Validating... Without Launching

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Unicorn founder Brett Adcock shares how cold email can work better than warm intros (Link)

Growth

• 3 small marketing tactics working for this SaaS startup (Link)

• How Uber signed up their first 1M drivers (Link)

• A good tip for founder-led sales (Link)

ICYMI

• Mark Zuckerberg on how to shift your thinking (Link)

• Why being bad at everything can work in your favor early on (Link)

• How this repeat founder/CEO thinks about his job (Link)

• The 3 jobs of a CEO (Link)

• Balaji on how X is disrupting traditional media — a good case for how disruption works in general (Link)

• The lessons Jony Ive learned from Steve Jobs (Link)

• Garry Tan’s 4 tips for YC applications (Link)

• How you should think about giving out titles early on (Link)

• 5 insights that all founders need to hear (Link)

• A collection of thoughts from a founder building a venture-backed startup (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Productized QA

Productized services, where you pay a monthly subscription for a highly streamlined and done-for-you service, are all over the place:

• They’re notably common in design with Studio Salt, Designjoy, and others

• And I offer ghostwriting for X, LinkedIn, and newsletters

Some other niches, like engineering, are more challenging to productize (what happens when there are bugs?) but one I could see working is QA:

Startups hate doing QA. You have limited technical resources and need to move fast.

Spending time on extensive testing feels antithetical to that.

But QA does have an impact. It can prevent bugs from happening which can positively impact churn and sentiment.

🧠 Framework: Jobs to be Done

We’ve got a classic this week.

Jobs to be done (JTBD) teaches that customers hire your product to do a job for them, just like they’d hire a person.

If the product doesn’t do that job well then they will fire it, or if it does do it well they’ll recommend it to their friends.

And part of the founder’s job when it comes to marketing, positioning, and product design, is understanding what job your customers are willing to hire a product for.

It was originally created by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Normally, I try to stick to frameworks from founders rather than academics, but Clayton also is the father of disruption theory — which is how less-developed products can conquer even established, crowded markets.

He’s someone worth listening to:

However, not everyone is sold on JTBD.

Notably, a16z partner Sriram Krishnan doesn’t like it at all.

He says the theory works in a vacuum, but when a founder is actually building a company there are so many other “agents in the system” (i.e. competitors, factors that limit your ability to produce your product, etc.) that focusing solely on solving one job may hinder your overall success.

Here’s his take from an appearance on Lenny’s Podcast:

My take is that knowing the "rules and theories better informs you about how and when are the right places to bend and break them.

You learn the rules as a student, but you learn how to break the rules to become a master.

📈 Trend: Living Off Grid

Traditionally “living off the grid” has meant you’re prepping for doomsday and fearing Big Brother (not to say you shouldn’t be…).

But it’s always seemed like a daunting amount of work to set up the basics like electricity, water and, if you want to stay at all connected to the rest of the world, internet too.

But Starlink has changed that.

Especially as distrust in traditional institutions increases, I expect we’ll see a rise in people looking to take advantage of solar panels, Starlink, and other systems to escape the sprawl of society.

There’s already a subreddit that’s quickly growing to support the trend.

💬 Quote: Validating Without Launching

Validating products means endless iterations and quick launches, right?

Not always.

In some industries, like consumer tech, your reputation means everything. As Mark Zuckerberg said in The Social Network, “it has to be cool.”

So how do you make a “cool” product without getting a ton of users on it?

Nikita Bier founded tbh and Gas, grew them to millions of users, and sold both of them for tens of millions (to Facebook and Discord, respectively).

He says the best way to get insights before launch is to simulate the UX:

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