

[Go deeper: Mastering The Founder Letter, by Bill Ker]

(III) Traction: How to build your business with a proven framework.

Most companies wait until the end of the quarter or year to realize that they’ve missed their goals. And only then do they try to work backwards to understand why. But by that point, it’s way too late to take action.

That’s where the philosophy behind the book “Traction” comes in, as it prevents that from ever happening. Tyler Denk (CEO at beehiiv) shared a stunning summary of this book in his newsletter. Here’s an excerpt that shows how one of the main components of the framework, “The Weekly” plays a key role in ongoing issue spotting and goal accountability:

• If your 5 year target is $250M in revenue, that might equate to 50,000 paying users (the KPI).

• That means in 3 years, you might need 30,000 paying users.

• Which means by the end of this year you’ll need 8,500 paying users.

• But if your Scorecard reveals you only added 11 paying users this week… well that’s a big fucking problem.

Your call to action: 🏃 Don’t wait to realize you missed your goal. If you know where you’re going and how you’re supposed to be pacing to get there, then it should be easy to spot problems every week, address it as an issue, determine the solution, and take a course-correcting action.

[Go deeper: Traction, by Tyler Denk]

(IV) How to Apologize

It can be hard to apologize. People often struggle to get the words “I’m sorry” out even when they are actually sorry. Bottom line—we could all probably be better at apologizing. Myself very much included.

has a great post on this. TLDR, a good apology has these key components:

1. Explicitly say the words: It’s important to actually state that you are apologizing: “I am sorry.” Avoid vague language that might dilute the sincerity of your apology.

2. Take full ownership: Be clear that you know what you did wrong. Don’t deflect blame or make excuses for your actions.

3. Emphasize empathy: Show that you understand and regret the impact of your actions on others.

4. Course correct: After stating that you’ve done wrong, the final part is giving genuine feedback on how you will do better next time to avoid the same mistake.

Your call to action: 🏃 Who do you owe an apology to? Now go to them and try say sorry armed with these 4 components.

[Go deeper: How To Apologize, by ]

(V) 10 Most Important Metrics For Evaluating a Company

For anyone in the job market right now, consider this…

from suggests (strongly) that when evaluating a company, you learn all these data points.

Your call to action: 🏃 If you’re unfamilair with any of these metrics, start by reading her post. And the next time you’re in the market and evaluating a company, note these 10 metrics. But remember, you still need to make your own calculations to figure out if an opportunity is right for you or not.

[Go deeper: 10 Most Important Metrics For Evaluating a Company, by

]

1 How They Grow lesson

Throwback to my first deep dive ever that marked Day 1 of my Substack journey… Notion!

🧩 Call out the competition. Use comparative positioning to the tools you know.

Notion calls out the competitors that it’s replacing with no shame. These are tools that are all familiar and well positioned in the minds of their audience of consumers or SMBs.

This is a simple and effective strategy to explain your product.

Your competitors have spent a ton of time and resources creating awareness for themselves and making sure end-users understand what they do — and now you’re piggy backing on that to quickly help people get what you do, and then explain your differentiator. It’s similar to the “We’re Uber for X” — but actually useful and not some fantastical statement to attract investors — because you’re instead saying “We’re replacing X”. This is a bolder statement, sure, but it’s far more useful because people don’t have to perform any mental gymnastics to figure out what you do.

An excerpt from the 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)

👉 View my full stack.

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 ↗

And that’s everything for this week’s edition.

If you enjoyed reading today’s email, feel free to forward it to someone! Or you can always hit the like button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack!

Share

Have a fantastic weekend. I’ll see you next time.
—Jaryd

Happy Friday, everyone! ☕

ICYMI, I wrote about CommandBar earlier this week. I’ve been experimenting with formats recently and think I’ve found the sweet spot that has a short version at the top for everyone who just wants the headline lessons, and the main (context-rich) deep dive below. Personally, I’m super happy with where it’s landed style-wise and I actually think this latest deep dive is the best one I’ve written.

I’d love to know if you think I’m crazy or if you agree :)

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5 actionable insights from this week

(I) Where to Play, How to Win

There are only ever 5 choices anyone or any company ever needs to make to have a strategy. Just 5.

It’s a model I’ve been learning more about, and it’s called Strategic Choice Cascade which is built on the premise that strategy is a series of choices that take you from ambition into a go-to-market strategy that can be operationalized.

At its heart, Playing to Win relies on five pillars: the winning aspiration, where to play (i.e the part of the market to compete in), how to win (i.e the unique right to win), the core capabilities needed to win, and management systems required to support said capabilities. The idea is each answer must integrate. If you can’t clearly answer one of the five questions, you must go back to the last question you can answer.

Your call to action: 🏃 No company can be all things to everyone, so narrowing down the strategic playing field is a must. Ask yourself, what choices have you made that narrows your competitive field across markets, segments, channels, categories, and ICPs in which you want to compete?

[Go deeper: How Strategy Really Works, by Roger Martin]

(II) A brilliant trick to use whenever you forget someone’s name

We’ve all forgotten somebody’s name before that we ought to have remembered. You know, when you’ve met someone more than once and it’s got the point where it’s too late to just plainly say you forgot their name?

I certainly have. That’s why I loved this advice by Peter Mukherjee. I told it to a coworker yesterday at drinks and they thought it was brilliant, so here I am passing it along to you.

You say to them, looking straight into their eyes and with a smile: “‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t remember your name?”.

“Ben”, they say.

Then, you say: “I know it's Ben! It’s your second name I can’t quite recall…”

“Carlton”

“Carlton!! Yes of course. I’m sorry Ben, just had a complete mental block for a moment!”

Your call to action: 🏃 The next time you’re awkwardly forgetting someones name, just remember that it’s perfectly plausible (and forgivable) to have forgotten their second name.

[Go deeper: Whenever I Forget Someone’s Name, I Always Use This Brilliant Hack, by Peter Mukherjee]

(III) Signals you're playing the wrong game

As we saw in the CommandBar deep dive, it's easy to get caught up doing something that only sort of works. Fortunately, James knew they were not playing the right game and repositioned them.

So, how do you know if you’re playing the right or wrong game?

shares 10 signs, but here’s one: Competitors dying doesn’t boost growth. In short, that’s really bad because it means some large pool of customers who are looking for a replacement are not finding or choosing you.

Your call to action: 🏃 It’s an important exercise stepping back, pausing, and asking yourself if you’re building towards a local maxima rather than a global one. False summits in the journey to PMF are real.

[Go deeper: 10 Signals You're Playing the Wrong Game, by ]

(IV) Taking bigger and bolder product bets.

You can’t experiment your way out of every product problem.

The issue with testing is that it can easily become a crutch for good product prioritization. When everything can or will be tested, Noah notes that “teams stop thinking about ‘the why’ behind what you’re doing and start focusing more on experimenting without thought. The hope is that you end up in a better place than where you started.”

Your call to action: 🏃 Be careful of the addiction to the velocity of experimentation. You need to know the difference between when to experiment on something, rather than running tests willy-nilly.

[Go deeper: How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer, by FirstRound Review]

(V) This might be slowing down your career growth

Getting things done is an important part of leveling up and getting promoted.

It’s easy to think if we just move things forward and do a great job that we’re having impact. But, getting things done matters much more at the team level that at the individual level. Career growth, particularly as a PM, is tied to how much of a multiplier effect you bring to the team. So, be careful of the solo contributor mindset, and focus on driving and championing team impact.

Your call to action: 🏃 Prioritize getting things done with others, not just by yourself.

[Go deeper: 7 Mindsets That Are Slowing Down Your Career Growth, by ]

1 tactical idea worth thinking about

Offer users a lower cost “maintenance” mode plan during self-cancellation of a subscription.

I saw this on Riverside a while ago and I thought it was very smart. I was cancelling my $29 a month subscription, and they presented me with a $5 a month plan (80% less) which would only keep my recording history and data.

No functionality, but they sold me on some lower-level value that was worth at least something to me, and it’s allowed them to keep at least some of my business.

1 How They Grow lesson

This was one of the first deep dives I wrote. We covered the gaming industry and one of the most strategic and prominent players within it…Epic Games.

🧩 Own value creation and value distribution.

Epic have mastered the chess board that is the gaming industry. Their strategy is one of vertical and horizontal integration, and they basically have a finger on all the pieces on the board.

To summarize, Epic develops, publishes, and distributes games. They have their own game engine empowering others to develop games, while they also develop and publish their own titles like Fortnite mostly following a free-to-play model with in-app upselling. And from a distribution standpoint — they also own an important pipeline with their own online games store, where developers (who probably made their game on Unreal Engine) can now reach customers and sell their games.

From the 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)

👉 View my full stack.

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 ↗

And that’s everything for this week’s edition.

If you enjoyed reading today’s email, feel free to forward it to someone! Or you can hit the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏

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Until next time.
—Jaryd

Happy Friday, everyone! ☕

ICYMI, I posted the first free version of From The Garden on Wednesday. FTG is the corner of this newsletter where I share one useful idea with you. This week, we covered how to find the invisible obstacles in your users' lives that demotivate them from buying.

Most of us think the best way to win people over is to push harder.

That is all very local thinking though. Because another type of friction exists outside of our product, inside your users’ everyday lives, and in their off-platform workflows.

These are the obstacles we don’t see: The hidden frictions

— Read: The New Couch Problem

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Find patterns before they’re problems, with Dovetail*

I’ve been absolutely loving Dovetail as my repo for customer data and insights and is becoming a key tool in my PM stack. Here’s a few ways it’s so helpful:

• It automates feedback classification, where you can see real-time trends and predict problems before they happen.

• It pulls out key takeaways without reading through mountains of feedback across docs

• It enables the whole team to keep track of themes in feedback, for free

• It makes it easy to share insights in the tools your team already uses, like Slack and Jira

• There’s a continuous sync, where it classifies feedback from support tickets to app reviews in real-time

• It visualizes trends for you, making it easier to explore product performance, usage behaviors, and customer satisfaction over time

If you’re on a product, design, or research team, consider giving Dovetail a go.

Try Dovetail for free

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5 actionable insights from this week

(I) Bad UX: 3 Mistakes

It’s easier than you think to make blunders in your UX with seemingly tiny things. I was reading an essay that spoke about 20 common ones, but here are three that really bother me personally. 😓

• Long dropdowns. If there’s a lot of scrolling happening in your dropdown, you’re doing something wrong. This is especially the case on mobile. You may need to break things up, cut your list down, or rethink the form structure.

• Overkill on the tooltips. If you’ve sprinkled little tooltip icons everywhere to explain how things work, you’re not addressing the real problem of onboarding users to your product. When overdone, it’s a sign of laziness as you’re pushing the burden on the user to read all your little microscopy. This is equally true with banners.

• Complex password requirements. There’s really just no need to make it hard for people to figure out a password for your app. I mean, how annoying is it when you keep getting told you’re missing some character from the Chinese alphabet and a Roman numeral?!

