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Going to market when no market exists
Martin Casado’s primer on taking a category‑creating enterprise product to market emphasizes that GTM drives valuation as much as—if not more than—technology. Anchor pricing high and align ACV with a direct‑sales model; discover price through the sales motion, delay public pricing, and avoid premature SKUing, bundling, and channel reliance. Over‑invest in a simple story, leverage analysts thoughtfully, attract developers but convert via direct sales to core IT, use professional services when necessary, and staff with early‑market, SE‑led sellers before scaling.
Make ARR Useful Again
A roundup featuring new founder stories, takes on founder energy and why VC works, and hiring links—followed by a practical guide for startups on defining and reporting MRR/ARR. Key advice: anchor on GAAP for revenue recognition, treat only contracted subscriptions and minimums as MRR, track variable usage separately (especially for AI products), avoid annualizing spikes and one‑offs, be explicit about ARR vs run rate, and ensure metrics reconcile to GAAP to make better operating decisions and maintain investor trust.
Marketplaces in the Age of AI
a16z argues that AI is reviving previously tough marketplace categories by fixing unit economics and scalability: LLM agents vet supply and demand, automate intake, matching, and back‑office communication, and drive personalized retention, enabling fixed-fee or subscription models and better seller tools. Examples span talent, real estate, home services, legal, and healthcare, where AI removes operational bottlenecks and increases throughput. The approach works best where past failures were cost or matching complexity—not hard constraints like scarcity or trust—and a16z invites AI-native founders tackling legacy marketplaces to reach out.
I made an app in 24 hours and $20,378 the next day
After Pieter Levels called out fake MRR screenshots, Marc Lou built TrustMRR in 24 hours—a site that verifies startup revenue via read-only Stripe keys—and launched it with a minimal landing page and a public leaderboard. A viral tweet fueled demand for sidebar ads he repriced from $299 to $1,499, selling out and generating $20,378 in three days, while he kept shipping features (including a $1 vs $1M game) and attracted big verifications like Gumroad. Takeaways: simplicity, strong OG image, timing/context, and shipping often.
Ecosystem is the next big growth channel
In an AI-saturated market where traditional growth channels are losing effectiveness, top startups are breaking out with ecosystem-led growth—leveraging creators, partners, integrations, and communities to create a compounding flywheel of distribution, credibility, and product virality. This piece explains how to operationalize that strategy, with concrete playbooks and examples from Supabase, Lovable, Clay, Gamma, Vercel, ElevenLabs, and more. The takeaway: don’t start from zero—identify the right partners, empower them to create, and reshape GTM to make your ecosystem an extension of your team.
This week on How I AI: 0-to-1 AI guide for absolute beginners + how this CEO turned 25,000 hours of sales calls into a self-learning GTM engine
Weekly recap from Lenny’s Podcast Network: Claire Vo hosts practical, no-fluff episodes on using AI at work and in life. Highlights include Matt Britton on turning sales-call transcripts into marketing keywords (even hacking data access with Browse AI) and building proactive, hands-on teams, plus a beginner’s guide to coding with AI using Cursor—why the agent view helps newcomers, when to choose JavaScript vs. Python, and when to start over if tools overcomplicate. Expect highly actionable workflows, tools, and mindset shifts.
Where you build is who you are: the ElevenLabs story
A profile of ElevenLabs shows how European roots and a distributed culture shaped its mission to give machines voices as natural as our own. By tightly coupling research and product—using a three‑month rule to ship product bridges—and collaborating with creators and major labels, the company built a licensed Voice Marketplace and music model that share revenue with talent. As it scaled from creators to enterprises, ElevenLabs balanced rapid consumer feedback with slower enterprise timelines, invested in hybrid sales–engineering roles, and aligned incentives (even paying commission on killed deals) to protect long‑term strategy. The result is an integrated model–product stack powering voice, music, and conversational agents across industries.
Everyone should be using Claude Code more
How to get started, and 50 ways non-technical people are using Claude Code in their work and life.
Anatomy of an enterprise platform company
Everyone *says* they’re building a platform company, but the proof is in the P&L.
Introducing the GAIN Feedback Framework
An evidence-based method for delivering feedback that people love, appreciate, and act on. A step-by-step guide to crafting feedback that you’ll enjoy giving and others will appreciate receiving.