The Daily Index — Wednesday, November 8, 2023 · TLDR Index

GENERAL

TLDR Founders

TLDR Founders

TRY STYLO INSTANTLY: SEE STYLO SOLVE A TICKET (NO SIGNUP REQUIRED)

Summary unavailable

try.askstylo.com

TLDR Founders

MORE GOOD NEWS IN STARTUPLAND

DataDog announced earnings that beat plans. In its earnings call, it mentions that it’s seeing signs that the cost-cutting activities that dominated the start of this year are plateauing, which hopefully acts as a signal of good news for tech.

tomtunguz.com · 2 min

TLDR Founders

HOW AN INVESTOR MIGHT CATEGORIZE YOUR AI STARTUP

Summary unavailable

medium.com · 8 min

TLDR Founders

CAN MOST “PRETTY GOOD” SALES REPS SELL ANY SAAS PRODUCT?

Probably not. When hiring salespeople, dig into these points. Known brands are easier to sell, and enterprise SaaS is meaningfully different from SaaS built for smaller businesses. Only the very best salespeople can context switch between SaaS effectively.

saastr.com · 2 min

TLDR Founders

YOUR BUSINESS MODEL DRIVES YOUR MEASUREMENT

Usage-based pricing seems to be rising in popularity. It’s a revenue model that scales value for both parties as a customer uses your product more. What metric you decide to pivot your pricing around is hard to land on. This metric is commonly called the “Value Metric”. Here’s a breakdown of metrics used by some top companies.

mostlymetrics.com · 5 min

TLDR Founders

THE BRAINTRUST: WHAT SHOULD YOU HAVE INVESTED IN SOONER?

Reflections from a diverse set of 8 unicorn founders on things they might have done differently earlier on in building their businesses.

thegeneralist.substack.com · 7 min

TLDR Founders

OHMYSYNT (PRODUCT)

Personalized AI content for brands.

ohmysynt.io

TLDR Founders

CHARGEBACKSTOP (PRODUCT)

Automatically detect and prevent chargebacks in your Stripe account.

chargebackstop.com

TLDR Founders

RE:CATCH (PRODUCT)

Automatically qualify, route, and schedule inbound leads to supercharge your sales pipeline.

recatch.cc

TLDR Founders

SOFTWARE MARKET GENES

Software building on top of open-source LLMs, how defensible is that? A lot of AI, much like vertical SaaS, is a winner-take-most market. Investors and founders are racing to reach an inflection point that brings down their CAC and makes market capture increasingly easier.

akashbajwa.substack.com · 6 min

TLDR Founders

TAKE TIME TO PROCESS A FAILURE BEFORE STARTING A NEW COMPANY

Shutting down a company often comes with a grieving process, just like a breakup or the loss of a loved one. Give yourself time to process before jumping back into the startup fray – investors tend to watch out for clear rebounds.

chudson.substack.com · 3 min

TLDR Founders

TRANSPARENCY IS HARD TO DO WELL

Teams with high trust often function more efficiently. Trust requires a degree of transparency, but transparency can be unsettling without context. How you share information is just as important as what you share.

breakingpoint.tech · 4 min

TLDR Founders

A JOB IS JUST A PHASE IN SOMEONE’S LIFE

Managers and employees often play this bizarre game where they pretend the employee will be working at the company forever. That’s never the case and the company won’t be around forever either. Honest conversations about career ambitions will help with retention and trust building.

critter.blog · 2 min

TLDR Founders

11 HOURS SINCE OPENAI DEV DAY: HERE IS WHAT PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY BUILT

If you haven’t seen the news about OpenAI Dev Day yet, this thread gives a good estimation of what is now possible. It’s pretty mind-blowing.

twitter.com · 5 min

TLDR Founders

EVEN THE SMARTEST VCS SOMETIMES GET IT WRONG - BILL GURLEY AND REGULATED MARKETS

Bill Gurley gave an impassioned talk at the All-In Summit a few weeks ago that has been held in high regard. Here to give the counterpoint, Steve Blank lays out why he thinks Gurley might have gotten it wrong. Gurley’s talk and Blank’s rebuttal are both well said.

steveblank.com · 6 min