Nader Akhnoukh

Three lessons from building and launching a P2P payments app without doing the proper customer validation first (despite knowing better): 1) Building something you need is a great starting point - but not enough to validate an idea. As someone drawn to building solutions, I’m an early tech adopter. This led me to overestimate consumers’ willingness to onboard, especially with a P2P payments app that requires KYC/KYB compliance and relies on a network effect to be useful. 2) Manual solutions are often best to start with It’s good business to be in business - transitioning from ideating to operating as early as possible is the BEST way to learn effectively. While the move fast and break things mindset has attracted well-deserved skepticism, getting stuck in a multi-year build trap distracted me from critical real-world validation. 3) Consumer appetite shifts quickly In my case, the proliferation of free and instant P2P payment options like Zelle added additional pricing pressure that I couldn’t compete with. This disincentivized the consumer event/payment collection market, turning my bottom-up go-to-market strategy upside down. Pitch (https://www.pitch.fun) is currently on the back burner as I’ve begun building custom solutions in various industries to sharpen my skills, solve specific problems, gain a hands-on understanding of operations, pain points, and workflows, and build a network of experts to lean on as I keep my eyes peeled for high-impact opportunities.

11

So far, I am not impressed with the early drafts of the post-open source license. It can put your business for 1% of revenue - which most major businesses try to avoid. And it doesn't even touch yet how they will split that 1% between contributors - which is not a problem we know how to solve fairly. Oh, and you cannot use it in your software products, SaaS, or shrink-wrapped - as that would put your customers into the same "give us 1% of your revenue" category. https://lnkd.in/gXvjAeYX

7

2 comentários

Founders/CEOs/COOs/CTOs: if you're seeing downtime, defects, and delays… and have been hearing that "we're fixing this internally" but haven't seen much progress… Bad news: You might NEVER see progress. You're in the "quality trap." Here's what's REALLY happening (and what to do about it): 1 - Your testing team is overloaded Maybe you have existing testers; maybe engineers are doing their own testing. No matter what: They are behind. And playing "catch up" in testing is insanely difficult. Almost impossible, unless you radically scale the team. (And even then, it's almost impossible to make fast progress. a.k.a. diminishing returns) 2 - Your engineering leadership doesn't want to allocate more budget to testing. They probably feel like investing in QA and testing is directly competitive to hiring more engineers and build more product. They feel like they're currently understaffed to meet the roadmap goals. AND they feel like bringing you additional budget requests for new testing ideas could be a big risk. What if you say, "Why should you get MORE budget if you're not effectively shipping good software with your existing budget?" When you're in the quality trap… the stress prevents you from making bold, necessary moves. – SO WHAT? YOU, Founder/CEO/COO/CTO, have to bring them new ideas; don't expect them to bring YOU new ideas. My biased recommendation is to look into AI-powered QA services, that can plug in and take a lot of the testing load off your team. If YOU suggest they look into this, and tell finance we need to budget for this, it will happen, and you'll escape the quality trap. If not, expect more of what you've been getting.