There are 17 more great ones in there. Follow the link below if you’re interested. Also, I’d love to hear if you have any pet peeve UX mistakes. Drop a comment!

Your call to action: 🏃 When you're making choices about how some feature will look and feel-- including the small little UX patterns around it--always ask yourself if you like those things. Do you like needing to give complex passwords? If not, it's a good sign you probably should push that to your users.

[Go deeper: Bad Bad UX: 20 Common Mistakes in User Experience, by FlowMapp]

(II) The most important way to manage up

Unless you’re a founder, your relationship with your manager is the most important one to get right. And the most reliable way to get it right is to remove uncertainty for them and build ridiculous levels of trust. Just one rudimentary example: If your manager asks, “What's the status?” then it's already too late. There’s uncertainty.

You need to make sure they know you’re always moving something forward and there’s no need for them to check in, ever. You do that by:

1. Saying what you’ll do

2. Doing it well and updating them regularly

3. Telling them when it’s done and how it went

One template that works well for me is the PPP model. It’s light, quick, and clear.

Your call to action: 🏃 Overcommunicate things, and don’t underestimate how explict you can and should be.

[Go deeper: Managing Up: 3 things I wish I realized sooner, by ]

(III) 3 Questions to ask yourself as a leader

If you are a manager, one of the most important soft skills is self-awareness. As Akash Mukherjee says, “I’ve made many mistakes by not paying attention to how others might see my actions. A leader’s actions have a deep impact on individuals. You should choose them carefully.”

He suggests 3 things we can ask ourselves to be more self-aware.

• Would you want to work for yourself?

• Are you evaluating your actions periodically?

• Do you balance your core leadership strengths? For example, if you’re very candid with people in feedback, are you balancing that with positive affirmations and great support?

Your call to action: 🏃 Next week, pay extra mind to your non-verbal cues. Check in on your own emotions, and ask yourself during interactions if perhaps they're bleeding into your communication. Say you're rushing to get something done and are under pressure, ask yourself, “Am I being a little too direct or short with people today?"

[Go deeper: 3 Questions to Ask Yourself As A Leader, by ]

(IV) Inbox ten - don’t commit the cardinal sin

The two bits above make this obvious point even more so: communication matters. Meta CTO, Boz, puts it perfectly:

So, how do you stay updated on all the necessary info so you can advance your own work (inbound coms), while also keeping others updated so they can do the same (outbound coms)? Boz has a bunch of brilliant tactics (well worth the read, you can just skip to #3), but here’s the headline: Never end the day with more than 10 unreads in any inbox; systemize deleting emails; and decline to engage if you don’t have anything to add or have time to take on more.

Your call to action: 🏃 Think of your information ecosystem like a garden. You just need to do a little bit each day to maintain it, but if you neglect it, you'll quickly have it overrun.

[Go deeper: Inbox Ten, by Boz]

(VI) Craft and beauty: The ROI of marrying form and function

Craft and beauty inside products often get dismissed as just aesthetics, but now, when we’re overloaded with product choices, gorgeous UI/UX are what people will choose. As Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe, tells us:

“[In a crossed market] the quality and details become the differentiation. We’re eager to prioritize craft and beauty not simply because we think the world is better when it’s more beautiful, but also because quality is important for growth”

When something feels like a work of art—something a product team has really poured attention to detail into—people gravitate towards it and it drives usability and engagement. Cosmetics are a growth lever.

Just remember: We like beautiful things for rational reasons.

Your call to action: 🏃 The only way you'll ship a high-craft product is if craft becomes a culture thing. Everyone needs to decide to care more about what goes out to users. It's about not accepting 7/10 choices and holding the product to a higher bar.

[Go deeper: Craft and beauty: The ROI of marrying form and function, by Figma]

Try June…the free and simple way to launch your product, understand your users, and reduce churn. Plus, June comes with all the prebuilt reports you need. Learn more about June, the data analytics platform for the next-gen of B2B SaaS. (Sponsored)

1 tactical idea worth thinking about

Think about building a more unique, interactive, and context-rich customer testimonial / social proof page. So many companies all have the same generic “Case Studies” page, so, this is an opportunity nobody is really differentiating on.

Btw, this is by far the coolest one I’ve seen in a long time (scroll down once). I love it because it shows screenshots of real WhatsApp conversations! It’s a similar concept to ’s of “Screenshot marketing = the ultimate curiosity hook”

Check it out, take inspiration!

1 How They Grow lesson

I absolutely loved writing this deep dive on Roku, and thought I’d reshare it since it went live exactly a year ago! We’re now 3X bigger, so I imagine a few folks may have missed it!

To understand the power dynamics between different platforms, aggregators, and other players in a tech ecosystem, it’s helpful to look at them as a vertical stack with different layers.

At each layer, companies are trying to create value for customers and capture value for their bottom lines. The lower in the stack you go, generally, the more valuable the layer will be. Why?

Because whoever controls a layer has huge bargaining power and leverage, allowing them to call the shots for how value creation and value capturing are happening in the layers above them. For example, big-box retailers like Walmart control the retail distribution layer, allowing them to dictate the terms—ultimately deciding who lives and dies in the consumer goods world. Amazon does that online.

Subsequently, we often see:

• Companies adding layers on top of their existing business (thus, giving them platform power)

• Companies moving down the stack to get closer to the base/bottom layer

The base layer, simply, is the last UI in the stack that we as end-users deal with. In tech, this is usually an operating system connected to hardware

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Enjoy the weekend everyone!
I’ll see you on Wednesday.

—Jaryd

Happy Friday, everyone!

Hope all of you in the US enjoyed yesterday! With the holiday week and all, just a reminder in case you missed the latest deep dive. It’s shorter than usual, in a new format, and packed with 15 tactical ideas for both PMs and founders. If you read it and have an opinion on the structure—I’d love to hear. 🙏

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Here’s how to get the most impact from your discovery*

Run your research on easy mode, with Dovetail.

The best teams have some ongoing customer discovery process. They’re interviewing people, running surveys, reading through support tickets, and doing usability tests.

And the bigger the team, the more people there are gathering data on their customers.

The problem is this customer data is scattered. At best, there’s a shared Notion page or some Google Drive. The impact of this is that it often takes time to pull insights from places like this, present them, get alignment, and make decision.

And for teams, analyzing all the insights the company has collected across all customer interactions across time is basically impossible.

Unless you’re using Dovetail, of course. Dovetail is the platform that absorbs and makes sense of all the information you’ve ever collected on your customers (from all sources), maximizes your research impact, and builds you a single source of truth for all your customer insights.

It’s the insights hub every single team should be using, because as a product leader, you know how important it is to center your team around the real customer problem.

Well, Dovetail is truly the fastest way to understand your customers. If you want to try it out, they have one of the most generous free plans around (everything, including all AI features, is free).

Give it a spin with one project…just go upload a video and see it in action.

Try Dovetail for free

*Thank you for supporting this week’s sponsor…it keeps all this stuff free!

5 actionable insights from this week

(I) Do you have a clear power user strategy yet?

The people who engage in some critical path of your product frequently—your power users—are a huge growth opportunity. They’re the people who are getting the most value from your product. But, many teams don’t actually have a defined playbook for tapping this group of users. James Evans, CEO of CommandBar, calls out 4 things you could be doing with these people:

1. Upsell them: Users who are using your product a lot are great candidates to sell more to.

2. Retain them: A lot of these users are probably paying you already. You don’t want to neglect them.

3. Turn them into advocates: The difference between a user who silently uses your product and one who wins you more users by being a vocal advocate is enormous.

4. Use them for research: Power users can help you find subtle flaws or new use cases.

Your call to action: 🏃

You need to strike the balance of (1) not over-optimizing for power users and neglecting the rest of your user base, and (2) not ignoring the people who are gaining the most value from your product. 

The best move is to deeply understand who your power users are, and why, and then incorporate them into your broader product strategy

[Go deeper: Why every app needs a power user strategy, by James Evans]

(II) An interesting thought by Aussie blogger, Tim Denning: “You're Not Overwhelmed, You're Just Focused on the Wrong Goals” .

I’ll be the first to admit it—I’ve had the wrong goals before. And by wrong, I mean goals that didn’t energize me.

And this isn’t some older version of me. I still do this. I still fall into the trap of goal setting for external reasons. But, one the best feelings I get is when I delete a goal.

It’s so easy to tack on something else to your list because a friend or peer you admire is doing something cool, and you feel like if you don’t do that thing, you’re not doing enough. I know founders who are building incredibly helpul companies but feel inadequate for not writing a newsletter about it, or hosting a podcast or running a marathon for charity or waking up at 5am for sunrise yoga and daily icebaths.

As Tim says—which I wholeheartedly agree with and think is great advice—”Multiple goals are the fastest way to reach overwhelm and join the average at the bottom of the ladder.” If you feel overwhelm, it’s a sign you have too many goals—goals that often compete for each others time.

Your call to action: 🏃

Nothing beats extreme focus. Take stock of how many goals you have, and considering picking one goal that most aligns with your interests. Then aim to do just one big thing towards that each day. 

[Go deeper: You're Not Overwhelmed, You're Just Focused on the Wrong Goals, by ]

(III) Ask these more subtle questions to improve your pre-project stakeholder meetings.

Before new projects kickoff and research begins, there’s always some initial meeting(s) where context is given. But people are not always explicit, and your job as a PM is to make sure that all the right context is captured and understood before time is spent moving things forward.

By asking a few targeted questions, you’ll get a more comprehensive understanding of why a stakeholder is asking you to do some project, leading to far more aligned research goals, structure, and ultimately, more actionable insights to make a decision.

Your call to action: 🏃

In your next pre-project meeting, ask these 5 questions that go deeper than surface-level goals. 

1) Specific problems to be solved
2) Silent constraints and pressures from higher management 
3) Conflicting hypotheses within the team
4) Realistic timelines for decision-making
5) Preferred formats for deliverables

[Go deeper: Five questions to improve your pre-project stakeholder meetings, by Lisa Nguyen]

(IV) One surprising tactic to negotiating is getting to a “No” as fast as possible.

Everyday is a day with some negotiating. We negotiate with our partners about what and where to eat, or we negotiate priorities with our team, or we negotiate design choices inside our product, or we’re negotiating for more money. We’re always negotiating to some level, and the folks who’ve perfected the soft-skill of influencing a decision are generally the ones who enjoy the most success.

“In business as in life, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.”

— Chester L. Karrass

One strategy proposed by former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, is to get the other person to a “no” as fast as you can. Odd when you consider you’re trying to get a yes. But “no” doesn’t mean failure, rather, “no” is when the negotiation actually begins. “No” gives you all the information needed to convince your counterpart.

Your call to action: 🏃

In your next negotiation, once you get to the “no,” listen to why. What were the concerns they had? Then use those reasons to chart your path to a “yes.”

[Go deeper: 6 Negotiation Tactics for Salespeople From Chris Voss, by Ashitha]

(VI) Are you getting more competitive, or less competitive?

