Finn Lobsien

How 4 YC founders do founder mode to unleash their companies

Paul Graham's founder mode essay injected founders with energy: It gave founders permission to take charge and correct what's wrong — even if business book authors disagree. But it's easy to feel inspired. Actually making those changes is hard: Sometimes, you won't feel

Startup Advice

The unhinged application I used to get a job at a fast-growing startup

On August 27th, 2023, I sent an email that changed my life. It was a simple email I spent about 2 minutes on, but I’d spent dozens of hours on the application. I sent the email hopeful, but not exuberant. I’d been burned before, spending hours on applications

Artificial Intelligence

The $5b company with no product: How did Safe Superintelligence raise $1b?

I love writing about startups that make sense: They validate demand in a small market segment, overserve that segment with a great product, then expand from there. But I love even more when startups don't make sense. And Safe Superintelligence doesn't. The company just raised $1

Startup Advice

Newsletters we read to stay ahead of the competition

After I accepted my offer to join CommandBar (now Command AI), but before I actually joined, I asked James for recommended reading for new team members. Here’s what he said: Few things are as important at a startup as continuing to grow, learn and eedutcate yourself. Working on a

CommandBar Tips

The best Command AI alternatives

Alright you little rascal, you googled Command AI alternatives and you want us to help you not buy us? Well, you're lucky we're an honest bunch around here and are happy to talk about alternatives since Command AI isn't 100%, all the time, for

Startup Advice

Claire Vo: The CPO who automates herself with AI

“I couldn’t have done this before LLMs. It’s all literally thousands of times faster now.” That’s what Claire Vo told Every’s Dan Shipper about ChatPRD, the six-figure side project she builds next to running LaunchDarkly’s product and engineering orgs.  If I taught a course about

Startup Advice

When to ignore your users (and when to listen to them)

“Listen to your users” is great advice until it isn’t. Talking to users prevents you from building things nobody wants. But it can also cause you to abandon your product vision and build a bloated, aimless product.  If you put product vision above user feedback, you build the Humane

Startup Advice

$10m ARR in 2.5 years - How Beehiiv wins with an email tool in 2024

“We’re going for billions here. Fifty mil is not what we’re looking at.” With a $50 million offer on the table 18 months after starting the company, most founders would start calling the Lamborghini dealership. Not Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk.

Hot

AI won’t kill support - it makes it more important

Feel supported by our newsletter Support our newsletter Opening an article with “AI changes everything” is the most trite, cringe and boring thing you can do in 2024. So that’s exactly what I’ll do here 😎 AI changes everything, especially support. Klarna famously said their chatbot resolved as many

$81m for a content business: How good is Reforge at product strategy?

(Re-)forge your product chops with our newsletter. Content so good we might upload it to Reforge. I expected to use my Reforge membership mainly for networking. I’ve taken too many online courses and read too many how-to books to get impressed by content. Reforge was different: I was

Company News

How our sales team achieved 35% QoQ revenue growth (+everything we use to sell)

This is where we sell you our newsletter Sold on reading more stuff like this? Going sales-led increased our deal size by 34% and conversion by 17%. in this article, you’ll find out how we did it. I chatted with our GTM leader Joe Skupinsky about how we approach

Case Studies

The new default for devs: How PostHog beats billion-dollar incumbents

We'll Post(hog) you the best insights Don't miss more of these insights “I’m writing about how PostHog does the opposite of all the startup advice out there”, I told my software engineer friend, “Really? I love PostHog!”, he replied “With other companies you never

Startup Advice

Stanford, SF, FAANG job - The only way to get into YC?

For a long time, Y Combinator was known as a place that sniffs out the oddball hackers nobody else would fund, but would build billion-dollar companies later.

Do we still need humans in support? Klarna’s AI chat is the future

The latest on AI support. Don't get left behind on AI support It’s rare that a software company’s product decisions make the mainstream news. It’s even rare when those product decisions barely affect the user’s core experience. Yet that’s what happened when Klarna

Case Studies

Loom's $975M onboarding secrets revealed

Want more PLG breakdowns like this? Look smart in your next meeting Tens of millions of users, a brand so strong it became a generic term and a $975 million exit to Atlassian… that’s Loom. You know the product: Record your screen, talk over it, send it to your

Growth

How Perplexity could defeat Google (if it doesn't fumble)

For the past years, Google has looked like a billionaire who’s accomplished their lifelong pursuit of wealth, but now wonders “What's next?” Google’s mission statement to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has been accomplished to the point that people

Startup Advice

Is usage-based pricing overrated? These 3 YC founders agree (and so do we)

If you love pricing, I’m sorry for you. It means you’re a nerd like me, someone who’s fascinated with the ripple effects of tiny, but fundamental decisions. It means you have to live with the knowledge that nobody in real life cares about your little niche interests.

UX Best Practices

Crypto UX is pretty good, actually (or at least could be)

For more niche UX takes 👇 For more niche UX takes 👇 Confession: I was the “crypto bro” to friends and family. I remember a walk in the winter of 2021 where I unironically told my friend a decentralized protocol with “maybe 25 people” could replace Spotify & music labels so artists

Product Management

Humane's AI pin is a victim of its own hype (Product mistakes were made)

More lessons from the barely reviewable 👇 More lessons from the barely reviewable 👇 "This is the new worst product I've ever reviewed" is how Marques Brownlee describes the Humane Ai Pin. Brownlee is a fair reviewer who almost never goes to these extremes. Humane's hyped

Startup Advice

Airchat: Why Naval Ravikant is building yet another social network

A newsletter as fun as Airchat 👇 A newsletter as fun as Airchat 👇 Two veteran bank robbers got away with it all. They lost contact when they left their lives of crime and laid low for 15 years. Now they meet again in a seedy bar. After catching up on their

UX Best Practices

In-app "help" wasn't always this annoying (it was worse)

For more user assistance archaeology See the power of Command AI's Copilot for free No credit card required. Up to 100 MAUs trial Imagine you run into an issue with a SaaS product. With a sigh, you poke around to make it work, swatting away the product tours

Startup Advice

Canva acquires Affinity: The product strategy behind the battle of the design tools

Acquire our newsletter for free 👇 Acquire our newsletter for free 👇 Yesterday, Canva acquired Affinity’s design tools for an undisclosed amount. In this article, we’ll explore why this is a brilliant execution of astute product strategy from Canva—and how Adobe might retaliate. First, here's what you

Product Management

Can Devin AI replace product managers?

Devin writes our newsletter 👇 Devin writes our newsletter 👇 In the fall of last year, I wrote about whether AI could replace product managers. I tried to use ChatGPT for product management tasks. As part of my conclusion, I wrote: Perhaps this means the age of AI will equip each product

Startup Advice

Attack on Excel: 3 startups coming for the spreadsheet throne

We write our newsletter in Excel 👇 We write our newsletter in Excel 👇 I have a frustrating childhood memory of playing Pokemon Red on my flea market GameBoy Advance at 5am. Right after you start the game, there’s the Viridian Forest. I encountered lots of cool bug type Pokemon—and

Product Management

Arc: Lessons from a product that shouldn’t work

Follow our arc(h) 👇 Follow our arc(h) 👇 My friend chuckled when I showed him Arc. He’s a machine learning engineer, a technical purist who only finds products impressive if they’re breaking new technical ground. Looking at Arc, he scowled, “A new web browser, huh? Because that’s