5-Bit Fridays: Try this approach to finding a startup idea

Also, why you should be sincere (and not serious), and deliberately break your routine

Gooood morning, everyone! ☕

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. 🤙

…made it eventually though

Read time: ~8 minutes

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5 actionable insights from this week

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(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

Pierre

]

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(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 ]

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(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

Elena Verna

]

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(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

Andrew Chen

]

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(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.

Personalization gone wrong (Source: Marketoonist)

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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Awesome, have a wonderful weekend everyone. 🥂

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