26

49 comentários

VC Platform explained, in apples. By the nature of what I do, I think about social systems a lot: how do we build a platform of founders supporting other founders? It’s so easy to get caught up in complexity here, that I make myself think about it, quite literally, in apples. Give it a try: * If I have two apples, and give you one, how many do I have left? One less than I had, so down to one apple. * But in real life the correct answer is that I now have an apple and a relationship with the culture of sharing with others when you can. I‘ll be able to lean back on that relationship when in a twist of fate it’s now me standing with no apples. I am now part of a system. * Can I rely on someone else to start this system? Yes, I can. But apples in life are a bit more complicated: — Maybe the person in front of me doesn’t share the apple with me, because she has already committed it to someone else. — Maybe she borrowed the apple from someone else in the past, and now wants to return it. — Maybe she hasn’t eaten in a while, and now needs not one, but both apples to sate herself. — All these people might be generally willing to share an apple with me—but maybe not this exact one, the timing may be not right at the moment, they are part of a bigger group where they have agreed to only share apples inside the group etc. Yes, the analogy with deal-sharing is intended, too. :) * When we factor in real-life circumstances, it’s hard to tell if the person, in fact, has a spare apple or not. Besides, when I wait for someone else to share an apple first, I make myself dependent on an external factor over which I have no control. I shouldn‘t, therefore, be surprized to find myself in a situation when I would want someone to share an apple with me, but the system is not there yet. * So, in reality, the only sure way to become part of a system like that is to wait for a moment when I have a spare apple and share it. * For this to work, the person I am sharing the apple with should actually need the apple. Let’s imagine I try to share an apple with someone who has just had two, doesn’t like apples, or has an apple tree. In the best case, it just won’t work. In worse cases, if let’s suppose I insist on giving the apple, the person might grow irritated. So, I need to share my spare apple with someone who actually needs an apple at this point in time. * This example is fabulous, as it helps answer other questions as well. For example, should I then give both apples, so that the relationship is 2x stronger? My answer will follow in the next post. PS. The artwork frivolously used by me to illustrate my thoughts is by a generative artist @dmitricherniak on inst who considers automation his artistic medium. He makes it seem easy, but after spending an hour in DALL•E and getting a bunch of really ugly apples in webs, I am a raging fan.

14

Is this ARR madness? Logitec proposes mouse as a service. As one Reddit user joked - if you exceed the mouse clicks, you go to premium plan. Yes we know from Economics 101 that rent is the most profitable concept. But a society of renters (and here we try to build one when everything is rented) is a society of poor people. Soon your electric toothbrush will stop working when you forget to pay the monthly fee. May be your fridge too. And you many not be able to go into your house if you haven't updated or paid the monthly fee for your smart lock. I am going back to metal keys. https://lnkd.in/e5zay5J2

12

7 comentários

If your CEO isn't technical and your board lacks tech expertise, you're not really a technology company; you're just selling software. As Mark Zuckerberg pointed out: “I observed as soon as I came out to the valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The companies I was talking about, it's like, the CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it, they had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical, and everyone else wasn't. It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company.” From Acquired: The Mark Zuckerberg Interview, 18 Sep 2024 https://lnkd.in/eyV3HKWe

34

John Sung Kim has the most unique advice I've heard so far to non-technical founders. The problem: your CTO is telling you something "can't be done". Is the CTO right? You have no way to know. Should you always demand that it be done anyway? Or should you accept it as the CTO is the highest technical authority? John's method: Have Two CTOs. https://lnkd.in/eS8MNArD I love it. #startupswithseoul with Chang Kim

17

What I read last weekend ** 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗔**𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗲 ** Turns out, good and horrible founders have the same characteristics, but very different characters. How do you tell them apart up front? (It’s super easy after a few days of working together though) --> https://lnkd.in/dsU9wD6J ** 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗮 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗿 ** You are Volkswagen, it’s 1949. You want to sell the car Hitler commissioned. To Americans. The car is about half the size of an American car, but gas is still cheap. Ah, the car also looks a bit odd.  Your ad agency has a secret weapon though: humor. These ads have everything I miss from this region: a sense of humor, the clever, self-deprecating kind. Copywriting that sounds like a human had written it. --> https://lnkd.in/dUwv4T3T ** 𝗥𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘀 ** Robo-advisors for investments were statistically better than humans. Nevertheless, they did not succeed. Why? We will soon all talk to AI agents (and those are probably way better than the lets-not-even-mention-them-anymore chatbots of yesteryear) but here’s why they still won’t replace many human ones.  --> https://lnkd.in/dHYV7gqx

13

2 comentários

Humane getting absolutely slaughtered by the internet, but is that justified? Whichever view you hold, there is little doubt that the framework for shipping AI products is very different from traditional SAAS. Shipping an "embarrassing MVP" can be a big misstep with the consumer now spoilt by smartphones, everything apps and instant gratification. While you may consider your 100s of GPUs, SOTA infrastructure and the specialized fine-tuned models as your moat, the short term winners will be those who nail the UX. Market share matters and the MVP of an AI based product needs to be at par if not better than what a dashboard or simple google search can deliver. May the best UX win! #aiwearables #ai #tech #UX Linking Marques Brownlee's review that sparked the fire! https://lnkd.in/gqvHperW