As a company scales, it’s not uncommon for them to get less competitive. As Jason Lemkin says:

Once you really start to scale post $10m-$15m, the “internal” stuff starts taking up a ton of time.  Keeping existing customers happy.  Fixing long-standing product gaps and technical debt.  Scaling DevOps and TechOps and FinOps and AllTheOps and HR and Recruiting and the SKO.  Again, you’re finally building a real company.  What can happen with all that internal focus is you lose a little focus on remaining ruthlessly competitive. 

Your level of competitiveness can be measured by your % of market share. In short, if your market share is growing you’re doing well. But if it’s on the decline, that’s a clear signal of decay in your product.

Be careful not to lose sight of the competition when you enjoy success.

Your call to action: 🏃

Tracking market share can be tricky, but at least defining some process around it and calling out consistent things to look at in order to compare your growth directly to your competitors will keep you honest.  

[Go deeper: The Top 10 Mistakes Founders Make After $10m ARR, by ]

As you know, there are a lot of product analytics companies out there—many with pricing models that balloon out of control as you scale and are overly complicated.

Well, you should look into June. June is one of the newest kids on the analytics block, and flip, they’re one of the coolest ones I’ve seen. For one, their UI is just beautiful, and they make it so simple to understand your users and figure out what’s causing churn. I also love that June is built just for product teams. Oh, and it’s also free.

One feature that’s super helpful is automated, out the box, reports on the things B2B SaaS companies need to know about their users. If you’re building in this space, check out this really cleverly designed page to show why some of the newest B2B companies are choosing June. Never seen a design pattern like that before. 🔥

*Sponsored

2 tactical ideas worth thinking about

• “If your platform has a signup, send an automated text-only (not HTML) email with the subject ‘Your opinion’ and one question (i.e. What their experience has been like so far). If you want to make it even more personal, add "Sent from my iPhone" to the footer. You’ll be amazed by how much great feedback you get to improve and grow your product.”

  • s/o Manuel Becker, Founder of Locationscout, for this one

• Audit your calendar and find one standing meeting that you can handle asynchronously.

Want to share a quick product/growth idea here with everyone and get a shoutout in front of 22K founders/PMs? Drop yours below.  

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1 How They Grow lesson

In a very unconventional product manager way, consider putting your audience last. This is borrowed from contrarian writing wisdom, but as you read this post, you’ll see how it translates to Arc’s approach to building. If you are building for an ICP like yourself, Arc shows us that sometimes you need to build what’s true to you first and foremost. As with art, that creates soul and craftsmanship that people see and come to love.

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Awesome, have a wonderful weekend everyone.
Until next time.

—Jaryd

Hey, everyone!

Two quick notes based on some reader feedback. First, I’m dropping the “News” section of this email. There are so many people reporting on that stuff and you likely get your news elsewhere—it’s not why you’re here. Second, I’m dropping the “My recommendations” each week. I agree with Rameel, I don’t think it’s adding much value to you and helping your grow your business.

So, you can now expect the core 5-Bits to be in the spotlight✌️

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A peek into the Fibery platform

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• How it grows with you: You can add additional data sources and limitless custom databases, change your prioritization formula anytime, compare top features for different markets, create a custom product hierarchy, and work using a completely custom flow.

• Test Fibery for free and see why industry leaders like Lemonade and Plex love it. If you need an extended trial (the standard plan is just $10 per user per month), just drop 'How They Grow' into Fibery's support chat.

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*Thank you for supporting this newsletter’s select partners…it keeps all this stuff free!

5 actionable insights from this week

(I) Strong positioning leads to strong/differentiating copy. And if you’re struggling to write compelling copy, you probably need to go back to your positioning and refine it.

What people often forget is that great positioning starts by understanding what you’re actually positioning your product against. For example, is your product’s comparator an incumbent in an existing category, a new approach to an old way (i.e. you’re building a new category), or are you carving out a specific vertical solution (i.e. unbundling a larger horizontal platform)?

Once you know what status quo you’re comparing your product to, you can drill into who it’s for, what it does, and why it’s better. That’s positioning. And to turn your positioning effort into excellent copy that converts, you need to write with deep focus. You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) say everything you do for every audience on your homepage.

Your call to action: 🏃

Curious how your homepage reads? Head over to Substack Chat (link below), and join the thread I just started for today's post. Drop your products homepage in there, and I'll drop some feedback on how clear your positioning/copy is over the weekend.

[Go deeper: Positioning & messaging teardown, by and ]

(II) Sometimes you can be doing things right, but you’re not doing the right thing. This is an easy trap to get caught in, and to navigate out of it, you often need to reframe the challenge in front of you.

One way we get caught in this trap is by being over-reactive to customer feedback. We think we’re doing the right thing listening to customers, cutting tickets to fix their issues, and then shipping new stuff people asked for. But great product work comes from solving a more nuanced problem than the one simply put in front of us—one our customers don’t even necessarily know they have yet.

Entire categories have been born with the simple art of phrasing the problem correctly.

Your call to action: 🏃

The next time you're working through a problem, do this:
1) Keep rephrasing the problem while solving it. Come at it from different angles. Brainstorming with others helps.
2) Don't succumb to overindexing on the first solution you think of-- play out various approaches.

[Go deeper: Are you solving the right problem?, by ]

(III) Execution beats strategy almost every time…but execution without strategy leads to burnout and turnover.

Tech startups live and die by their speed of shipping software. In the early days, strategy matters very little. Once you have an insight into the market and a hunch about what people need and will pay for, the only thing that matters is getting to work and making the thing.

Strategy is fun to think about. But as says, “Startup success is almost entirely about executing relentlessly in a general direction and then tuning your approach as you get the harsh feedback of iteration.”

But it’s not only startups that benefit from building fast over strategy. Customers just don’t about what your nice slide deck or memo says about your big plans for the future. They want a great product in their hands today.

Spending less time planning and more time working on being quicker is how you grow. The balance is not to overthink it, but not to underthink it either.

Your call to action: (as per Dan's advice) 🏃

The kind of strategic work you actually want to focus on and get good at is rapidly synthesizing data and customer feedback to speed up your Build > Assess > Build > Assess flywheel.

[Go deeper: Dan Hockenmaier’s LinkedIn post, or Execution Eats Strategy for Breakfast by Peter Thomson ]

(IV) The right strategy isn’t the one that’s hardest to create — it’s the one that’s easy to understand. Simplicity scales. Complexity fails.

This is just so good, it just needs to be directly quoted…

Simplicity in strategy is about refining your Languaging and repeating yourself until it becomes a clear, resonant sound that echoes across your company and category.

It’s about being bold enough to say something straightforward, different, and powerful. And then saying it over and over. Something that frames a problem or opportunity, while presenting the vision for a different future. This is what grabs attention and drives action.

Clearly declaring your different is about declaring who you’re for and not for.

Clearly declaring your different is about forcing a choice, not a comparison.

Clearly declaring your different is about standing out, in a world that loves to fit in.

That’s why being clear and honest about your strategy can be uncomfortable. It means admitting where you're competing vs creating, which might make you feel vulnerable. It's not fun to be told you're playing it safe or that your complex strategy is really just a façade for fear. But the payoff for embracing simplicity is enormous. It clears the fog, focuses efforts on what matters (customers' wants, needs, problems, and opportunities), and aligns your team around a common, understandable, and achievable goal.

— The Category Pirates

Your call to action: 🏃

Want to test how clear and simple your strategy is? Write it all down on a single page. Just one page. If it's going over, then think about how you can make your complex situation much simpler. Is there perhaps a metaphor you can use to explain it? 

[Go deeper: The Big Strategy Lie: Why Strategy Is Not As Complex, Hard, Or Intellectual As You've Been Taught, by ]

(VI) An untapped growth channel could well be your company’s employees. Specifically, as a buzz-generation engine on LinkedIn.

just dropped his latest newsletter this morning, and it’s brilliant.

On LinkedIn, most companies just post from their main mothership page. This is an opportunity missed, as activating your full team to post and engage from their individual accounts is a win-win for everyone that could bring you tons of new reach.

Tom shares a great playbook for how to do this, but the first tip is the most important IMO. → Do all the heavy lifting for them: Write the posts, create personalized images, and give them crystal-clear instructions.

Your call to action: 🏃

*If you're a founder, read Tom's playbook and think about how you can start getting your team more engaged on LinkedIn.
*If you're a PM, send the playbook to your marketing team.
*If you're on the marketing team...start executing this playbook.

[Go deeper: How we turned 1,200 employees into a buzz-generation machine, by ]

2 tactical ideas worth thinking about

• Instead of launching features that require users to find and adopt them in your product, try to launch features that are defaulted to On for everyone. The impact of these features is often far higher and you learn much faster given instant usage. You can still allow people to turn them off, but even that then becomes a point for you to get data and capture feedback.

• On the theme of moving faster, go and ask your engineers what is slowing their day-to-day work down the most. Then improve it. Hint: There’s a good chance the answer is to leave them alone when they’re working on something. AKA, allow them to have single-threaded focus.

Want to share a soundbite product/growth idea here with everyone and get a shoutout in front of 20K founders/PMs? Drop your below here.  

Share idea

1 How They Grow lesson

Each week, I’ll reshare a short insight/soundbite from an archived deep dive. Mainly for the new folks who may have missed it, but also as a reminder for everyone else.

Instead of solving additional problems and risking being spread too thin, Stripe went deep on their customers’ core, mission-critical, JTDB. They didn’t get distracted by new products, and today, choosing Stripe is a complete no-brainer because the core problem is basically perfectly solved.

Stripe works. Not only that, but it does so with an elegance that can only come from obsessive devotion and exacting standards. From design to functionality, every aspect of Stripe’s suite seems to have been worried over, honed, polished. Indeed, one of Stripe’s values is to “really, really care.”

Awesome, have a wonderful weekend everyone. 🥂

If you thought today’s post was a good one and it left you feeling even just a tad more informed, please:

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Until next time.

—Jaryd

I decided to return to the newsletter a few days earlier than planned after our honeymoon. For anyone wondering if I got my passport/visa in time that Friday—no, I did not make my flight. 🤙

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Read time: ~8 minutes

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A peek into the Attio platform

Attio is the CRM for the builders and GTM teams who love products like Notion and Figma. They're also the only CRM (IMO) that can take on Salesforce because it’s powerful, easily configured, and deeply intuitive.

Attio delivers value faster than any other product I’ve seen with one simple tactic during onboarding:

They sync your work email and calendar to automatically map out every interaction you’ve had with enriched insights.

And the outcome? In less than a minute you’re looking at a view of all your relationships (ever) over email. Plus it all gets enriched with additional data. It’s insanely valuable and has helped me find sponsors by just looking into my existing network.

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5 actionable insights from this week

(I) A less conventional approach to finding an idea to work on is the audience-first business model. First, you build an audience. Then, you analyze their pains. Finally, you come up with a bunch of potential offers.

