Tommy Nicholas

I just went through 244 websites from the latest YC batch and as a designer, I’m going to pick out my favorites The first is Actionbase (YC S24) I like this one because it has an intriguing headline. So many of these companies are just stating what they do. Or at worst, state what they do and do something cringey like “AI automation at the speed of thought”. Don't do that!! You have to understand your customers, what their motivations are —  as a developer, I’m at least intrigued about using this product The second is Unriddle (YC S24) Super clean. Great black/white theme which I associate with writing papers. I think the headline is strong and action-oriented. The third is expand.ai (YC S24) This isn’t a super exciting page, but it doesn’t have to be. It tells me who I am as a customer — and importantly — shows me a demo! If you can show off how your product works without a 30s video. Go for it. Time-to-value there is everything. Next, is Mito Health (YC S24) Honestly, I think I like this site because it dares to be DIFFERENT. All of the other sites are headline/subheadline/cta/product image — which is fine! Those are definitely best practices, but I like seeing companies take a gamble. There’e something about the small video that makes it weird/compelling and makes me want to learn more! And finally, pap! (YC S24) This one is my *favorite* because it doing the 3 core things really well: 1. GREAT headline. It not only tells you what they do, but it invokes an emotional reaction: I’m getting ripped off by the man, and we’re the robin hood who’s going to fight for you, the consumer. I love that. 2. Really simple but effective imagery — just cutouts of images quickly cycling. Just so the customer knows: "Ok. Got it. This is for physical products." 3. Social proof. Their designer was able to seamlessly blend the main imagery with the positive feedback. Honorable Mention: Quetzal Labs Big bold claim: Copy and paste one line int my codebase and see if it works immediately. This is about time-to-value: If I can copy this, and have this translate my product in under a minute, you’ve definitely earned my business Remember: If you’re making a site, especially for a new product, make sure to have copy and imagery that not makes the customer say “Oh, I get it”, but also “And I totally understand the value” If you have that — you’re way ahead of the pack

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Founders: your investor pitch is not your hiring pitch. And conflating the two hurts the hiring funnel. Here's why: Top engineers, marketers, and sales people aren't gravitating towards the outward facing metrics that investors salivate over. You raised your last round from Sequoia? That's a great signal to investors. To candidates weaned off ZIRP era hype, that's a signal that stack ranks quite low for them. Instead, they care about things such as: ➡️ Actual leadership skills of the founding team (not just how many Stanford and MIT degrees there are). This is where repeat founders get a bit boost. ➡️ Whether the work is interesting. This matters a ton of engineers, but also for other roles. Great candidates want to know that the day-to-day is going to be challenging, intellectualy rewarding, and fosters their own curiosity and growth. ➡️ Sustainability of the business model. This is where the smart candidates want to know the investor pitch, but also want the candid take on challenges. Companies who spend too much time explaining "here's why we'll be worth billions in five years" but show little thought on navigating the medium term have lost candidates. This is why we coach so many founders to speak during the hiring process to the role itself, and less about the company. Paint a picture of the purpose of the role. The impact. The learnings. Go beyond the surface level selling points and seek to connect in a 1:1 manner!

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Deep Pockets Over Party Rounds It's YC demo day in 2 weeks and fundraising around the Summer 24 batch is already at fever pitch. Many founders are experiencing a lot of demand and it's tempting to raise a bunch of money from lots of small checks. I'm biased but if you are lucky enough to have plenty of interest, I suggest you engage those with deep pockets. 1. Most Companies Need More Money. Regardless of your momentum now, most companies end up needing a little more capital to reach the next round. If you've only raised from angel investors, they most likely won't be able to add much more to their position. 2. Term Sheet Minimums. Plenty of lead investors will ask for a minimum amount to be raised for the next round to close and for them to wire the funds. If your cap table has funds who can participate at the later stages, this relieves a lot of the pressure to fundraise beyond securing the term sheet. 3. Investor Network. Most funds are measured by who invests in their companies after they do and at what price. So your fund investors are heavily incentivized to help you fundraise your next round, if they've invested a large enough check. #startups #fundraising

