Startup founder diaries
Notion Sites launch | The product-market fit game | Unethical growth hacks | Do things that don't scale stories | The accountability experiment + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
Today marks the 50th issue of the Creator Club. Instead of writing the classic listicle “50 things I’ve learnt on my 50th newsletter issue” blah blah blah, I’ve done some napkin math and pulled some stats below:
263 products shared
162 articles
159 random hyperlinks
150 vintage tech throwbacks (AKA Flashbacks)
122 Bonus content features
Almost 30 entire days were spent writing the newsletter
~2,500 hours reading, listening and watching content (very rough cal)
Almost 10,000 subscribers
0 missed publishing months
I’m also pulling together a special issue which includes my top 3 articles, products and hyperlinks, however, I need your feedback.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last issues top link: Time Management Tips of Insanely Busy People
📓 Articles
The Product-Market Fit Game
If only getting to product-market fit (PMF) was as easy as a computer game. The amount of time I committed to gaming as a teenager matched with my superior skills would have made me a billionaire. Unfortunately, that’s not reality, however, James Hawkins (Co-Founder & CEO, PostHog) has managed to distil the typically pretty complex topic of how to achieve PMF into 5 step framework.
In a startup, the only objective that matters before you have product-market fit, is finding product-market fit.
Finding product-market fit is all about creating something people genuinely crave, ditching the "build it and they will come" mentality. James breaks the journey to PMF down into five levels:
Unearthing a Pain Point: Start by identifying a significant problem that needs solving.
Validating the Problem: Not all problems are created equal. Make sure there's a real market for your solution by validating the problem with potential users.
Snagging Early Adopters: Get people to try your product and see how they respond.
Sticking Power: Don't just get users, keep them! Focus on retention and making sure your product offers real value.
Landing those Promoters: Turning users into promoters is gold! These are the folks who will rave about your product to others.
Check the post out for more detail on each of the 5 levels and some of his personal learnings having pivoted PostHog 6 times before achieving PMF.
And if you’re curious how to know when you achieve PMF - I’ll leave you with a famous quote from Marc Andreessen:
PMF is like sex. If you need to ask if your having you probably aren’t
🎁 Bonus content: Lastly, just take a moment to sim over the PostHog website and bask in its stunning glory. The layout, hilarious copy and illustrations are on point. Also their merch is amazing! why is this the first time I’ve heard of PostHog?
I just shut down my second startup — here’s my retro
Interested in the perspective on the early stage journey as a first-time non-technical founder and if you are indeed daring enough to go 0 to 1?
I thought so. Well, step right into Wayne Zhou’s epilogue filled with reflections and takeaways from this rollercoaster of an experience.
Wayne Zhou opens up about his two startup failures, and guess what? Both can be traced back to a team that wasn't quite right. Startup number one got into YC then the decision was retracted after a co-founder decided to part ways just before the cohort kicked off. Startup number two, Verve, crashed because Zhou, the non-technical founder, wasn't truly passionate about the problem they were solving. The big lesson here? Know yourself and your team, and know when to throw in the towel.
🔗 Hyperlinks
Do things that don't scale stories
If there’s one saying that’s etched into Silicon Valley vernacular it’s “Do things that don’t scale”. Actually, perhaps it’s second after “Move fast and break things”. Anyway, I think we can agree it’s up there. As with most things in tech, it all routes back to the man himself, Mr Paul Graham. The phrase was initially coined by Paul back in 2013 with his famous essay “Do things that don’t scale’. To give you an idea of how much this post is referred to in startup folklore, I quickly checked the amount of backlinks this post gets. Any guesses? Scroll to the bottom to find the answer.
There are so many great examples of startups doing things that don’t scale scattered across the internet, but this is perhaps the most up-to-date comprehensive list I’ve found to date which isn’t full of fluff for SEO. In fact, it’s a spreadsheet which contains 90 examples created by Frank Lee.
My personal favourites are Airbnb, Zappos, Dropbox and Classpass.
Founder diaries
Does anyone else miss content like the original podcast series of ‘Startup’ by Gimlet Media? If you haven’t listened to it before it’s a fantastic series in which founder Alex Blumberg documents the early days of starting Gimlet media. Check out the first episode by scrolling to the bottom of this page.
Anyway, I’ve finally found something similar. This time it’s a vlog and follows first-time founder Jacob Binnie vlogging his journey as a new founder building Subbb - a subscription payments and permissions layer for communities. It’s not overlay-edited, comes across as super authentic and he shares his progress throughout short videos whilst filming on the move in NY.
I would suggest kicking off with the episode linked below which starts with him losing his job.
Unethical Growth Hacks used by Startups in their Early Days
Finding your first users as a new startup is challenging. Some take the traditional path with tactics such as buying targeted ads, posting in forums, creating lead gen content or tools ….. then there’s the other path.
This path is a somewhat grey area and depending on who you ask, could be portrayed as unethical, or in some rare cases, illegal.
Step into the realm of unethical growth hacks.
Here are some of my favourites below:
Uber: Uber developed a system called "Greyball" to evade law enforcement. If the app detected a user who might be a police officer or government official trying to catch unauthorised Uber drivers, it would show a fake version of the app with no available cars.
Reddit: In its early days, Reddit's founders created numerous fake accounts to populate the site with content and make it appear more active and engaging for new users.
Airbnb: Airbnb created bots to automatically reply to rental listings on Craigslist, their competitor. These bots would redirect users to Airbnb's platform, effectively poaching potential customers.