This playbook defers thinking about any potential startup ideas until you’ve built up an audience that you’re able to learn from and sell to. Audience-first is a massive advantage because you can co-create a solution to a real problem they have, build in public alongside them which provides ongoing learning and validation, and have Day 1 customers. You don’t need a big audience either, and you can start building one right now on LinkedIn, a newsletter, or even a group chat. Compared to the normal model, audience-first looks like this:

[Go deeper: My Audience-First Business Model, by ]

(II) You’re often better off being sincere rather than serious. Yet, in life and work, we often gravitate towards the reverse.

Seriousness = rigid and results-focused; Sincere = adaptive and process-orientated. And whether you're working with people, playing a board game, or dancing….”a curious, playful approach to challenges might be more effective than tension and struggle”. Importantly, the difference between the two is not how involved you are in things, but rather, how tightly you grip to an outcome. Plus, gripping less tightly and having more fun with it is often an unlock to better performance with less effort. Seriousness can very often be a blocker to the best course of action. So, the next time you’re feeling rigid or overwhelmed by something, take a step back and try to bring a playful or even silly aspect to what you’re doing.

[Go deeper: Be Sincere—Not Serious, by Michael Ashcroft ]

(III) This is the best definition I’ve seen of what a Growth Team does: “Your core product and marketing teams are building a highway for customer value. Your Growth teams are building on-ramps onto that highway.”

I bring this up because there’s often confusion about what a Growth function actually does compared to traditional product work, and having a common definition of Growth makes it easier to divvy up responsibilities.

Core product & marketing teams run discovery and build products/features that solve user problems. Growth teams distribute the value (i.e. make sure people find and use those things) by obsessing over areas like acquisition, retention, and monetization.

[Go deeper: My favorite definitions of Growth, by ]

(IV) This one hit hard. The argument for “anti-routine” is that executing repetitive loops makes us obsessive and generally focuses on us doing small leverage tasks. If we want space to do 10X work—the stuff that defines our careers and lives—we need to make room for serendipity.

We are stuck in a world of routines: Wake up, answer email, go to a meeting, then another meeting, check off an item from a todo list, and repeat. The “hustle culture” of the internet tell us to add even more to the routine: Grind more hours, wake up at 5am and do yoga, remember to meditate, work out an hour a day, and so on. There’s endless tips on what successful CEOs do with their mornings, making us feel bad for not executing core loops with machine-like efficiency.

— Andrew Chen

Guys, I am that person. And honestly reading this essay that goes so hard against conventional wisdom is a bit of a wakeup call. I don’t want to be a robot; life and fulfillment aren’t about checking off perfect little habits. What’s more, it’s usually a very finite number of high-upside tasks we do that drive the most impact, but, that work doesn’t live inside routine—it’s random and comes from following some pull to action. Doing the same tasks every day, while comforting, adds no new information, contains no risk, and as Andrew points out, no quantity of them will add up to 10x work. So my suggestion, read Andrew’s essay below and consider rejecting the strict adherence routine, the daily checklists/loops, and embrace more serendipity.

*I’d love to hear your take in the comments.

[Go deeper: The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings, by ]

(VI) In theory, personalization is about tailoring a user’s experience and turning the generic into the meaningful through contextualization. But it’s hard, and can very easily go wrong.

One of the big issues with personalization is the perception paradox: One user’s idea of personalization is another’s idea of intrusion. This can make it tricky to find the right balance between data-driven personalization and user autonomy. To fix the perception problem, focus on transparency. When people understand the mechanics behind personalized experiences, it helps demystify the process and build trust.

[Go deeper: What no one tells you about personalization, by Slava Palonski]

4 things in the news you should know about

• Anthropic’s latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, came out yesterday. Apparently it’s a beast at interpreting charts and graphs, is 2X faster than the Opus modal, and is slightly better than OpenAI’s GPT-4o. The rate these players are shipping model improvements is crazy. Anyway, I’ve been loving Perplexity—it brings all the models together under one roof.

• Word on the street is that China is emerging as a scientific superpower, surpassing the U.S. and EU in both highly-cited publications and contributions to prestigious journals like Nature. What has driven this shift? Well, China's R&D spending has gone up 16X since 2000 and they keep bringing in top talent. This growth supports China's ambition of becoming a global leader in high-tech industries, which as you can guess, has significant implications for global economic competition.

• Bitcoin’s cooldown might be a warning for the stock market. A Stifel strategist predicted a late-summer stock market decline based on Bitcoin’s 10% sell-off in the past few weeks—pointing to the strong correlation between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 since 2020.

• Netflix has plans for physical stores next year. This could be an interesting blend: Give fans an immersive way to experience shows, buy themed merch, and even TikTok themselves with themed foods. Obviously the big wigs are looking for a way to open up new revenue streams and deepen viewer engagement.

3 tactical ideas worth thinking about

• If you run a subscription product, create loss aversion during self-cancellation by reminding users of the premium features they’ve put to use (and will be losing).

• Tell users how many emails they can expect within the subject line of your onboarding email sequence— i.e. (1/7). I saw this recently with Perplexity’s onboarding, and it’s genius.

  

• The next time you send a cold email/DM, test having NO inline links. Up until recently, I always shared links to my newsletter and to find time on my calendar when doing email outreach for newsletter sponsorships. I spoke with a friend who runs sales at a top cybersecurity company, and he suggested (1) make my emails way shorter, and (2) cut all the links—make the only call to action something like “If this sounds interesting and you’d like some more info, I’d love a quick response”. My reply rates have shot up. Give it a try if.

2 recommendations

• I recently launched a recommendations page. It has my tech stack, my favorite sources of information, and my reading list. Today’s first recommendation (if you want them) is to check out my recommendations. 🤣

• If you’re in NYC, wear sunblock this weekend. Better yet, hold onto a nearby AC unit. It’s gunna be an absolute melter.

1 interesting chart to noodle on

What’s more (According to Emergence), the companies that have implemented GenAI have seen a 7% higher Net Dollar Retention rate than those that haven’t. This is significant, given NDR is a primary driver of sustained revenue growth.

If you’re a founder or PM and you’re not currently thinking about how GenAI can be used in your product, don’t fall asleep at the wheel and fall behind.

Read the full trend report

Awesome, have a wonderful weekend everyone. 🥂

If you thought today’s post was a good one and it left you feeling even just a tad more informed, please:

• Show your support by checking out Attio, this week’s select partner

• Spread the word; forward this email to a friend

• And of course, if this was your first read, hit subscribe for more
  

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Thanks a lot to all of you who shared your thoughts in last week’s survey. Turns out that the vast majority of you—while appreciating the depth and length of deep dives—would prefer a shorter format.

I got you. 🤙

Based on everything you shared, and my own pondering, I’ve got a really epic new style for the deep dives that I think you’ll love.

Also, 93% of you said you loved last week’s 5-Bit style compared to the old one— so, let’s roll with it.

Before getting to this morning's letter, quick housekeeping: Julia and I fly this afternoon to our honeymoon. Well, at least we’re meant to. My passport and visa haven’t arrived yet and I have about 7 hours until takeoff. Yikes. Gotta love a good ‘ol roll of the dice. If luck lands in my favor, I’ll be back with the next post on June 26th. ❤️

— Jaryd

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Read time: ~8 minutes

A modern CRM for fast-growing companies *

A peek into the Attio platform

Attio is the CRM for the builders and GTM teams who love products like Notion and Figma. They're also the only CRM (IMO) that can take on Salesforce because it’s powerful, easily configured, and deeply intuitive.

Attio delivers value faster than any other product I’ve seen with one simple tactic during onboarding:

They sync your work email and calendar to automatically map out every interaction you’ve had with enriched insights.

And the outcome? In less than a minute you’re looking at a view of all your relationships (ever) over email. Plus it all gets enriched with additional data. It’s insanely valuable and has helped me find sponsors by just looking into my existing network.

For free, you can join companies like ElevenLabs, Replicate, Modal and more to scale your startup to the next level.

Start using Attio for free

*Sponsored

p.s If this sounds interesting to you, please do hit that button ☝️…it keeps all this stuff free 😬

5 actionable insights from this week

• For an early product to be positioned successfully—especially one creating a new category—you need to be crystal clear on what you do until people get it. AKA, don’t jump the gun and skip straight to emotional benefits over your functional messaging. A good rule of thumb is to be more explicit in what you’re saying and use plain English. You can still have some aspirational note in your headline that feels magical (see Attio’s homepage for an example), but just tell people who you are and what you do without the jargon. No fluff words like “scale”, “efficiency”, “leverage”, or the new cringe one, ”ethical/responsible AI”, that mean nothing anymore. [Go deeper: Arielle Jackson Shares 6 Early Marketing Missteps to Avoid, via In-Depth Podcast]

• Being a genuine and highly connective networker is an insane advantage for a founder. It’s a power that acts as an undercurrent; pushing you and your company forward. And one great way to build meaningful relationships is to offer unvarnished honesty. While that can be hard and uncomfortable, it’s a muscle well worth practicing because honesty that’s rooted in helping someone is how you can add real value to them. People come back to and reciprocate with those they trust to help. So, go be helpful through honesty, even if the feedback is hard to give. [Go deeper: How to Become Insanely Well-Connected, via First Round Review]

• Founders more than anyone hear no a lot. But, you may be closer to a yes than you think, and knowing when to press a little more can be the key to a massive inflection point for you and/or your company. If you thought the above point on radical candor with people was uncomfortable, well, “pushing” past rejection and doing a little more “selling” is way worse. As Mario wrote in an excellent briefing on Vinod Khosla, “We are taught to take our rejections with dignity, to view them as permanent and inflexible. But how often do we stop trying just before our luck is about to turn? What if one final, ferocious push is all that’s needed to convince that venture investor, land that promotion, recruit that game-changing hire, or seal that sales deal”. [Go deeper: Vinod Khosla: A Case Study of Unreasonable Tenacity, by ]

• The job of a founder is to define what game the team is playing (mission/vision/strategy), create the rules (culture/goals), find great players (hiring), and then give as much flexibility and autonomy as possible for the players they recruit to play the game. And often, this means creating a flat organization. I was reading this essay on one of the greatest manufacturing and industrial feats ever, and what likely won us WW2: how within just 5 years, the US produced more aircraft than what Germany, Japan, and Italy combined produced during the war. It was also more aircraft than have been built for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation. One tactic that helped facilitate this was driven by factory architect, Albert Kahn (who also designed for Ford): “Kahn favored large, single-story factory buildings with wide bays to maximize the flow of material through the factories and minimize interruptions.” [Go deeper: How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years, by ]

• You know you’ve built something right when in an inexplicable way, you can just feel it in your bones. That’s taste. And in the product arena we all play in of limited attention and overwhelming choice—taste is increasingly a way to stand out. But how do you build with taste and artfulness? Simple: make what you want, and as much as you can, don’t compromise to satisfy the whims of the wrong stakeholder. Align yourself as closely as you can with your customer—ideally by being your own customer—and you’ll scale your product with taste. As Andy Warhol said, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” [Go deeper: The Art of Scaling Taste, by Evan Armstrong]

4 things in the news you should know about

• In the past ~week, Nvidia’s market cap increased by more than the total value of Tesla. Sure, Nvidia and their badass captain Jensen Huang are doing insane stuff (that I went into great detail on here), and it’s clear that they consistently manage to be at the right place at the right time…over and over again. But damn, surely they are overpriced? Either the madness of crowds or the madness of me I guess.