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🚀 Venture debt covenants might sound like a small part of the deal, but they carry huge implications for your startup’s future. 📈 You need to be strategic in your negotiations to avoid any pitfalls down the road. It’s all about setting yourself up for success, not stress. Dive into more details in the original Kruze Consulting post. The link is in the 1st comment. 👇

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How Aaron, co-founder of Fintech Ember, scaled their team by 30% in 3 months without spending on traditional agencies: When Aaron reached out, they’d just secured funding. Great news, but they had to ramp up quick: - Increase engineering team talent - Increase product team talent They needed 9 high-quality hires, fast. But they had 3 big problems: 1. No internal talent team 2. Pressure to scale fast 3. High stakes for quality Recruiting was falling on leadership. Growth targets were big. Past experiences with bad hires were scary. It was crucial that we nailed this for Aaron. But we knew we could fix their hiring problem. We needed to do 3 things quickly: 1. Install a dedicated talent lead, sourcer and co-ordinator 2. Integrate with their hiring managers 3. Align with the brand to attract talent excited about the vision The difference to traditional agencies: not just a recruiter. We gave Aaron a support system with recruiters working constantly. But that’s not it. In just 3 months: - 9 high-quality hires, scaling Aaron’s team by 30% - 2 weeks average time to hire, hitting growth targets - £81,340 cost saving vs traditional agency fees Here’s the best bit though... Leadership was buzzing with the quality of hires, saying: “The quality bar has really been raised.” And Aaron was buzzing too: “The results have been fantastic. We scaled our team by 30-35% with high-quality hires, all without overwhelming our time or resources.” Securing funding should be exciting for a business. Don’t let the worry of hiring take that excitement away. P.S. if you’re a fast-scaling startup struggling with: - No internal talent team to manage recruitment - Pressure to hire quickly without compromising on quality - Concerns about the costs of traditional recruitment agencies - The challenge of attracting top-tier candidates to your mission - A lack of seamless collaboration with past recruitment partners And you want to scale your team efficiently, raise the quality bar and save on recruitment costs? DM me

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We have a new addition to the VentureFizz weekly email (signup here: https://lnkd.in/eMWsg9U). Announcing Boston Tech Time Warp!!! It's crazy to think that I've been publishing this email for something like 15 years (how is that possible???). I started archiving the emails 10 years ago, so I thought it would be fun to look back at the archives each week. I'll pull pieces of info through the years. So... what was happening in the Boston tech scene 10 years ago on January 5th, 2015??? * Who raised capital?  Swoop, Qualtre, Appcues * Event: the next WebInno event was coming up featuring Flyp, RocketBoard, & Upware Labs. * Some of the companies who were hiring: Swipely, Codeship, Backupify, Digital Lumens, CloudHealth, & Kiva Systems. * Blog post: Matt Fates (a VC at Innospark Ventures but was at Ascent Venture Partners at the time) published a blog post titled: The New Normal: Cloud, It’s Not Just Early Adopters Anymore - READ Part 1: https://lnkd.in/dDcNJbFr Part 2: https://lnkd.in/deBzUrNp

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YC has invested in 90 companies worth over $1B I've never done their program, but I religiously follow their playbook and cannot understate how important it has been in driving my company's early success. here's a quick rundown #founder #startup