9

Not long after joining a promising tech start-up, one where I would have to raise money in order to get paid, I joined two of the founders on a trip to Silicon Valley. One of the founders wanted to pitch his idea to the Board of Directors of a colleague’s company. Now, at this point, I wasn’t officially on board yet. It’s not easy to commit to a company that cannot pay you. I watched as the founder started to pull back the curtains on the details of the intellectual property (IP) during his presentation. I was torn between embarrassing him and not overstepping. I was very worried. Now, in fairness, this other company was in an entirely different business. And they were well-funded with their current business model. And the CEO was a friend of the founder. But I couldn’t help but be concerned that over-sharing might be a problem. My instincts were right. That company ended up being a flat-out competitor. The CEO tried to do an end-run around me and approached the founders directly to acquire the rights to our IP. I squashed that effort. I’ve over-shared at times, too. Mine was never about IP, but the lesson is the same. We all want to connect. But it’s also important to recognize who our audience is and when it's a good idea to share, and when its better to just keep it under wraps. By the way, our company was successful…and the other one, despite raising tens of millions, eventually crashed and burned. We still owned the IP. #leadership #entrepreneurship #communication #intellectualproperty

138

54 comentários

Well, we finally did it. We have a newsletter. Or, to be precise, we are about to start one! The first edition will be sent out shortly, so if you want (you probably don't need!) another awesome newsletter to receive, the signup link is below. Hit that sign-up! (and feel free to repost and help a brother spread the word!)

104

7 comentários

What do users want from Bonterms? That when they send out a Standard Agreement it's quickly accepted by the other side. That's why for our Cloud Terms (SaaS) we: • started from a template that had already supported billions in SaaS revenue • went through six drafts, three sub-committees and multiple meetings over seven months by (our now) 100-lawyer Committee to get the balance right between customer and provider. Our Cloud Terms have been accessed over 26K times and we have all kinds of evidence that we got the balance right (more on that soon). But it's always nice to hear it from someone else: 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝘀 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 𝗧𝗲𝗿𝗺𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝟳𝟬% 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗙𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 TermScout (top of the list). ("Customer Favorable" is the coin of the realm in these rankings as they otherwise compare agreements 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘣𝘺 𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘳𝘴.) Bonterms Standard Agreements cover the full stack of enterprise commercial transactions and are free to use. Link to the TermScout report and our Standard Agreements below. Have you met your customer (or vendor) on a Standard Agreement yet? #standardagreements #sales #procurement  

16

3 comentários

In “Do software companies actually have good margins?”, Benn Stancil makes a case for a counterintuitive point : Software companies are much less profitable than they might seem. Why? Because the research & development costs associated with software should be part of their cost of goods sold. Software companies don’t invest once in R&D & then sell copies of the software as we did in the 90s on CDs. It’s software-as-a-service. So the costs of developing & maintaining the software are ongoing. If that argument is correct, then the average gross margin of a software company in the public domain would fall from 72% to 47%. Quite a stark difference. Profitability for software companies isn’t straightforward. Different accounting rules govern revenue & cost recognition. In 2017, the industry migrated from ASC 605 to ASC 606, which are financial arcana as esoteric as it reads. Overnight, some companies were more profitable & others were not. So let’s set profitability aside for a minute, & look at free-cash flow yield. Free cash flow yield offers investors or stockholders a better measure of a company’s fundamental performance than the widely used P/E ratio. Investors who wish to employ the best fundamental indicator should add free cash flow yield to their repertoire of financial measures. FCFY is a metric that measures this : how much of a company’s revenue, after funneling through every cost imaginable, is left over in its bank account at the end of the year. That’s my mental model for it, anyway. Software companies top the charts at 3% over the last 20 years, according to data from New Constructs, a financial research firm. For a period from December 9, 2009, to approximately March of 2016, technology companies produced nearly 5% free cash flow yields on average. There are times when other sectors yield more. For example, energy tops the list at the moment, primarily driven by the fluctuations in those markets. But over two decades technology tops the list. And if AI fulfills anywhere close to its promise, we should expect that trend to continue. Despite the enthusiasm from Investopedia, I think it’s important to say that no financial metric is perfect & all of them are proxies for the ultimate performance of a business. Free cash flow yield has its imperfections & nuances like any other metric.