• OpenAI is leaning in hard to their enterprise business model with the signing of 100,000 users from consulting giant, PwC. On top of that, PwC will become OpenAI’s first resale partner to drive more enterprise adoption. At the rate they're going with new features, business model focus, and LLM improvements—each release probably wipes out at least 10 AI startups.

• Anduril—the software/hardware DefenseTech startup—is delivering on the Pentagon’s dream of deadly and autonomous drone swarms. Started just 7 years ago by then-24-year-old Palmer Luckey (Oculus), Anduril is winning contracts against giants like Lockheed and Boeing. Their success reflects a shift in America’s war-fighting outlook toward quicker development of less expensive systems that feature more software and autonomy.

  

• Want a peak into a day in the life of Jeff Bezos? It starts with a lot of putting around and taking things slow. Fair enough, don’t think he’s worried about rent come end of month. Here’s one thing he said to Axios that stood out to me: "As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.” A little inspiration there—what’s the one most important decision you can make today?

3 tactical ideas worth thinking about

• Think about your product’s key differentiating feature, and then think about how you can make that feature the centerpiece of your UI. The killer features that set you apart from others must be obvious and discovered by new users ASAP. People make this mistake all the time— they have their non-differentiating (and “safe”) features as one of the main things users see. If you need a bouncing tooltip to get people clicking what makes you special…that’s a crutch.

• Competing on vectors like being "the best” or “the cheapest” is incredibly hard and expensive. But, anyone can be incredibly helpful. So, think about how you could 5x your competition through your customer experience. Find some time with your team to think about what winning an award for the best CX function in the world would look like—and be very specific about it— then pick just one thing on that list that you’re not doing, and go do that thing. Excellent support is an underrated growth lever.

• And lastly, think about how you could reward meaningful user behavior that aligns with your product goals. For example, if you’re trying to boost engagement, then reward users with something like credits for doing things that push the goal forward, like sharing content or inviting friends. This doesn’t have to be all-out gamification, but it does tap into game design.

2 recommendations

• To dile up your charisma, do this one simple thing: say people’s names—a lot. As Dale Carnegie said, "Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language." It shows you care and it stirs up a feeling of affection, closeness, and respect. It’s a social unlock.

• If you want a humble, niche, cash-flowing business, then → Keep your team small, AI-powered, global, and use audiences and communities to power your distribution. Hiring a global team (which we do at my company) means your costs go down big time. My suggestion, try Athyna*. Lighting fast matches with the best remote people. The founder, Bill Kerr, is a good friend…he’ll take excellent care of you. (*Not sponsored, but I’m a small investor)

• ✨ Bonus, and an ask for your help: ✨ My wife, Julia, is an extraordinarily creative person. One of her outlets is digital art. Two days ago she launched an Etsy store to sell her work. Maybe I’m biased, but you won’t find the kind of stuff she does anywhere else. And her digital prints are only $4 a pop. She doesn’t read my newsletter, so I thought I’d try to surprise her with a little boost. Early sales and reviews make a huge difference to a new store’s ranking on Etsy, so if you want to snag something unique for your wall, do me a huge solid, and help make her day…take a look at her store and grab your favorite piece. Thank you!

1 interesting chart to noodle on

The above is from McKinsey. And for extra color, Bloomberg reports that the average American spends $5,108 on wellness each year.

The fact that the wellness industry is big business (and young people care about how they look) shouldn’t get you jumping off your seat—we know people need and want the goods.

But my friend Rex calls out something that is worth thinking about: the distribution of wellness products. In his words, “Direct-to-consumer channels eventually dry up and CACs become untenable. What new channels will emerge?”

An interesting opportunity…

And that’s it for today. Nice and snappy!

If you thought this was a good one and it left you feeling even just a tad more informed, please:

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Cool…

Well, I hope I get to leave in the first place.

— Jaryd ✌️

I had a great chat with yesterday, and honestly he really inspired me to think about the format of How They Grow, across all our series.

I’ve had incredible and motivating feedback from many of you about the depth of my content, but I’ve also had feedback that there’s a ton of information being shared, the posts are long, and it’s hard to always get around to reading the entire thing.

The long part I’m very aware of…my deep dives take about 40-50 minutes to read. 👀

That means they also take a very long time to write. So, the first thing I would really really appreciate your help with today is answering this short survey.

It should take no more than 90 seconds to complete, but it would really:

1. Help to make what I write more useful for you

2. Help me manage my time in the best way…ultimately, for you.

At the end, there’s a chance to drop your email in for a possible/optional interview. If I reach out to chat with you, I’ll dedicate half the time to answering any questions you may have about product/growth/work/etc.

You’re probably thinking there’s no need to respond because everyone else will do it. I promise you, most people will be thinking the same thing. It would mean a lot to me, and it will give you the chance to be heard if you took a second to answer these 5 questions.

Take the Survey. Help me. Help you.

On that note—to make this post more scannable and brief—I’m testing out a new format for 5-Bit Fridays. It goes as follows:

• 5 actionable insights from this week

• 4 things in the news you should know about

• 3 tactical ideas worth thinking about

• 2 recommendations

• 1 interesting chart to noodle on

I’d love to know if you liked it at the end. I hope it’s tighter, easier to digest while having your coffee, while still as informative and valuable.

— Jaryd

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Reading time: 7 minutes (wild, right?)

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A peek into the Attio platform

• Attio is just as powerful as Salesforce, but orders of magnitude easier to use, more affordable, and snazzier. If you like Notion and Figma, you’ll love this CRM.

• By simply signing up with your work email, you’ll get an instantly enriched graph network of everyone and every company you’ve ever engaged with. It’s insanely valuable and has helped me find sponsors by just looking into my existing network.

• For free, you can start testing out the crazy-flexible CRM companies like Eleven Labs, Coca-Cola, and How They Grow are using. 🤪

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5️⃣ actionable insights from this week

• One surefire way to figure out your AI strategy is to think about how you can supercharge the “constants”; the customer needs that never change. Jeff Bezos said this once; “We know that customers want low prices… they want fast delivery, they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher’.” Once you figure out what the constants in your market/customer base are, then you can apply AI there. Any other area is a distraction. [Go deeper: Athyna’s “AI-for-talent” strategy, by Tom Alder]

• If you want to say no to more people, create a policy for yourself, stick to it, and then tell people your policy when there isn’t a fit. As my newsletter has grown, I’ve had more inbound asks from people for stuff like podcasts, collaborations, consulting, etc. I want to say yes to all of it, but I’ve done that dance and I always get overwhelmed when things pile up. Saying no—while hard—is a superpower that first and foremost protects your time and mental health. Lenny gave 2 great examples of policy statements you can steal: “I’m not taking on any new projects until [Date]” or “I’m not adding anything to my to-do list right now”. [Go deeper: On saying no, by ]

• True leaders build their reputations around the feeling of being trusted, but earning the right to be trusted is an everyday commitment. And you do it through consistency in your decisions and follow-through actions. You need to establish a set of principles, and then not bother with telling people, but rather focus on showing them you can be predictably reliable in sticking to some operating system. [Go deeper: The Feeling of Being Trusted, by ]

• If you want to crush it as a remote team, the number one thing you need to do is write everything down and drive a written culture of excellent documentation. This creates a source of truth for information, keeps everyone on the same, makes working async much faster, and removes ambiguity. I’ve been working with Athyna recently as a small investor (if you need to hire global talent, check them out) and I’m truly blown away by their remote collaboration. They put incredible detail and clarity into their writing, and it makes the world of a difference. [Go deeper: The habits of effective remote teams, by ]

• The classic pitch deck template for early-stage startups is rife with problems, the biggest one being that it dilutes your story—which is a key asset in the beginning—because it boxes your ideas and energy into a predetermined flow. I spoke with the founder of Dovetail earlier this week, and wow, I learned so damn much (stay tuned…). One thing Benjamin told me was how they did early investor updates very differently to most. Instead of numbers and classic progress reports, each update was taken as an opportunity to tell the story of what they were doing. I’ve never heard anyone do this, but it makes a lot of sense—people remember stories/feelings, not numbers. A different format to think about is The Pitch Cycle: 1: Capture imagination, 2: Introduce the opportunity, 3: Drive the business argument, 4: Ask for investment. [Go deeper: The pitch deck template is dead. Introducing — The Pitch Cycle, by Moti Elkaim]

4️⃣ things in the news you should know about

• Athyna (of which I’m a small investor) just raised $2.5M to build their AI hiring platform and double down on changing recruitment. They were already one of the best places for early-stage founders to quickly find great folks to join their team (hence my investment), but for you, this means if you’re hiring, you can do it way faster now. Big kudos to Bill and the crew. 🥂

• Canva has launched a proper enterprise product at $100 per seat—and this time they seem very serious about it. Oh, the inevitable has happened. Canva is evolving from consumer to enterprise. Raise your hand if you’ve seen this story before. 🙋 I’m watching this Figma <> Canva space…there’s something interesting here.

• Apple is considering a next-generation Airpod which features two AI-powered cameras. With Vision Pro sales not nearly up to Apple’s expectations (thank God), it looks like they may be exploring other avenues. 🤣 Business Insider noted: “In theory, AI could use footage from the cameras to help people keep track of their daily activities and optimize their daily routines.” Could be neat having Apple tell me that my back pain is due to my poor leg press form.

• Google Search’s new AI overviews will soon have ads. This should not surprise you. Follow the money, and it will always tell you where the puck is moving. Google’s VP for ads, Vidhya Srinivasan, said companies will soon have the opportunity to break into the new top section when their ads are relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview. Once again, ads are coming to eat the free internet, or as says, the enshittification of it all.

3️⃣ tactical ideas worth thinking about

• To improve your conversion rates during sign-up, go ask customer support and sales about one thing that’s blocking your users.

• Try to build something totally unnecessary into your product that does nothing but make someone using your product smile. Could be an animation, or some variable reward. I left my first Amazon review yesterday and I saw a little thing saying “Leave 5 more reviews and we’ll tell you a joke”. So random, but fun and unique. I wonder if the joke will be good?

• The next time you’re reaching out to someone in cold outreach (email, LinkedIn, etc), try adding a short (1m) Loom video into your message that is personalized just to them. Say their name. I’ve seen it work wonders in reply rates.

2️⃣ recommendations

• Practice the art of contemplation, and lifting your head more than you currently are. I’ve been using the Triple Flame app (free) for about 2 weeks now for reminders to take a pause. I know I know, you can just set up a reminder on your phone. But I like the app—I set it to every three hours, where I receive a reminder to pause whatever I’m doing for at least three minutes. No signup. Nice music. Good for clearing the head.