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Throwback Thursday! Feeling nostalgic after just donating some of our old swag. Before Go Fractional became a platform connecting companies with any type of fractional it was called "Gotta Go Fast" where we had just a marketing site and a cool turtle in a jetpack focusing on placing fractional CTOs and amazing engineers. If you're wondering, yes it was inspired by Sonic. A little over 3 years ago I was wearing a Sonic t-shirt and thought "Of course! People want to go fast", who wishes they could go fast? That's right turtles 🐢 That's how Torty was born in collaboration with the amazing Oliver Lisher (who also did Interseller's space bear) I don't have that sonic tshirt anymore but I still have the old site up on Vercel for anyone that wants to check out Torty in all his glory: https://lnkd.in/da9fXdfk The forms probably don't work, but if anyone is looking for or looking to become a fractional CTOs, engineers or anything else. Check out Go Fractional! Would love to bring back Torty in some way! Let me know if anyone has any ideas! Here's some ideas to get started: - Torty the game - Torty the AI startup coach - Have Torty be the 500 page (similar homage for Slack)

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If you're re-engaging a VC who passed or wasn't super excited before, they are not going to be excited because of the sum of 100, lightly positive things And if there actually IS something significant within that flood of things you share... unfortunately, those important things will get lost. When updating an investor, choose 1 or 2 things TOPS that you think will move the needle with an investor. keep it concise and enticing, show momentum, and move on.

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A CTO I know has been begging his Founder to engage us for months. They're looking for a couple of Staff level roles, and the caliber is not there with whatever they've been doing directly (the VC's + Founder's network mostly) Last week - the CTO quit. On the last call I had with him before he resigned, he told me: "The Founders won't engage recruiters because it is capital burn in their eyes, yet paying me $290K a year to interview muppets for 10 hours a week is supposedly good spend". So, not only have they wasted heaps of cash NOT hiring 2 Staff engineers, they now have a $290K/year sized hole to fill too. If recruiter spend is 'capital burn', this Founder is now dealing with a 'capital atomic bomb'. Apparently this isn't quite common sense yet, but: - If you choose to recruit for 8 weeks instead of 3, that is capital burn - If you hire crap people and need to replace them, that is capital burn - If you interview 40 people instead of 4 to hire 1, that is capital burn Spending $35K to hire someone that'll help you raise $35m is NOT capital burn. Stevie Wonder can see that - why can't you? When you decide that your ACTUAL capital burn needs extinguishing - call me.

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First time founders in AZ don’t need a $100k check to get going. They simply need a check of any size (>$1,000), so they can build their confidence and skillset on how to convert investor interest to money in the bank. Once they get a check, the next one comes easier because they have taken an investment already. They act like they’ve been there before because they have been. Let’s stop pretending like we need to cut a $50k check or nothing. A $5k check is also quite meaningful for a first check. And if you’re a first time founder with a min check size of $50k or something like that, please let your ego go for a sec. You need any size check. You dont have leverage at the start. Play the game on the field.

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💡 Sunday read. Was catching up on some reading today and enjoyed this TechCrunch article with Marc Lore. His comments about startups and taking risk - specifically seeking out risk specifically - is insightful. From the article 👇 "But startups are very different than big companies. When you’re at a big company like Walmart [whose U.S. e-commerce business Lore ran after selling it one of his companies], it’s all about incremental improvement. There’s no incentive to take risk. As a startup founder, chances are you’re going to die. Chances are you are going to die every day that you’re living and doing this startup. The probability is 80%, with only a 20% chance of this actually working. So you have to take that into account when you’re making decisions. You have to seek opportunities to take risk, to reduce your risk of dying. The status quo is the worst thing you can do. Doing nothing is the most risk you can possibly take." Full article here https://lnkd.in/gQhuyeiu

