actually, what’s the most useful business-use agent you’ve come across? And any thoughts on Poe and the GPTs “stores”? They look like silly toys right now, but I also know people first used Twitter to post about their sandwich (same with IG, lol).

some of my issues have been workflow related. I’ve gotten better and scoping requests and directing the agent, as well as focusing on the right issues to resolve. I’ve also better learened to use Assistant vs Agent, and how to use context windows.

paired with a friend for 15 minutes 🙈

🐇

I spent 3 hours once trying to get a logout button to work using only natural language prompts 😂

more customer discovery, more value delivery, more revenue. What about you?

are you able to share your burn rate and hours per week? I’m curious if you’ve written about your founding journey and what it took you to build your business

- Build for B2B SaaS and go upmarket. The ACV is higher and you only need a few customers to become sustainable.
- Build a web app…mobile is more capital intensive and makes you less agile and able to pivot quickly

- Don’t spend more than 12 weeks building your MPOV…launch within 3 months and make money within 2 weeks of launch
- When pitching prospective cofounders, pitch on the market niche and how you’ll make money and why you’ve de-risked making money…ideally, bring them into customer discovery

- But don’t bet your finances on your company.
- Instead, after you find your niche, build brand awareness and a waitlist, build only the minimum proof of value to realize repeatable revenue and re-invest that cashflow into growing the business (not building more product)

Lessons learned:

- Focus on nailing the customer (users ≠ buyers)
- Focus on repeatable and scaleable customer acquisition
- Talk to hundreds of prospective customers and hone in on their unmet needs and map the value to the customer to business impact
- Bet on yourself to be scrappy and learn

I had set out with the intent to grow a venture-scale business, and focused on the tech, network effects, and non-monetized growth. This was an expensive long play, and it set me up for failure in the 2023 fundraising climate…even though I pivoted to a per-transaction % and had revenue.

the reality is the B2C “product” was never going to scale to $100m ARR.

It took a year to launch to the app stores. By then (2021), a close friend and prominent VC suggested I’d easily raise $2m with a $5m pre-money cap because we had a product and traction, far more than a lot of other founders at the pre-seed stage.

I hired a “top 1%” contractor on Toptal to get started. He was $150/hr and ended up being more expensive in the long run because he selected the wrong database resulting 3 months for re-writing the client and API. This was my first major set back.

One VC suggested focusing for a B2B segment and monetizing that single customer. It was the best advice in retrospect, but I ignored it because it felt difficult to reach these prospective customers. I want to build for what I knew.