YouTube: YouTube knowingly hosted copyrighted and pirated content on its platform to drive user adoption. They also allowed users to spam their videos to friends to increase engagement
Whether you agree with them or not gotta admit some of them are clever.
The Accountability Experiment
There is no doubt accountability is powerful. When you don’t get around to something you’ve let yourself down, but if you’re held accountable for something the odds of you completing that task or goal have from 65% to 95% completion rate - nearly guaranteeing your success compared to trying to accomplish goals on your own (according to a recent study).
I’ve been doing accountability calls for the last 2 years with two different friends twice a month for an hour and I can certainly vouch that they work yet I don’t hear of many others doing it!
Recently, Ryan Hoover - founder of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund ran an accountability experiment. 200 founders requested to participate, 12 were chosen, $100 each, over 2 weeks and 3,342 text messages later here are Ryan’s findings.
📱 Products
Notion Sites
Notion finally jumped on the bandwagon and launched Notion Sites. An entire maker economy has been modifying Notion for years to make websites despite the lack of support from Notion, but it seems today is the day. However, don’t get too excited just yet. The new Notion Site features are limited but I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg and I expect more feature releases shortly.
The big standout feature for me is the support for a navigation bar. I’ve been hacking my way around this using janky ‘callout blocks’. It’s basic functionality but works great. Next up are custom domains which the community have been crying out for and lastly, Google Analytics + some additional SEO settings.
I’ve updated all my Notion website templates to take advantage of these new features and they are all for free here.
🧠 Fun fact: Notion actually started life as a no-code website builder then later a web app builder before evolving into the product you know today. Looks like it’s coming back full circle.
Palmer Luckey’s Gameboy
Firstly, who’s Palmer Lucky and why is he creating a Gameboy. Well, in short, he’s a billionaire tech founder who founded Oculus VR at 20 years old and sold it to Meta in 2014 for $2 billion. He then got fired and created Anduril a defence weapons manufacturer. Interesting pivot eh?
I have no idea why this all matters, just that he’s a very interesting character. While you’re here, you gotta check out this short Bloomberg interview with him - it’s absolutely priceless! Seriously, stop now and watch it!
So this brings me to his side project - The ModRetro Chromatic. Basically, a pimped-out Gameboy, including a magnesium alloy case, sapphire crystal cover glass, PBT buttons, a pixel-perfect IPS screen at the same size, resolution, and pixel structure as the original Game Boy and Game Boy Colour, colour-matched to the Game Boy Colour screen — and with “well over a thousand” nits of brightness so you can play out in the sunlight.
Perplexity | AI Search Engine
Switching browsers is a hard enough challenge given we are accustomed to our most used piece of software, but when was the last time you considered switching up your search engine? I’m going to take a wild guess and say…. never. Me too. Why on earth would I consider moving from Google? it’s the defacto search engine and for the most part, it just works. It’s like muscle memory at this stage and it’s even a friken verb.
However, I’ve recently been playing with Perplexity when researching for this newsletter and I’m absolutely loving it.
In short, Perplexity is an AI search engine. It uses AI models like OpenAI's GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Anthropic's Claude 2 to understand, summarize, generate, and predict new content. Perplexity AI is designed to make searching the internet feel like having a conversation with an expert, and it cites its sources for every answer.
With fewer than 50 employees, the company has a user base that’s grown to tens of millions. They’re also generating over $20 million ARR and taking on both Google and OpenAI for the future of search. Their recent fundraise of $63m values the company at more than $1 billion, and their investors include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Andrej Karpathy, Garry Tan, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Naval Ravikant. With Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said he uses the product “almost every day.” Despite this meteoric success so far, they have ruffled some feathers recently.
🎁 Bonus content: Lex Fridman sits down with Arvind Srinivas CEO of Perplexity. A quick search on Arvind and it turns out he only graduated in 2021 and had two intern jobs (Google + Open AI) before founding Perplexity on Aug 22 and is now CEO of a startup valued at $1b+ and taking on Google. Incredible. Check out the pod here.
🎁 Bonus bonus content: I originally found Perplexity in Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter and his post ‘How Perplexity builds product’. One for the AI PMs out there.
Beta Directory | Discover the latest tech products
This month’s latest early access beta products brought to you by Beta Directory are:
Particle News: An AI-powered news that helps you understand more, faster.
Teleport: The visual development and collaboration platform for designers and developers
MS Paint Anything: Upload an image and get a bad MS Paint version
🐽 Other links to consume
You can’t watch this and not think humans are pretty incredible
Two new website designs I’m absolutely loving here and here.
🔮 Flashback
This month we’re going back to 1995 and no this isn’t an early concept of a drone it’s actually Nintendo’s Virtual Boy a 3D gaming console that induced neck pain and nausea. Nintendo paid $10m to acquire the technology from a US company and spent the next 4 years building the console.
Despite it being called virtual it wasn’t VR, and therefore included no motion tracking and required the use of a controller to navigate. To avoid any lawsuits they didn’t allow the device to be strapped to your head and instead users had to play it whilst sitting it on a table using the stand.
Nintendo discontinued Virtual Boy just five months after its release and in the US in the summer of 1996. It only sold a reported 770k units, making it Nintendo’s biggest hardware flop.
Answer: 98,466 backlinks!! Unreal.
If you made it this far, hit reply or jump into the comments and tell me what you thought of this edition. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
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Until next the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