• If you’re a New Yorker, or just interested in culture and a fun take on business news, check out ’s newsletter. It’s one of my new favorite daily reads that makes me feel smarter and more in the know. Subscribe here and learn stuff you’d never know you needed to know…like the future of food media.

👉 View all the tools/products I use here.

1️⃣ interesting chart to noodle on

AKA, despite an improving US economy, people just don’t feel it. Simply because most people could not care less that inflation is down, employment is good, and the market is rising, when things like food, goods, and housing are still more expensive.

If you feel squeezed, you’re (rightly) going to complain about it.

And that just about wraps it up for today!

Also, in case you missed the link to the survey at the top 😉—or saw it and maybe are reconsidering 🤪—here’s the link. Would love to hear your thoughts about an improved How They Grow style.

Take the survey

Thank you, thank you. You’re the real MVP.

Until the next one.
— Jaryd ✌️

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Good morning, folks! ☕

After catching up on Survivor late last night, I overslept a tad. So, I’m writing to you today on a short deadline.

But, we’re up in the suburbs while we’re in the middle of a move. The sound of rain and birds certainly beats the sirens and the constant hum of stress. AKA, the NYC soundtrack.

Anyway, big welcome to the 216 new folks who’ve joined us this week, including Sergey, Rachell, Georgia, and Tim. We’re now a solid 20,766!

Real quick, I posted the below to Chat yesterday. I’d love your input. If you have any questions, please do send them over, ideally in Chat, the comments, or by replying to this email.

Cool. Since I’m sitting down to write later than usual, let’s just get cracking.

I hope you enjoy and learn something new!

— Jaryd

ICYMI this week 🗞️

• Bloomberg asked Adam Neumann why Andreessen Horowitz invested $350M in his new startup, Flow, after everything at WeWork. His reply: “That’s a question for Andreessen Horowitz.” If you missed my story on Why WeWork Died…read it here.

• Paramount is in talks to buy Sony. Last week, they submitted a non-binding letter of interest to buy them for around $26B in cash.

• My favorite created, MrBeast, is going solo and cutting ties with his management company. Honestly fair enough, Jimmy Donaldson is such a beast he doesn’t need a manager. He just turned 26 and as a creator with his own business is pulling in $600M in revenue a year. Just think about that for a second. Jimmy is the biggest, but it’s an example of the growing power of giant creators across the entertainment industry. Speaking of YouTube…

• YouTube is planning to compete with Spotify and Apple in podcasting. As video podcasts grow on YouTube, the platform is leaning on its ability to offer both video and audio to draw in listeners. Read the high-level strategy.

• Apple launched a strange commercial, called Crush!, for the new iPad, leaving many with a bitter taste. They’ve since apologized for the ad, showing a huge hydraulic press destroying all the beautiful things in the world, just to replace them with an iPad.

Today’s 5-Bits ☔

1. How novelty effects and Dopamine Culture rule the tech industry

2. Have you done a pre-mortem yet?

3. Broken Record: Lessons from the West’s politics on Russia

4. Asking the right questions

5. Rethinking the brand ROI

+ Quote, tools, chart, and rabbit holes of the week

1️⃣ How novelty effects and Dopamine Culture rule the tech industry

, if you see this, welcome to Substack, and congrats on 6 years at a16z! I’ve been a big Andrew Chen fan for a while, and his book The Cold Start Problem is a must read for anyone building networked-based products.

We’ll get today started with one of Andrew’s first Substack posts.

Key quote

It’s obvious that a new product has to tap into any new emergent culture in order to succeed. In a world where visual media is the dominant force — whether that’s photos, videos, or clips — any product that figures out how to naturally produce media in its usage will succeed. No wonder we’ve seen the Novelty Effect of diffusion models that produce media, being shared on social media, become so viral so quickly.

And, yes, ride the Novelty Effect. Build upon Dopamine Culture. But also keep in mind that to be successful in the long-run, your product must also be useful. It must retain. Because when the S-curve progresses to the next stage, anyone who is novel but useless will surely come to an early end.

— Andrew Chen, via

Insight & Action 🛠️

Andrew shared this hard-hitting graphic by Ted Gioia:

You can pretty clearly see that everything in our world today is optimized to be quick and super easy to consume. Minimal attention span. Mindlessness. All online. No realness.

Everything has become more accessible. Sure, there’s a case accessibility is good and given power to the people, but the tradeoff is a lack of substance.

From the online side, that’s one of the big reasons I love the culture engine that Substack is creating, because writers create, and readers generally prefer, depth.

And more broadly, I’m absolutely all for the trend of shifting back to “slow and traditional” culture. This is nested in the nostalgia movement: more vinyl records, film cameras, physical locations to play sport, etc.

I’m not going to even bother to go find the data, because I know that the further to the right of that chart we go, the unhappier we’ve become.

I personally want more tactileness. The actual feeling of doing something vs just having my day lost in the sauce of pixels and bits. Give me the atoms, baby.

So, two observations:

1. Big picture, there’s growing opportunity in the physical world. IRL experiences, hardware, play, and things that work to actually bring people together. Worth noodling on.

2. But, in the world of software building where most of us sit, a big implication of this accessibility is a constant battle against retention. Which means your product has to deliver value incredibly fast. If you’re not giving first session value (nay, first few taps value), brace yourself for big drop-off rates. And once people abandon your product in search for quicker gratification, it’s exceedingly harder to convince them to come back.

Read the full post by Andrew

2️⃣ Have you done a pre-mortem yet?

In short, before:

• Starting a company;

• Making a big change/bet in life, or;

• Launching a product

Put in some legwork upfront to find out what could go wrong before you even start.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the concept, but Luca Dellanna put it very succinctly.

Key quote

Imagine you wake up in a hospital. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?

Imagine your partner breaks up with you. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?

Imagine you lose your job. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?

—Luca Dellanna

Insight & Action 🛠️

Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then working backwards to figure out what happened (the classic post-mortem), rather unlock the power of 20:20 hindsight with a “pre-mortem” by imagining it went wrong and asking some questions to deduce why.

The pre-mortem is a technique to help you do what’s right for your customers, your company, and your team, by foreshadowing and mitigating the most blatant (and obscure) would-be blunders.

The process is relatively straight forward:

• You list out all questions you can think of. Some of these will be clear questions, but some could be fuzzy, for example:

  • What's the go-to-market strategy?

  • What does that go-to-market strategy cost?

  • Why do influencers wanna promote this?

  • What's my exit strategy?

  • What is the multiple at IPO that this company is going to have?

  • And how does that work backwards to a series A?

• You then go an answer all of those questions. The idea is to force yourself to think about it and write an answer for each one, then organize it into sections, and then turn into something that's relatively readable.

A super handy exercise to minimize risk and think of the edge cases.

3️⃣ Broken Record: Lessons from the West’s politics on Russia

don’t often publish content without a paywall, but when they do, I read it.

A recent post of their’s is an open letter to Western politicians on Russia.

It’s a geopolitical piece, but while reading it, I found some broader lessons that could be abstracted out worth sharing.

Key quote

The Russian economy is booming while Europe battles recession and Ukraine nears collapse on the battlefield—in large part because Russia produces vastly more weapons than the West can supply. Russian imports have been replaced by members of the Global South, especially China. China and Russia have gotten so chummy on trade that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Beijing and threatened to sanction the country just last week. The Chinese sent him packing, all but daring him to do something about it.

The “lost companies” that represented “~40% of its GDP” merely sold their businesses to new Russian owners on their way out of the country—often at pennies on the dollar—and those businesses quickly reopened under local management. Starbucks is now “Stars Coffee” and McDonald’s is now “Vkusno i tochka,” and both menus are virtually indistinguishable from their pre-war predecessors. The sanctions simply forced a change in the equity stack of the grand Russian capital table, and in Russia's favor at that.

— Doomberg

Insight & Action 🛠️

Some practical things you can take away from the piece with regards to the West’s strategy towards Russia.

• Stress test your operating and strategic assumptions. Run wargame scenarios where competitors are stronger or more nimble than you expect. Have contingency plans.

• Look for indirect and non-obvious paths to victory. Attacking a problem head-on (e.g. sanctions) may be less effective than an oblique approach, like flooding markets.

• Be willing to make hard tradeoffs. Be care to not let side priorities stop you from doing what's needed to win.

• Build agility into your culture as a first-class citizen. You have to be able to rapidly pivot strategies, replace vendors/partners, and adapt to shocks. Any level of rigidity is a vulnerability.

• When you see an opening, act decisively. Once you spot an advantage, move fast and go all-in to press it. Hesitation gives competitors time to respond.

Read the full post by Doomberg

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4️⃣ Asking the right questions

The greatest discoveries in life come not from finding the right answers, but from asking the right questions.

In a recent essay, Sahil Bloom shared 7 questions that have had a big impact on his life.

Below I share my favorite 3, as well as 2 questions of my own I’ve shared specific to company building.

Try asking yourself at least one of them today.

Key quote

You live your life zoomed way, way in.

It makes it difficult to assess the quality of your daily actions and whether you're on the right course.

On a regular basis, zoom out by asking yourself this question:

• How would your actions from a typical day compound in your life?

• Would they be driving you forward in the direction of your goals and vision?

• Would they be steering you off course?

Remember the 1-in-60 Rule: A 1 degree error in heading means a plane will miss its destination by 1 mile for every 60 miles flown. Small errors in heading are amplified by distance and time.

Course correct early and often.

— Sahil Bloom, via his newsletter

Insight & Action 🛠️

• If someone observed my actions for a week, what would they say my priorities are?

  • Why: This prompts us to examine the alignment between our stated intentions and our actual behaviors, revealing any discrepancies and areas where we may be cutting corners

• If I were the main character in a movie of my life, what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now?

  • Why: Oof, good one! We’re so bad at taking our own advice, but forcing ourselves to take the bird's-eye view perspective on the situation gives us a nice vantage point to see the bigger picture.

• Where am I allowing more information to get in the way of more action?

  • Why: There’s always more data or reassurance you can find to build confidence, but it can easily become a silent excuse for inaction. As Sahil says, “When in doubt, it's safe to assume the balance is found with more action.” Spot on.

And then, related to work and building products:

• What are the top three skills or knowledge areas I need to acquire to take my product to the next level, and how can I prioritize learning at least one of them?

  • Why: You will always have gaps, but often we don’t think about them and just focus on the now and getting what’s in front of us done. Building skill is a longer game, but taking a step back to think about your growth in relation to your products growth is an interesting exercise.

• If I could only work on my product for 2 hours a day, what activities would I prioritize to maximize my impact?

  • Why: This gets you thinking about three things: a) what moves the needle the most, b) what your comparative advantage/biggest leverage on the team is, and c) what type of action you should take each day to move your product forward.

Just remember, it’s mainly about the questions, not the answers. Simply asking yourself a question can bring you new clarity and perspective. Also, it’s a good habit to circle back to questions like this somewhat periodically. Your thoughts will change.

Read the full post by Sahil

5️⃣ Rethinking the brand ROI

Brand is one of those things that can sometimes be tricky to nail down. Like, what exactly is our brand?

