Tips & tricks
74 storiesWhat founders actually do, with credit to where it came from.
Anthropic drops the coding interview. What small teams do next
A hiring manager at Anthropic says data-structures-and-algorithms questions now produce no useful signal, and has cut them from the loop. What replaces them has not been spelled out publicly.
Five questions a former processing executive says to ask before signing
US merchants paid $198.25bn to accept cards last year. The networks' headline rates barely moved. Robert L. Day, who spent a decade selling processing, says the gap is markup you can negotiate.
Earned media now feeds the machines as well as the buyers
Coverage you did not pay for builds trust with customers and puts your name where AI tools go looking. A US business title argues the two now come as a pair.
Vercel's inbound agent now runs on 14 rules, not 1,000 lines
Vercel's COO has described how one engineer at 20% time, a prompt written by the best SDR and six weeks of human checking produced an agent that handles the top of the funnel. The lesson is what came after: most of the prompt turned out to be code.
Six founders kept the four-day week: what they changed
Cutting a day does not cut the work. The operators who stuck with it rewrote their meetings, their sign-off rules and their cover rotas first.
Three months of stock gone in 48 hours: what breaks next
A brand sold a quarter of a year's inventory in two days, Inc. reports. The hard part starts when the orders stop.
Annual trials of 30 days converted 44.6%, four-day trials 24%
RevenueCat's trial data covers more than 17,000 mobile apps. It suggests the 14-day trial most software firms copied is the wrong length for an annual plan.
GPU rents doubled to $8.08 an hour while token prices fell
Tomasz Tunguz puts the reconciliation down to efficiency. For anyone pricing an AI product on token costs, the useful number is gross profit per GPU-hour.
Selling a $30,000 watch on Instagram Live
A watch dealer is moving five-figure timepieces through livestreams, according to a report in Inc. The mechanics of how have not been made public.
The $25,000 form a UK founder owes the IRS every year
A single-member US LLC files no income tax return. It still owes Form 5472, and the stated penalty for missing it is 25,000 dollars.
Danny Meyer delegates early and lets slow starts scale faster
The Union Square Hospitality Group founder says he hands work over before the business looks ready, and gives new ideas time before judging them.
Vercel cut its inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25
The company's COO says home-built agents now handle 90% of inbound sales development and 93% of support cases, on an infrastructure bill in the single-digit thousands a year.
Six terms to pin down in a letter of intent
Founders argue hard over the valuation and leave payment structure, exclusivity and non-competes to be sorted out later. Later is when the buyer has the leverage.
Lumox kept its WebGL site and added 41 crawlable pages
A Canberra software firm decided its animated website was not the problem. The missing second layer was.
Sort the job into four buckets before you approve the hire
Write down the ten things the new person would actually do, then split them into judgment, relationship, repetition and coordination. Three of those buckets are not a hiring problem.
A calculator for when a local LLM rig pays for itself
Sunk Cost takes a machine, a model and a daily token count, and works out how long the hardware takes to beat renting the same model by the token.
Harvey puts a lawyer in every deployment. About 180 of them
The legal AI company staffs former practising attorneys onto every customer rollout, at a posted $220,000 to $320,000 OTE. Here is what that buys and what it replaces.
Pitching a Substack writer: skip the subscriber count
Ashley Waters of PAN sets out how newsletter inboxes differ from newsrooms. One mass message through Substack's own system can cost a founder access to the whole platform.
The bad sales hire you pay for twice
Salary is the smallest part of the bill. The bigger costs are ramp time paid over again, accounts that will not take a second call, and a manager's week spent on the wrong person.
Five places a growing company hides bad news from its founder
Consultant Bruce Eckfeldt argues that scale costs founders their view of five things at once: customers, employees, work quality, profits and decisions.
SaaStr runs on three people and 20 agents. Here is where they broke
Jason Lemkin has published an account of every AI agent SaaStr runs, including the one that emailed 1,000 founders from a banned address. The useful part is the failures.
Hiring by pitch contest: what the stage screens out
L'Oréal drew 380,000 applicants to a competition that ends with candidates on stage. Recruiters and psychologists warn the format sorts for confidence and spare time as much as ability.
When hiring fails, some founders buy the firm instead
One founder could not recruit the skills her business needed, so she acquired a company that already had them. The case for treating a small acquisition as a hiring decision.
Set the evidence threshold before you make the call
An Inc. column argues that leaders should decide in advance how much proof is enough, then structure the bet so it can be undone. The four questions behind it were not published in the summary available.
HTeaO built $147m of iced tea sales on its water
An Amarillo family chain picked the most boring input in the drink and made it the brand. The lesson is in what they chose not to compete on.
