Tejas Manohar

Startup decks vs Business plans. It's accepted that a startup needs a deck. Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed Commerce made an important point on 20VC. Writing a business plan - including financial projections - is an important step. It requires discipline. It provides a rigorous framework for thinking deeply about the problem you're trying to solve. Harry Stebbings countered that he doesn't even want to see a deck since it's all dreams. We spent a lot of time and energy on our business plan with the expectation that we would show it to no one ever. The business plan was part of our roadmap for the company. We researched customers - including having 50+ conversations. We wanted to understand them: their background, their interests, their presence on social media. We also wanted to understand how they were evaluated by leadership and how integrated they were with the business of the company they were protecting. We researched pricing both with potential customers and other products in our industry to find out if OpEx or CapEx was a better fit. How did they buy today? How would they like to buy? We did market research to understand the verticals and map the right entry point - we were wrong but that doesn't reduce the value of the research. We looked at competitors in depth to understand what they were seeing that we weren't. Dax is right. This is an invaluable document that should be updated every year - the company is changing, the market is changing, there's more feedback about price and ICP. It's not for sharing with the outside world. It's a map for driving forward. Decks won't get you investment - VCs invest in people. We make decks but we know they don't tell our story. The deck is a calling card. Dax and Harry are both right. https://lnkd.in/e25M82xY

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If you're connected with me, you know I scream about how necessary integrations are. Check out this piece where I explain more for insideBIGDATA!

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If software is your strategy, you know a thriving engineering team is key to success. But team health is about more than just numbers. That’s where the Ultimate DevEx Playbook comes in. This step-by-step guide, featuring insights from Jellyfish and AWS, explains how to improve the developer experience meaningfully. Teams with great DevEx are: ✔ 33% more likely to hit business targets ✔ 31% more likely to improve delivery flow ✔ 20% more likely to stay with their employer Ready to level up your team’s performance? Access the playbook now. Link in comments

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Organizing an intimate meetup for high-growth founders building dev tool / Infra / b2b SaaS, together with Bain Capital Ventures this Friday in SF. If you've either: - Raised at least $2M or achieved at least $250k ARR for your current company - Or, you’re a repeat founder who has raised at least $10M or achieved at least $1M ARR in a previous company - Or, had a previous exit for at least $5M Please comment/DM to get tickets - 5 more spots left

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Layup (YC W23) turns your product usage data into touchpoints that drive retention and growth. It enables you to act on every customer when it matters most. By integrating with your product usage data, Layup enables you to take optimal actions with customers at key points throughout their journey and retain and expand accounts.

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We shipped 130 SDK releases in 6 months at Velt (YC W22). The screenshot shows 8.1k commits from one engineer this year. We’ve been on a weekly release cycle for 4 years straight. No stops. This is what a high shipping velocity looks like. Competitors copy everything. Product, marketing, all of it. The antidote? Velocity and taste. Especially now, with all the AI dev tools, taste is hard to replicate, and delivering it fast is even harder. Here are some secrets: 1. Be your own best customer. - SDKs are hard to iterate on because you depend on developers to adopt updates and provide you second hand end-user feedback. - So we built our second product Superflow using our Velt SDK. - With Superflow, we bypass developers and go straight to end users. We get feedback fast and iterate 10x quicker than any other SDK. 2. Hire a hungry team: - We hire people who want to be the best at their craft, whether it's engineering, design, or marketing. Hunger is part of our culture. 3. Provide freedom and room for magic: - Our team members have extreme ownership and freedom to do things in the company. This kind of freedom makes magic happen: - Our designer evolved into a design engineer and now ships amazing products single-handedly. - Our marketer tells stories filled with memes that customers love. - Our engineers pack powerful features that are easy for developers to integrate. Our goal is that even an intern can develop features you find in unicorn products. This is only possible with a high shipping velocity culture. This is one of our long term moats. How often do you ship?

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Meet Duckie: an AI-Powered Technical Support Solution with a funny name. Duckie (YC W24) is a YC-backed AI company that's all about reducing unnecessary support escalations, helping non-technical team members get the help they need (using conversational natural language) fast while freeing up developers to focus on meaningful work. Here's how Duckie helps your team: Reduces Support Escalations: Handles repeat questions and common issues, reducing escalations by 35%. Accelerates Resolutions: Gains insights instantly and delivers answers in seconds, making resolutions 10x faster. Cuts Costs by 90%: Offload tech support to Duckie and pay a fraction of the cost of a dedicated technical support engineer. Seamless Integration Duckie integrates with most knowledge base platforms like Slack, Discord, and Confluence. It can be set up and ready to work in just 5 minutes! Less Distraction, More Productivity Duckie only escalates issues to developers when absolutely necessary, so your team can focus on meaningful work without constant interruptions. Ready to supercharge your tech support? Discover how Duckie can transform your team's productivity! If you need help solving costly or time consuming problems in your business with new AI tools let me know. #AI #TechSupport #YCW24 #Productivity #BusinessInnovation

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With Velt (YC W22) we provide features that boost engagement and growth within your product. You can add full-stack features like contextual comments, recording, notifications and more. You can fully customize these components. Make them feel native. Make them your own. Match your brand. Developers have full control: * Custom component layouts * Your own CSS * Dynamic template variables * Conditional component rendering * Custom behaviors and functionality * Component variants * Or build your own UI with our APIs. Learn more👇