Sometimes people spend a lot of time thinking about it and focusing on all the details you’d never even think about. And other times, often like a team’s culture, it just becomes what it is quite naturally.

That isn’t always a good thing. Like Uber’s bro culture under the leadership of Travis. Kalanick—the culture just emanated him.

But your brand and culture are deeply tied.

In a great post, gets int how brand marketing— which is all about the production of “cultural artifacts” and “experiences that carry your story"—, when executed well, create a "cultural influence strategy" than can be a great competitive advantage and profit driver.

Key quote

Brand marketing was invented to create a link between a company and culture. It conveys the brand identity that transcends what a company sells. In contributes to cultural conversation through stories about humans, their aspirations, and their life. 

Brand marketing is the strategy of cultural influence. Brands used to influence mainstream culture through their advertising on mass media like TV, print, billboards, or public relations. Today, they influence culture through the cultural products they create: content, merchandising, events, aesthetics, experiences, archives, history, entertainment, fandom. These cultural products are directed to subcultures, taste communities, and consumer niches. Through these cultural products, brands tell their story.

— Ana Andjelic, via

Insight & Action 🛠️

A few observations from Ana’s post:

• Try to connect brand marketing to financial results by focusing on cultural influence. Your brand's ability to shape culture through stuff like content, experiences, and aesthetics is what will help drive long-term financial outcomes like pricing power, market share, and customer loyalty.

• You want to develop a strong, clear brand story that permeates everything you do. Your products, advertising, and all user touchpoints should tell a compelling, differentiated story that draws in attention in. A story that stands out from the noise is the foundation.

• Plan to create a steady stream of "cultural products". That’s things like events, collaborations, content, merch, IRL stunts, etc. They will help carry your brand story in a more engaging way. Ask yourself, is there some new (bold) idea we can test in the real world?

• Like your roadmap, balance the short and long-term in your cultural influence strategy. Some things should focus on driving immediate engagement, while others plans could be to plant seeds for the future. Manage across timelines.

Read the full post by Ana

Quote of the week 💡

Tools of the week 🛠️

Here are 3 tools I use, either at work, personally, or both :)

• Sprig: Sprig is great for capturing user insights with micro surveys right inside your product. They also have an epic tool to gather user feeding form interactive prototypes.

• Webflow: I use Webflow to spin up landing pages and websites without writing a line of code. They have gorgeous templates to get started in minutes, and there’s a really robust community of resources to help build pretty much anything.

• Passionfroot: I use Passionfroot to manage my sponsorship storefront. If you’re a brand looking to find a creator, they also have a marketplace for brands and creators to match.

👉 View all my recommendations.

Chart of the week 📈

Trust is everything.

Unfortunately, people in the US don’t trust anything (or anyone) anymore. 👇

Byte on one of these posts 🧠

Other favorite reads from the week…

• Screenshot marketing = the ultimate curiosity hook, by

• 10 Lessons From 2024 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting, by

• Which Music Stands the Test of Time, and Which Does Not? A Statistical Analysis, by

Whenever you are ready 🤝

Here are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Are you looking to grow your team? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team. Their product, service, and talent pool is just amazing. Just reply to this email if curious, or learn more here ↗

2. Are you looking to grow your product by reaching my audience of founders, PMs, and product builders? If so, maybe we can partner up. You can reply to this email to get the convo started, or learn more here ↗

And that’s everything for this week’s edition.

As always, thanks so much for reading and being part of this growing community. It means a lot. If you enjoyed today’s post, don’t be shy to hit the heart button or forward this email to a friend.

Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️

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Haaappy Friday, everyone! 👋

Big welcome to the 278 people who’ve joined us this week, including Serene, Amir, Ivan, and Ben! You’re now part of a 20,563 strong bunch of folks who like to make things.

Today is an all-star edition, featuring some of the best writers and operators in tech. If I was playing fantasy startup, these folks would absolutely be my first few picks on the dream team.

Before getting to it though, a quick personal update.

I know my main deep dives have been a bit fewer of late. Outside of life being a bit more demanding recently with work, moving, and family visiting, (excuses excuses…) honestly the biggest reason I’ve taken my foot off the gas a bit is to help manage burnout.

I care about this newsletter, and all of you, a tremendous amount. I never want to stop this thing because it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made. Like a founder and their startup, I’m always thinking about it even when I’m not directly working on it. As a result, it takes up a lot of mindshare.

I have all the intention of ramping up to full pace again, but I read a great post by writing expert on managing burnout, and decided to slow down and take a bit longer to write each deep dive for a little just to manage it.

Burnout is cyclical. It doesn’t come because you lose interest, but rather, it comes because you care and put so much in to something that it can become all-consuming. I never plan on stopping this newsletter, I love it. I love this community, and I am so grateful you click my emails and hear me out every week.

And to keep the fire going, sometimes it doesn’t need more logs, it needs to breath a bit.

Actually, I don’t think that’s how to keep a fire going. But the analogy somewhat makes sense here.

Anyway, I’m actively working on the next deep dive and it’s on a super cool company. Stay tuned.

Onto today’s post…

— Jaryd

ICYMI this week 🗞️

• beehiiv–Substack’s top competitor–just raised $33mm in Series B. I wrote about beehiiv here and made a case for their superiority in a lot of areas as a newsletter platform, and with this funding, they’re going to double down on, among other things, building out their ad network. They were already shipping ridiculously fast, so I expect this fuel to supercharge this. (Take a look ↗️)

• Women don’t have to send the first message anymore on Bumble. Another company we’ve covered here, Bumble has shipped a pretty major redesign which now allows men to make the opening move. That was a pretty big differentiator for them, so time will tell if it was the right move. (Take a look ↗️)

• Shopify’s stock has surged 200% in the 18 months after October 2022. Also a company we’ve covered, Shopify’s stock rebound can be credited to several well-timed decisions. This is something I actually plan to write about in a Shopify Part 2, so stay tuned. (Take a look ↗️)

• Biden has plans to raise taxes. Yes, he’s right that the US needs to raise taxes, BUT—and this is a big but—he’s just wrong/insane in some approaches. The biggest one being taxing unrealized capital gains. That would crush the US startup economy and honestly stifle so much innovation. I doubt this will get close to passing, but just saying. Rather focus on simplifying a ridiculously complicated tax code my guy, and stop quizzing me on my income when you know exactly how much I made. (Take a look ↗️)

• Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s biggest rivals, launched an iPhone app for its chatbot, Claude. I’ve been using the paid Claude Opus model, and I actually prefer the quality of responses to ChatGPT. (Take a look ↗️)

Today’s 5-Bits ☔

1. Startup Canvas: Product Strategy and a Business Model for a New Product

2. Writer-Builders

3. 3 types of debt product teams need to tackle

4. 7 fails of roadmap-making

5. The unspoken skill of finesse

+ Quote, tools, chart, and rabbit holes of the week

1️⃣ Startup Canvas: Product Strategy and a Business Model for a New Product

I really enjoyed ‘s take on why common frameworks like the The Business Model Canvas and The Lean Canvas miss the mark around startup product development.

I totally agree with his sentiment—they are great tools that should not be disregarded, but with a few modifications like mixing strategy and business model together, can become much more relevant to startup founders.

Being the ultra-helpful guy Pawel is, he didn’t just write about his thoughts, he created a handy visual and template.

Note, I think Pawel is missing one or two things in his model. I’ve added to it below too.

Key quote

Not quite a quote, but straight to the good stuff…here’s Pawel’s Startup Canvas model. (Double click to expand and read)

Insight & Action 🛠️

What I love about Pawel’s updated model here is how he focuses on a holistic view of strategy and business model, and how they need to work together.

Compared to the other popular canvas frameworks, Pawel has a few key inclusions:

• Vision is front and center. For startups, this is key. It’s the North Star for the team and founders, and the reason why people show up and work for lower wages :)

• There’s a clear “can’t/won’t copy”. Basically, it’s your defensibility. What makes you think your competitors can’t or won’t copy your strategy? Is this unique value proposition, counter positioning, activities, knowledge, culture, partners, IP?

• Trade-offs. As I wrote about last week, a strategy is a way to say no. Just as much as it tells you what you need to do, it helps you stay away from distractions.

• Relative costs. This forces you to think about what you want to optimize for. Do you want to optimize for low cost, like Southwest Airlines, or for unique value, like Starbucks?

All great additions. Personally, I’d add the following to the list of things think about as you build a canvas:

• Inflection & Insight. This is your product’s why now? What inflections/changes are happening from a technical perspective, or a behavioral/demand/societal standpoint. And from here, what is your unique insight? This is key to your strategy.

• Headwinds. These are large risks or obstacles that could be existential. Say you are a startup building within the social landscape; does the TikTok ban expose you? If a headwind is substantial, how will you navigate it? Another big input to strategy.

• Startup timebox. If you’re a founder, you need to ask yourself the tricky question—how long can/will you work on this idea before stopping, or before making a decision to keep at it. Timeboxing is an important tool to make sure you don’t just chip away at a losing bet and burn your most precious resource…your time. For example, “I’ll work at this all out for 10 months. If we have more than 10 paying customers by then, we know we have something and I will continue.”

Of course, every situation is different. I’ve said it before, just copying and pasting a template can be problematic, as the only thing that matters is doing what works best for you and your product/market/team/culture context.

But, Pawel’s Startup Canvas is a great forcing function to sit down and think about hard questions. And at the end of the day, asking the right questions is what will get you building the right product.

What question/theme would you add to the canvas?

Read the full post by Pawel from

2️⃣ Writer-Builders

Much like , I’ve always enjoyed and gravitated towards writing. When I was in school, the subjects I chose (and did the best in + enjoyed the most) where the ones that leaned essay heavy. History, art, biology, and English. And in University, economics.

Clearly, I’m still at it.

Writing has been one of the best habits I’ve kept up, because quite simply, it’s just made me better at life and work. Why? Because it’s one of the best vessels for learning.

And now, applied to the domain of product/startups/tech that I work everyday in, writing has been a huge advantage. An advantage to both me personally, and an advantage to you (I hope?) as the reader since I bring real-world operational experience to the conversation.

In a recent post, Anu shares a new archetype that really resonated with me, the writer-builder—someone who both writes and builds in a given domain.

These are the Substackers (and friends) like , , and . The writer-builder is in a position to create some of the most insightful content, as well as crush their day job. The examples above prove that.

So, what should you do about it?

Key quote

Writing increases your rate of revelation. This is true irrespective of the subject because writing is a process of reflection, assertion, and iteration. Writing clarifies your own ideas. Writing begets new ideas too. Writing lets you explore ideas in depth even if you won’t have time to act on them all. Writing shows people how you think and lets them decide if they agree, if they respect you, and if maybe you’re the kind of person they’d want to ask out for coffee or spend years working with.

You don’t write something in one shot and hit publish. And you don’t build one version of something and call it done. Doing either well calls for copious amounts of reflection and revision too. So while not everyone has the interest or aptitude to embody the writer-builder archetype, those who do have a distinctive advantage — they can unlock a virtuous cycle of revelation that levels up both.

