5-Bit Fridays: Are you still using crutches?
Also, an interesting lesson from how America built aircraft in WW2
Morning guys ☕
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
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.
*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 Mario Gabriele ]
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 Brian Potter]
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:
Show your support by checking out Attio, this week’s awesome partner
Spread the word; forward this email to a friend
And of course, if this was your first read, hit subscribe for more
Cool…
Well, I hope I get to leave in the first place.
— Jaryd ✌️
Always a great read. Thank you!