AI Spotify and Selling Horseback Riding

I’m trying something new this week called Two Minute Tuesday.

A weekly email where I highlight useful things I found this week that you can read in two minutes or less (because founders are busy!). Think about it like Tim Ferriss’s Five Bullet Friday, but specifically for startup founders.

Today at a glance:

• Opportunity → AI Spotify

• Framework → Don’t Sell Saddles

• Trend → FinOps

• Resource → A YC company that can save you 60% on AWS

• Quote → Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia about when he “figured out how to make a few bucks”

It’s an experiment so let me know if you like or hate it at the bottom, or by replying.

💡 Opportunity: AI Spotify

You may have seen the AI-generated Drake track that was shared on TikTok this weekend.

Product Hunt's founder, Ryan Hoover, saw it too and concisely shared what an AI-driven Spotify could look like:

Spotify seems unlikely to do this themselves (at least in the short term) due to the risks it would present to their relationships with major labels.

🧠 Framework: “Don’t Sell Saddles”

In August 2013, Slack launched to the world. The month before, cofounder Stewart Butterfield sent a note to his team called “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here”

He likened this to a saddle company choosing to sell horseback riding as a lifestyle rather than trying to convince existing horseback riders to buy their saddles.

He doesn’t mean selling horseback rides, but rather the idea that by buying a saddle you can ride a horse.

It’s a way of saying to sell the benefit, not the feature, and also helps the startup think bigger and position themselves as a market leader. In Slack’s case, they sold the dream of a more productive workplace with a less cluttered email inbox.

📈 Trend: FinOps

As anyone building on top of GPT-4 or AWS knows, cloud-based services can get expensive fast.

Increasingly, companies are looking for standardized ways to manage these costs and increase efficiency.

The rise of FinOps is creating opportunities for tools to help teams manage their cloud spend.

🛠 Resource: Pump

Here’s some evidence that FinOps is trending: a Y Combinator startup in the space launched this week.

Pump saves founders up to 60% on their AWS bill without any engineering effort or financial risk.

They do this by purchasing volume discounts and also closely monitoring what you’re actually using.

💬 Quote

A great startup idea can come from anywhere, and may not even seem like it has big potential at first.

Airbnb was started at a time when the founders were struggling for cash. Here’s the moment Joe shared the idea with Brian:

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