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A few thoughts on “founder mode” and adjacent topics— 1) most founders I’ve worked with are chaotic. I am no exception. Chaos generally increases when things aren’t working; “sales solves all problems.” There’s nothing more chaotic than a 3 year old startup who has raised one round. 2) most “professional managers” don’t want to grind to the extent a founder will, even startup professional managers. This usually manifests as excuses. 3) the problem is that real issues often sound like excuses. I’ve seen plenty of “founder mode” founders drive things into the ground: chaos makes a team nervous; a product that is too ambitious and never works ends up burning customers, et al. 4) styles of startup management move in and out of fashion, just as styles of management as bigcos is often a fashion exercise. Our goal at Featrix is to brute force our way to 100 customers. I was recently told the current fashion is to form a hypothesis and try it on five people and then when that doesn’t work, move on. That’s one approach, I suppose, except n=5 isn’t particularly interesting, and setting meetings takes time. Our broad approach lets us learn about verticals rapidly; we are focused on learning as much as we can as fast as we can. 5) horizontal vs vertical: the style right now is vertical-focused. Yes, customers buy solutions, verticals have their own jargon—but we see a lot of value in experimenting across verticals. We have found the same AI challenges and the same data challenges across media, logistics, marketing, agriculture, facilities, finance, healthcare, HR, and biotech. 6) this horizontal approach coupled with a focus on customer delight lets us go deep with the customer, get a robust and complete solution to them, and more importantly, lets us work with channel partners across these verticals to figure out where we want our product perimeter to be and not to be. 7) old school VCs were interested in firing the founder as quickly as possible. That seems to be out of fashion now—probably a good thing—but I suspect it’s because the startup space is a lot busier so it’s easier to move on to the next thing rather than mess around with creating a mess. Ideally founders would instill the mission, design principles, or whatever the key to the business in their immediate team from day one. If they can manage to keep that team, the first 20, 50, 100 people should be able to carry those attributes across the organization. When it fails is when you bring in professional management at all layers of the org (rather than promoting from within) and you end up with a lot of people running around saying “at IBM / Google / Apple we did it this way”—and the founders insights get watered down and lost. Once, a founder I was working with told me the best ideas came out of his office. I couldn’t quit fast enough. It turns out there are all kinds of ways to be a bad leader, founder or not.

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I've talked to 50+ crypto projects over the last few weeks and they're all looking for help onboarding KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) Many are hiring agencies, BD people, assistants - just to fail miserably Here's what they don't get: Before we get into how to onboard KOLs, just know: KOLs won't fix your problems If users can't understand your product, if your value prop is not strong enough... then go work on fundamentals and then work with KOLs KOLs work great when they amplify sth that's already great Now, back to onboarding KOLs 1) Outreach Most of the teams I've talked to use cold outreach, copy-pasting the same DM over and over again If that's you, you need to stop that NOW - nobody likes spam This is how you win and set yourself apart: - Try to get a warm intro if possible (this is where agencies can help) - Personalize your outreach! - Own your pitch! 💡No agency can do a better job than you at pitching your product! 2) Why your project is a great fit Make it obvious why their followers should care about a project like yours! Share metrics that show traction, Social proof (investors, PR articles, etc) Demo about how to use your product 💡Onboard them to your product as if they were users! 3) Remove friction from generating content Ok so now they buy that your project is legit, but now are thinking how painful could it be to generate content? (yes many of them are lazy) 💡Share some of your own content that has worked, content from other projects/KOLs can work too 4) Landing a good deal Lastly, negotiating a deal that makes sense for both sides is what will make or break this process Make sure incentives are aligned 💡Remember: No deal is always better than a bad deal! That's all - there's not much else to it tldr 1. Personalized outreach 2. Make it clear why your project is a fit 3. Remove friction from generating content 4. Land a good deal If you'd like me to go deeper into KOL deals, please reply to this post and I'll follow up with you

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59 out of our first 100 customers were fellow Y Combinator companies. 🧡 Post-pivot, the YC network/community, and bookface (YC's internal forum) were mission-critical for us. Critical for so many reasons: 1) These companies bought our product before they should have. Shout out to Gabriel Spencer-Harper for literally buying our product 1-week before it shipped. 2) Allowed us to get initial feedback from people who really cared. 3) Gave us so many customer referrals. 4) Enabled us to show initial traction ahead of a seed-extension round. 5) Basically free CAC. YC has a lot of benefits, but for us, being able to sell into the community has been arguably the biggest.