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💡 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐕𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐈𝐬 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞! 🌍 Fundraising is hard, but finding the right investors doesn’t have to be. This guide is your shortcut to 5000+ VCs, angels, and family offices across:  • 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and MENA.  • 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀: SaaS, Web3, ClimateTech, DeepTech, and more.  • 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀: Pre-seed angels, fund-of-funds, and diversity-focused investors. What you’ll get:  • Verified global VC lists, tailored by stage and geography.  • Specialized directories like AI angels, accelerators, and niche family offices.  • Tools to focus your outreach and scale smarter. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/dtdyuUqP

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Build vs Buy, the great internal debate every developer product has to overcome when selling to companies of all sizes. I had a great chat with Han Wang at Mintlify on how he sees Build vs Buy. Whether its docs, sdks or any part of the developer stack you will always meet great product teams that believe they should build and maintain exactly what your product does in house. Here are some takeaways 👀 ⏹ Its all about control. You're product needs to increase your users ability to ship high quality product. Think deeply about where you should blackbox vs expose controls to the user. ⏹ Quality. Do you think your product reflects the quality at which they could build AND maintain this themselves ? ⏹ Our job as vendors is to grow with companies over time. As your product matures the gap between what you can do vs what can be built in house will quickly diminish. If you're buyer of docs or sdks how do you think about build vs buy ? 👇 Speakeasy #sdks #docs #buildvsbuy

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✨🚨 Another Make Cents post is live! 🚨✨ In this post, "AI & its Impact on Vertical SaaS: The Gates of Distribution have Flung Open", I explore how AI is impacting vertical SaaS workflows and its implication for distribution and defensibility. We defy.vc are more excited than ever to invest in vertical SaaS because we believe there's tremendous value leveraging AI to enhance human productivity across tasks like 1) structuring data, 2) analysis, 3) recommendations, and 4) taking action. I also walk through why customer acquisition costs are at an all-time low, attributed to more than just AI-driven product functionality. Read more ⬇ and share your thoughts and feedback in the comments! https://lnkd.in/gRVcJASH

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Learn how to fine-tune your product to meet market demands with strategic customer conversations and data-driven feedback mechanisms 👇 ➡ 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗲: Brian Long, CEO & Co-Founder at Attentive 🔌 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿: Nick Moran, General Partner at New Stack Ventures and Nate Pierotti, Principal at New Stack Ventures ✏ “The Playbook to Finding Product-Market Fit, When Founders Should Begin to Scale, and Lessons from Building Attentive” ⭐ 𝗦𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗺𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀: 💬 "I think that what we got right were two things. One, I think that we talked to a tremendous amount of customers, before we started building things. So we learned to hear their problems, hear their issues, and then start building and assaulting those, you know, rather than kind of just jumping right into build-build-build, so that saved us a lot of time." ⭐ 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸, 𝘁𝗼 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗯𝗶𝗮𝘀: 💬 "I think you're also looking at things like NPS, you know… because if that number starts dropping, it's often because you're no longer solving the problem." ⭐ 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴-𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆: 💬 "I think that we've taken an even longer term focus. We know what can be big. And we know it's dangerous to start getting an ego to think you can do things because it's always very hard. You've always got to think towards taking a longer term view, having a thesis around that view, and then understand how the pieces can come together for success." ───── 👉 Follow me, Alexander Small, for tactics and strategies for building startups from industry-leading Founders, Operators and Investors

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🚀 1st feature released in May: Evaluate text-to-SQL on your DB. The most frequently asked question by new users when onboarding to Brewit (YC W23) is "How can I confidently assess Brewit's performance on our databases?". Today, we're excited to announce the launch of the Evaluation feature in Brewit! With this feature, users can: - Run custom tests on your databases: easily set up a series of questions that test the accuracy and performance of Brewit's text-to-SQL agent. - Optimize answer accuracy: add correct queries into Query Library to ensure answer accuracy in the future. - Build confidence in the model output: empower your team and data consumers to trust the model's outputs through transparent and detailed testing results. Changelog: https://lnkd.in/gk7Cfttj Try it out here: brewit.ai

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Workflows v2 just dropped including multiple paths, multiple charts, loops, and a brand new refined UX. Grab more details at https://lnkd.in/gEN_9Gvy and come give it a try! Observability reimagined just keeps getting better. 🚀

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X is the new aa? Baffled? When I first started ebdex back in 2004, we were one of the very first group of companies to build a SaaS product. In my case, tried to build is more accurate than anything else as I failed miserably. Then everyone started adding as-a (aa) to every damn business type/model. The x story started with - User Experience (UX) and then extended to - Customer Experience (CX) Today I got an email about EX. Guess what it might be? By the way, SaaS is always lower aa and not AA. Got it? 😃 Join us on 19th in #Manchester? https://lnkd.in/ezzFTe3n Join us today at 12 pm https://lnkd.in/esiZmSWA #MarketTrends #Itsthesameold #acronyms #abbreviations #terminology #terms #english #ux #cx #ex #SaaS

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20 meetings w/ investors and startups in 3 days around SF/Bay Area. Here's what’s happening in hiring right now: 1) Elite engineers demand elite offers. Early-stage startups are winning top talent by paying up (sometimes as high as $250k-$300k + equity). 2) Startups are prioritizing candidates with brand names, interest in startups, history of solving complex problems, ambition, higher ego (not too high). 3) The best candidates have clarity on career direction. Some good questions I heard founders ask, “Where are you going?” and “How can we help you get there?” 4) Despite early funding surges in Q1/Q2, investors are becoming more selective - especially in AI.  This creates an opportunity for startups to hire from struggling shops with top talent. Invest now before the market shifts again.

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