— Anu, via

Insight & Action 🛠️

The simplest way to think about being a writer-builder is to build and learn in public.

As you know, the concept of putting your work out into the public is becoming far more encouraged. The companies that operationalizing this (e.g beehiiv, The Browser Company) do a great job at attracting talent, investors, and customers.

You can do the same thing individually, and you should, because building any kind of audience is building distribution—and you always want distribution.

But distribution via writing vs say on Twitter/YouTube etc is extra powerful, because it’s a direct line of communication with people. Also, putting words to “paper” is the best way to figure out what you actually think about something.

As an operator, here’s your next step: Go build something. Write about what you learnt. Apply what you learnt after thinking about it. Go build something better. Repeat.

Your writing doesn’t have to be long either, or particularly consistent. Just write some, share, and write some more.

Platforms like Substack and beehivv are excellent ways to get started.

Here’s one parting nugget of wisdom from Anu’s post.

Read the full post by Anu

3️⃣ 3 types of debt product teams need to tackle

We all know about tech debt.

We want to build something, but in pursuit of getting it done either fast or more affordably, we make some tradeoffs for short-term gains with how we build that thing. Like sub-optimal architecture, for example. The outcome usually is less-than-favorable code and infrastructure in the long-term that creates accelerating development friction that eventually compounds and needs to be fixed.

At some point, just like any debt, it must be paid (and with interest). If you don’t, well…big problems.

Anyway, there are other types of less obvious debt that founders and PMs should think about. points them out (product and marketing debt), and highlights some neat solutions.

Key quote

When a product starts to accumulate complexity that comes in the way of increased adoption, feature discovery, or understanding of the product, this is usually a sign of product debt.

Some common symptoms:

• confusing information architecture (e.g. cluttered navigation bar)

• outdated product copy

• conflicting features that overlap each other

• data hygiene issues due to a data model update

• edge cases with increasing frequency of occurrence

It’s important to tackle product debt to prevent users from churning due to friction in usage or a reduction in customer satisfaction as the product footprint grows.

— Aatir Abdul Rauf, via

Insight & Action 🛠️

• Tech debt is often seen as an engineering problem. “Engineering made that decision”, or “Engineering needs to get around to fixing it”. But, let’s not play hot potato. Often, tech debt accrues because of poor product management. For example, overlooked edge cases, confusing PRDs, low context communication, and failure to give engineers visibility on the future plans can equally contribute to tech debt as well.

  • What you can do about it: The simplest thing to do is communicate product vision and potential roadmap items to the engineering team. If they understand where a product is going, they can make better decisions today about what will make that possible. Really try understand the tradeoff between getting something released faster, vs better.

• Product debt is the homework assignment you get for being successful. When your product works and you acquire users, you’ll inevitably build more stuff for them. Overtime, certain features will get neglected (even core loops of your product) in pursuit of building the next thing, and eventually, your UI/UX will become more confusing. This is amplified by the fact that most teams struggle to take things away.

  • What you can do about it: Outside of regularly investing in IA (information architecture) updates and UI/UX deep dives, make it a practice to unship. I wrote about that here, but in short—post-release make sure to audit the numbers and create a culture of sunsetting features that are not landing. Related, here’s what I said a few weeks ago:

  Don’t get distracted by shiny new features and lose sight of your core—the most important stuff you already have. Lenny Rachitsky had an 11/10 post on this earlier this week, but simply, as your product matures it becomes increasingly important to not neglect the main JTBD and loop of your product. Your quality bar is high when you’re always thinking about making that loop fast, efficient, and delightful.

Read the full post and learn about Marketing Debt by Aatir

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4️⃣ 7 fails of roadmap-making

In a recent post, PLG G.O.A.T shares common potholes to avoid when creating long term plans.

Key quote

When it comes to roadmaps, the process itself is often more valuable than the end result.

Just going through the ordeal of gathering the relevant stakeholders will reveal misalignment and help everyone to sync up. For instance, if you’re talking through timelines and someone says ‘That will take a year’ and someone else says ‘3 months’… well, you may not know who’s right, but clearly there are some conflicting expectations about how difficult this is to build.

This is a great opportunity to identify the source of the misalignment and get on the same page. Every time you disagree and find a compromise, you learn something. This whole process will make your team and your whole organization better at working together.

— Leah Tharin, via

Insight & Action 🛠️

Here are the 7 mistakes Leah reminds us to avoid:

• Too much detail on effort estimations. 99% of the time, project estimates are wrong 100% of the time. When I started as a PM, I over-indexed on this and tried to create these visual gantt roadmaps showing a lovely happy path. One that relied on estimates. These were never right, and I adjusted course to using mostly Now/Next/Later roadmaps. It’s much easier, because getting agreement on ranked priorities is easier than getting folks to agree on time/effort estimates.

• Too much focus on today. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce of what’s happening around you today, thus, having your roadmap too zoomed in on your current operations. A key part of a roadmap isn’t just to show people what they are working on next, but to paint a broader picture of where things are going and how everything comes together in the future.

• Too much focus on the competition. Be wary of roadmaps that are too reactionary. If things are constantly in flux and your plans change regularly because of what other people are doing, again, you risk getting caught up too much in the today. As Leah says, copying competitors is like “the blind leading the blind.” Spot on analogy.

• Too much focus on outputs. The further out that a roadmap looks, the more the work needs to be outcome focused. Outputs are very prescriptive, and they can be built against easily because what to do is super clear. But as you look beyond the horizon, you can’t know what the outputs you want will be. This means long-term projects must be outcomes…like expand into a new vertical, improve retention in a specific market, or unlock some group of on-the-fence customers.

• Too public. As Leah notes, “If you promise to ship something to customers, you can’t choose not to ship it anymore, therefore taking away the possibility of saying, “After looking at the data, maybe this wasn’t a good idea.”. Her advice—just avoid any public facing roadmap that may set unattainable expectations with customers.

• Not actionable enough. In the short-term when outputs are more in focus, a roadmap will fail if it’s too abstract.

• Not properly communicated. What’s the saying? Something like “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears or sees it, did the tree even fall?” Well, that is the truth of roadmaps and strategy memos. You can do all the right stuff, but if nobody hears its and gets it, it’s useless. As a founder or PM, the roadmap is you one big thing to evangelize and drill home.

Another two problem I’ve seen on roadmaps worth noting here

1. They are idea lists. A roadmap should not be a laundry list of things people on the team want to do (think a HiPPO’s ideas). Projects must be tied to customer discovery.

2. They are too fixed. A roadmap can’t just be created and then left until the plan is done. Stakeholders need to meet regularly enough in cycles to align on priorities and move things around if needed. Nothing is set in stone, and good roadmaps reflect that.

What’s one mistake you’ve seen around roadmap? Drop any thoughts in the comments.

Read the full post by Leah

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5️⃣ The unspoken skill of finesse

When I hear the word finesse, I’m instantly transported back to 2013. I’m sitting on my couch playing FIFA while I should be studying for my accounting exam tomorrow. My friend Luke has just taught me how to shoot the perfect shot on goals. Hold R1 and press O— shoot towards the far corner.

I’ve just learnt the finesse shot.

Well, as a tradeoff for that lesson, I failed accounting.

So worth it. Who wants to be an accountant anyway. Legal Zoom can do by books for me, but nobody can score banging goals on my behalf, can they?

Finesse is polish, and beyond the screen of FIFA, the more polished you are at work and in your interactions, the higher the likelihood is you’ll: close more deals, get a seat at the table, hire better talent, get buy in, build trust, and get promoted.

In a tactical post, unpacks what finesse looks like, why it matters, and how to develop it for yourself and your team.

Key quote

Every leader should actively look for opportunities to teach their team judgment. If you’re not doing this, you’re barely scratching the surface on what “learning on the job” means for your team.

You need to teach them to “see” how you see, and notice what you notice. Explain the “why” behind what you said or did, or the “why” behind your feedback. When someone on the team displays finesse, point it out. Let everyone learn from it.

Over time, your team will improve their ability to pick up on what you pick up on, and eventually, to make the judgment calls you would have made.

I believe doing this, regularly and with gusto, is how you create a culture of high standards and dramatically improve your team’s chances of winning.

— Wes Kao, via

Insight & Action 🛠️

Finesse is good judgment and succinct sharing of ideas/thoughts, applied to delicate scenarios, usually in the context of communicating with other people.

Sure, some people are naturals and are generally more attuned to picking up cues, nuance, and micro-expressions. That’s a skill that absolutely helps with reading situations and being on-the-fly adaptive.

And I do think there’s a strong correlation between experience in a domain and finesse. The more you get the market and customers, of course you’ll be in a better position to know what to do and say, and what not to.

But like most skills, we can train our finesse muscle.

How?

The next time you’re in a real-world scenario, before speaking or sending some message, pause, and think a bit deeper about the layers of the situation/question. Simple in communication is great, but sometimes, simple oversimplifies something that is more complex.

One tactical thing that can hone your finesse is to apply conditions to what you say. For example, instead of just saying some fact or opinion, follow the arc of:

• If this, then than.

• Or if this, then that.

• I believe it’s Y because of X, therefore, we should do this thing.

A simple tool that forces you to find the layers in any situation. And the more you practice this, the more you’ll shoot bangers in the top right corner.

Read the full post with more advice on sharpening your finesse by Wes

Quote of the week 💡

Tools of the week 🛠️

Every week, I highlight 3 products I actually use. Today, I’m highlighting:

• Typeform: If you send surveys and care about the UI/UX respondents see, then Typeform is a no brainer. Beautiful, on-brand, surveys for anything.

• Waking Up: Meditating is a key part of my morning, and I couldn’t suggest doing it in some form enough. I recently switched from Headspace back to Waking Up for more philosophical content. You can get 30 days free to try it out.

• Anthropic AI: I’ve been testing out Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT recently, and while it’s missing some features vs OpenAI, I’ve found the quality of responses better tbh.

👉 View all my recommendations.

Chart of the week 📈

Good news for folks in the travel industry. With all the extra money floating around the US system, a record number of people are planning international vacation in the next 6 months.

Byte on one of these posts 🧠

Other favorite reads from the week…

• In a Job Interview, This Is How to Acknowledge Your Weaknesses, by

• Why I Don’t Invest in Real Estate, by

• The Great Social Media Reset - We Scroll More Than We Post., by and

• Tesla In Turmoil: The EV Meltdown In 10 Charts, by

Whenever you are ready 🤝

Here are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Are you looking to grow your team? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team. Their product, service, and talent pool is just amazing. Just reply to this email if curious, or learn more here ↗

2. Are you looking to grow your product by reaching my audience of founders, PMs, and product builders? If so, maybe we can partner up. You can reply to this email to get the convo started, or learn more here ↗

And that’s everything for this week’s edition.

As always, thanks so much for reading and being part of this growing community. It means a lot. If you enjoyed today’s post, don’t be shy to hit the heart button or forward this email to a friend.

Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️