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Hi All, #BaaS is evolving so fast that it’s a challenge just to keep up. I suspect I’m not alone. So, in partnership with my friends at Infinant | Grow Your Bank, I’m launching a regular LinkedIn series to share my top-of-mind thoughts on BaaS. Consider it my Captain’s Log. 𝐀𝐥𝐞𝐱’𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐚𝐒 (𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 Infinant | Grow Your Bank) 𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧’𝐬 𝐋𝐨𝐠, 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝟕𝟖𝟎𝟗𝟎.𝟓 — 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐚𝐒 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 Since reading the bank regulatory agencies' RFI on bank-fintech partnerships, I've been trying to come up with a visual framework to map out the BaaS market. Here’s my newest attempt. First, we segment the market by product type — deposits, payment cards, lending, and non-card payments (think ACH). Next, we layer on the various regulatory and compliance requirements for these products, like: 🏦 Federal bank regulations (covering safety, soundness, financial crime prevention, and more) 🏦 State money transmitter and lending licenses 🏦 PCI DSS standards (not technically regulation, but sure cosplays like it) I also had to include a black hole to represent the regulatory gaps that swallowed Synapse. It’s a fitting analogy—there’s definitely something big and scary there, but I can’t quite see it 👀 Then, come the banks. Community banks under $10B in assets tend to focus on deposits and debit cards, whereas larger banks emphasize credit cards, lending, and non-card payments, especially for commercial clients. (Obviously, with state lending and money transmitter licenses, you can bypass banks entirely.) Next up, is the infrastructure connecting suppliers and buyers (regulators favorite layer!). Think: 🏦 Intermediate platforms (AKA BaaS middleware) 🏦 Classic issuer processors (now branching into non-card products too) 🏦 Lending-as-a-Service providers (partnering with banks or leveraging state licenses) 🏦 Open banking data aggregators (leading the charge on bank-to-bank payments in the U.S.) Finally, consider the nonbank users of these services. Generally, fintech companies flock to the deposits/debit/credit card side of the market, while the non-finance brands experimenting with embedded finance tend to dabble in lending and non-card payments. To paraphrase George Box, all graphics are wrong. Some are useful. Is this one useful? Let me know what you think in the comments!👇

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Growth-stage DTC brands know that scaling is a financial tug-of-war — every department is pulling for its share of the (budgetary) pie 🥧 In our most recent expert guide, Matt Weiler, founder of Second Star Ventures and interim CEO of Wells Group of New York, shares five tactical tips on strategic cross-functional finance: 1️⃣ Decide between tangible growth and buzz Balance investments in short-term ROI with hard-to-quantify activities. Collaborating across teams to align on needs will help you measure intangible results and focus on net profits per initiative. 2️⃣ Assess your decision risk Evaluate each business decision by mapping out assumptions for probability and measurability. Then consider how easily it can be reversed if it fails, and * only * proceed if the cost of failure is manageable. 3️⃣ Prepare for success just as you plan for failure Whip your ops into shape before you action on strategy. That way, when growth occurs, you can deliver what you promised your customers. For example, a successful product launch can still fail if you don’t have enough stock to meet demand. 4️⃣ Pay back your CAC quickly Tracking your LTV, CAC, and payback periods helps you monitor customer growth at all times. If you can’t pay back your CAC quickly, you can’t drive near-term ROI, making it tougher to increase LTV. 5️⃣ Use Drivepoint for cross-functional strategic finance Drivepoint enables you to easily create and compare financial scenarios, build accurate forecasts in minutes, and sync sales, accounting, and marketing data across all sales channels — for a holistic understanding of your business. Want to learn more? Matt breaks it down here: https://lnkd.in/gXc-f_5x

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Founders have basically three options when in the middle of fundraising and times are tough. 1. Cut costs (tough) 2. Raise prices (customers backlash) 3. Add ".ai" to your company's name and don't change anything about your product (best option IMO) Choose wisely.

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