Single Person Teams

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• This investor is looking to invest $100-$150k in 2 startups (Link)

• How this investor evaluates founders (Link)

• Travis Kalanick’s advice for startups that need to fundraise (Link)

• The worst type of investor a founder can add to their board (Link)

Growth

• Great examples of how founders got their product into the hands of users (Link)

• How a founder added 20 million users in a year (Link)

• HubSpot’s co-founder on why multi-year pricing deals are not good for startups (Link)

• Why it’s worth doing unscalable things, even in consumer (Link)

ICYMI

• Questions to ask when checking references (Link)

• Interesting perspective on the “IPO window” (Link)

• Loom’s co-founder shares the story of how they spent $150k on the loom.com domain (Link)

• A playbook to find startup ideas from Reddit (Link)

• Keith Rabois on why stress is actually a positive thing (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Former Founder Talent Network

Most startups fail, and being a founder can seriously burn you out.

When Launch House failed, I needed a break and it took 3 months in South Africa’s western cape wine country of doing practically nothing but writing this newsletter before I felt I was ready to build again.

For some founders, there comes a time to get back on the horse. But others opt-out and just want to get a job where they aren’t dealing with the unique stress of being a founder.

That’s ok.

And I bet a lot of other founders would want to hire them (as long as they weren’t looking to coast in their next role).

This is one of those low-ceiling but high-signal ideas. I’d probably promote this to our audience if someone wants to builds it and gets high-signal candidates on board.

🧠 Framework: Richard Branson’s Delegation Process

As I dove deeper into the world of extreme delegation (very interesting subculture, ngl), I stumbled on this note from Richard Branson about how he thinks about what to delegate:

I also interviewed Athena’s co-founder, Jonathan Swanson (who also co-founded Thumbtack) about this topic last year. He’s managed to automate his entire home life like a hotel.

Worth a read if you’re looking to get some time back.

📈 Trend: Single-Person Teams

Remember how Sam Altman predicted we’d see a billion dollar company that only had one employee, due to the productivity gains AI enables?

We’re already starting to see some founders decide to go it (fully) alone.

As someone who’s been a solo founder and also had co-founders, I’d recommend the solo route with enthusiasm for anyone who knows what they’re doing.

The speed you gain so overwhelmingly makes up for any perceived losses that I think we’ll see this trend dramatically accelerate as AI continues to improve.

💬 Quote: Building Consumer Products

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you probably know how I feel about startups that take the “if we build it they will come” approach to growth.

TLDR: you’re in for a lot of pain.

This is particular true in consumer tech.

You’re probably going to fail and need to iterate a lot, so the speed with which you can get something new up and running (and how quickly you respond to user feedback) is a primary success metric.

Ryan Hoover expands on why this is important:

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