Your Startup's Problems Are Within Your Control

On Saturday I shared a deep dive on how to use cold email to grow your startup. Get a 2-week free trial to get access to my library of 75+ deep dives, and a new one in your inbox every Saturday.

I may end the free trial as we head into the new year so, if you’ve been thinking about it now’s the time to try it.

Today at a glance:

💡 Opportunity: Work Trials

Hiring for an early stage startup is incredibly stressful. Your early employees will define your culture, product quality, and more. There’s a lot riding on getting it right.

So why should you (or the candidate) be expected to commit after a couple overly-formal, probing chats? Wouldn’t you both get a better signal about whether there was a good fit if you could try working together for a week or two?

I think so, and Linear’s founder Karri Saarinen does too:

I highly recommend reading through the full post — it outlines how Linear runs work trials and what they are (a paid period where the candidate works full-time alongside the team for a defined length of time).

I’ve hired people this way before as well and the process helps build a lot of trust and confidence in your decision. It also gets the candidate really hyped to say yes and get started for real, making the close a bit easier.

Most people are unfamiliar with work trials and how to structure and manage them, yet see the clear benefits once they’re brought up.

There’s the potential for a hiring platform built around work trials.

Initially you’d integrate with existing ATS options like Lever and others, where you’d allow users to add a custom step to their hiring funnel where they’d set up work trials. You’d have a dashboard for them, as well as education on how to prep for and run a work trial. You’d probably want to start out pretty in the weeds, as an account manager of sorts.

Over time you could expand beyond this and eat the whole ATS / hiring experience, but you’d be known as a native and best-in-class option for this emerging, interesting, high-signal way to hire.

🧠 Framework: 4 P’s of AI

If you ever took a marketing class in college you’re probably groaning right now because you’ve heard of the “4 P’s of marketing.”

This week’s framework is unfortunately named the 4 P’s as well, but is more practical for startups. Adobe’s Scott Belsky broke down the lifecycle of going from discovering a new AI tool up through when it becomes part of your normal workflow.

It’s relevant regardless of whether your team is just yourself and your cofounders, or if you’ve built a much bigger org:

When I find new tools that seem potentially useful, I just sort of let them be for a while. Unless I’m setting up a new workflow from scratch I’ll let myself wander around with a new tool, so to speak, until I find what it is uniquely useful for.

Rather than try to replace my existing workflow right away, I let the new tool linger on the periphery until I realize I keep coming back to it.

📈 Trend: VTubers

You’ve probably seen influencers talk about “faceless YouTube channels” over the last year. They’ve risen in popularity quite a bit as a way for people to make money via YouTube without needing to get in front of the camera.

The whole concept is an ode to editors and anonymity rather than the “talent.”

VTubers take it one step further — they create synthetic on-screen talent with 3D animation software (or sometimes even motion capture technology).

The first mainstream example that I know of was/is Lil Miquela, who began “her career” in 2016. Her team has been creating content for her for so long that she even has even had a few scandals, including one with Bella Hadid.

More recently, VTubers have been able to gain 2 million YouTube subscribers in under a year and #Vtuber has 17.3 billion views on TikTok.

Viewers I spoke with told me that they felt VTubers were able to be more “honest” and “authentic” than normal YouTubers.

Perhaps ironic, considering the characters aren’t real people, but it makes sense — YouTube and Instagram have both suffered from a continuously growing reputation of being overly polished or needing to cater to what’s acceptable to advertisers.

The (human) creators who are defining this new era like Sam Sulek are the ones who are genuinely unique people and not relying on fancy editing to stand out (here’s a breakdown of Sam’s content).

For everyone else, there’s VTubers.

There’s clearly appetite for a wide range of synthetic content, and room for multiple VTubers in every niche. Some ideas that come to mind:

• A VTuber-specific management agency → Some VTubers will want to remain anonymous, even from their partners. An agency that understands and specializes in this could do well for licensing, sponsorships, etc as the industry grows to support it.

• VTuber creation at scale → Use Pika to create VTuber content at scale. Scale to 1,000+ VTuber accounts in a year. Ruthlessly test and iterate.

💬 Quote: Fix The Issues

We all want our startups to work so badly. Unfortunately that can lead us to get make excuses for our own failures by blaming things outside of our control.

a16z’s David Ulevitch makes this case that everything is actually within our control (and if it really isn’t, to ask for help):

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