Founder Fridays No. 90
Founder Fridays No. 90
Getting to Product-Market Fit -- Human Curation -- Team Plan
Happy Friday.
Getting to Product-Market Fit
Product-market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand and meets the needs of a specific target audience, resulting in sustainable growth and customer satisfaction. So, how do you get there? 1) Find a niche. Identify a problem that a set of homogeneous companies share. Identify that set of companies, and define your ideal company profile by industry, geography, revenues, employee count, key challenges and tech stack. You can then set your buyer persona and your user persona. 2) Make sure the problem is so big that they are desperate to solve it. 3) Build a solution that does a good job solving that problem. Start with the customer experience first, and think about the huge benefits you are bringing to your customers. 4) Set a pricing and validate it. 5) Iterate the product. The VC Corner (6 minutes)
Human Curation
In a world increasingly saturated with mediocre artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content, the role of human curators who possess a distinct point of view and can guide the narrative of culture, politics or other topics will become increasingly important. These curators, who cannot be replaced by AI, provide a unique guiding function that people have always looked to individuals for. As AI models struggle with generating truly novel ideas, the value of influential individuals who curate content for others, combined with the support of powerful institutions that protect their integrity, will increase. Social platforms often enter a state of decay where users continuously create similar content, as the platforms optimize for distribution rather than originality, leading to boredom among users. However, the ability of human beings to consistently generate new ideas will remain a valuable asset that AI platforms cannot replicate. New York Times (85 minutes)
Team Plan
How should you plan your team's growth? Index Ventures analyzed 200,000+ employee profiles from more than 200 startups — Stripe to Spotify, Airbnb to Figma, to create TeamPlan. The most comprehensive dynamic guide to scaling teams and leadership from 1–500. This app is pretty interesting to play with as you’re thinking about planning growth. Index Ventures (5 minutes)
Founder FAQ: What Is an Option Pool?
The term “employee stock option plan” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s a pool of equity that a company reserves to issue stock options, in addition to stock grants and potentially even restricted stock units (RSUs). Perhaps a better name would be an equity incentive plan. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to use the colloquial term “option pool.” An option pool is a certain number of shares of common stock set aside as compensation for employees, advisors and contractors. In startups, most team members receive some equity. Startups use equity compensation to create an ownership culture, attract and retain top talent, and incentivize hard work and direct contributions to the company’s growth. This compensation can take the form of stock options, restricted stock or other equity-based incentives. The goal is to incentivize employees to commit to the company long-term and to perform well. Equity incentive plans can be an attractive form of compensation for employees since they offer potential financial gain if the company performs well in the future. Additionally, these plans align employee interests with those of shareholders, which can lead to increased productivity and profitability for the company. Westaway (6 minutes)
Startup Funding Guides
I’ve put together a series of guides to equip founders to excel at fundraising. These guides break down the deal term by term and give you negotiation tips so that you can speak to investors with confidence.
Convertible Note: Guide / Video
Control Legal Spend
Startups suffer from unpredictable legal bills under the billable hour system. Fees fluctuate month-to-month without warning. Law firms drag out billable hours, but startups foot the bill. Even basic work can lead to surprisingly high legal bills. This unpredictability cripples financial planning. Budgets rarely match actual spend. With utter uncertainty around legal spend, startups cannot forecast or manage burn rates effectively. The antiquated billable hour system fails them. Our General Counsel’s flat, monthly fee gives startups cost certainty. By switching from hourly to our flat fee model, startups finally get confident budgeting, accurate forecasting and predictable legal spend. If you’re sick of getting surprise legal bills and are interested in controlling your legal spend, let’s talk.
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