37

7 comentários

We've gotten fine-tuning down to the point where it can just take minutes, not days. And we've just released the details on how to the public. A few months ago, our normal fine-tuning tasks took a dozen hours or more and it wouldn't be uncommon for training to run for multiple days. That kills iteration velocity and increases customer churn when someone needs to come back 24h later just to test out their model. Today, fine-tuning is 15x faster meaning the jobs that took half a day previously are now running in less than an hour. We've now published the details on how we got there in one of the substantive blog posts I've seen on fine-tuning best practices, from our very own Arnav Garg. It's full of best practices like: ▶️ How switching our optimizers saved us nearly 40% in time. ▶️ Why disabling gradient check-pointing with our other memory optimizations was able to save us 25% – 30%. ▶️ The other secret sauces that go into a great fine-tuning experience, from sample packing to custom cuda kernels. If you fine-tune models or are getting educated on the space, I think this is a must-read. https://lnkd.in/gxJg8ERW

61

1 comentário

What if playing it safe is actually holding your startup back? 🚀 In product development—especially in startups—taking no risks might be the biggest risk of all. I’ve seen firsthand how moving too cautiously can lead to being outpaced by competitors or missing key opportunities. As technology leaders, it’s not about avoiding risk; it’s about understanding, managing, and embracing it strategically. In today’s fast-moving startup world, speed and calculated risk-taking can be the difference between success and failure. 💡 In my latest blog, I break down practical strategies for managing risk while driving growth. Are you ready to take your product to the next level? 👇 Click the link to read more. How do you approach risk in your business? Are you pushing the envelope or playing it too safe? https://lnkd.in/efAUA5xb

18

1 comentário

About half of the 40 SaaS founders I work with have shared that they are getting tired and can't shake their grumpy moods as quickly. Is this a mid-summer dip or something deeper? Here are some of the reasons I hear that founders are tired and struggling to boost their energy levels right now: 1) They have been the founder/CEO for a long time, sometimes more than 10 years. This is very common with bootstrapped or lightly funded founders who have grown their SaaS companies steadily for a long time. They are still on a growth track and will sell their companies someday, but it's taking longer than they thought. 2) Behind mid-year plan with summer seasonality. Small business owners take time off and buy less new software in the summer. Enterprise buying teams can't decide with everyone in the room. Summers drag on with lighter pipelines and cashflows. It's harder to get things done in their businesses, too. 3) For newer founders, receiving more bad news than normal or even a crisis event can knock them down and take longer to get back up. This can feel especially demoralizing if momentum is down and the business has fewer positives to offset the negatives. 4) For many founders, there is less in-person connection with remote working. Regardless of where they live, they get less energy from participating in 6-10 Zoom calls daily than meeting in person with teams or customers. 5) Social media's grind and mental manipulation don't help. Whether social media is important to your growth engine or not, keeping up with creating daily content or getting sucked in by the algorithms wears on their energy levels. Crazy politics and negative media don't help either. 6) There is less energy in the B2B SaaS world to keep your hopes up. Buyers have slowed, funding is down, AI is uncertain, and M&A is not easy. This is a more realistic time, making it hard to hide from their brutal realities. 7) Some founders have grown their companies but not their leadership teams. You may have 30 employees, but without serious senior leaders, the weight of day-to-day management still falls on the CEO. This is especially hard between $2M and $6M ARR, where leaders are added slowly and can be too junior to help. 8) Some founders are creators and disruptors, so dealing with repetitive business tasks and details can feel punishing and difficult. Surprise! After years of crazy experiments, you created a growing business. But now it's a steady factory that doesn't want your daily brainstorms and crazy pivots. The bigger your team, the less it wants to change quickly. It helps to talk it out and realize that every founder has had hard stretches or deep funks they have gotten through. And realize that our health, expectations, and perceptions shape our moods. Sorry, no clickbait solutions here. This won't be your last tough slog. Keep going and keep improving. What other reasons for founder malaise have you experienced? #practicalfounders

362

131 comentários