Build or buy: TaskRabbit rebuilt, Midi Health refused
Two founders, two opposite infrastructure calls. Leah Solivan paid for a full platform rebuild at TaskRabbit. Joanna Strober decided Midi Health's best engineering decision was the one it never made.
An operator set his AI agent an exam. It failed
The order matters: teach first, test second, trust last. One founder writing for Inc. put his most important agent through a written exam before letting it near real work.
The two-week test that shows who the business really needs
Codie Sanchez argues that leaving the laptop shut for a fortnight tells a founder whether they own a business or hold a job inside one. The diagnostic is unforgiving and free.
Kleo built the audience first, then the product
Lara Acosta and her co-founders reached $1m in annual recurring revenue in six months without paid ads, according to an account published by Inc. The order of operations is the lesson.
Zapier's CEO says AI agents save him two hours a day
Wade Foster has handed his briefings, his email drafts and part of his hiring process to software. The claimed return is two hours daily, on his own account.
SaaStr runs Salesforce headless for six months: usage 10x, bill up 40%
Jason Lemkin's team stopped treating the CRM screen as the way in and pointed AI agents at the API instead. The consumption bill is the part founders should read twice.
Pocket Prep's $20 price was laughed at. Nine years on it holds
Peter Murphy started Pocket Prep with $1,800 and priced exam practice at $20 a month. A prospective partner found that funny; on Inc.'s account, the cheap price became the hard part to copy.
A shop's 'No Influencers' sign became a 600-unit product
Four Winds Craft Guild in Nantucket put up a sign telling influencers to stay away, got shouted at for it, and then started selling handmade copies of the sign. The lesson is cheaper to borrow than to earn.
One startup bans video at its own launch events
The rule is simple: no cameras in the room when the product is shown. The reasoning is that a product should be able to survive the excitement built around it.
One question that tells you if a growth move is defensible
Before you call an advantage durable, name what a bigger rival would have to give up to copy it. If the answer is nothing, it is not an advantage.
Make the equity line on your offer readable before the next hire
Candidates cannot price a share count they have nothing to compare it against. Fixing that costs a paragraph in the offer letter.
Hastings: stop calling your company a family
Netflix's cofounder dropped the family framing after an early layoff. Two other founders of large companies have landed in the same place.
One founder, 15 Devin agents, $20,000 in a month
Ryan Carson runs his family law software company alone, with a fleet of cloud coding agents and a handwritten to-do list. Here is how the setup is organised and what it costs.
Ghostwriter claims 20 times the LinkedIn reach of his peers, without AI
Inc. reports that a LinkedIn ghostwriter outperforms creators of similar following by a factor of 20, and that he refuses to draft with AI. The specifics of how are thinner than the claim.
Ramp built its own coding agent with 5.5 people
The fintech turned down off-the-shelf coding agents and wrote its own. It says 75% of merged pull requests now come from it, and the team that maintains it is four engineers, a director and a part-time PM.
Yeet built its dating app from a 1,600-member Discord first
The dating startup ran a pre-launch Discord community as its research function, and says the feedback killed swiping and shrank the role of its AI. Here are the mechanics.
Replit's founder: over half the company will be salespeople
Amjad Masad spent a decade believing a good product sells itself. Enterprise procurement disagreed. The lesson for product-led founders is not whether to hire sellers, but when.
Inc: 65% of small firms carry a books problem that kills sales
Accounts built to satisfy a tax return are not accounts built to satisfy a buyer. A US report puts the share of small businesses with that gap at 65 per cent.
Cursor's talent chief runs every hire like an executive search
Adam Ward calls the standard recruiting funnel the "funnel of doom". His alternative has three steps, and most of it is work founders currently skip.
Mailchimp added everything, then Intuit stopped counting it
A product that won by doing one job now has its numbers stripped out of its parent's growth rate. The roadmap decision that got it there was made in 2019.
How 141 accounts got re-tiered in three days, not a quarter
Backstory's customer success lead described the exercise at SaaStr AI Day: eight signals cut to four, four connectors instead of five teams, and one signal that was scoring the wrong way round.
Adviser: bolting on AI can cut what a buyer will pay
Itay Sagie argues that copilots, model integrations and third-party AI tools often read to an acquirer as vendor dependency rather than innovation. His test is whether the AI leaves behind an asset nobody else can copy.
Stanley 1913 chief keeps five advisers who have never met
Matt Navarro tests hard decisions on three chief executives and a couple of former bosses, none of whom know each other. The separation is the point.
Filmmaker refused a $100,000 deal over AI-generated faces
Trevor Rappleye told a franchise brand his studio would not fake testimonials. He spent three hours certain he had ruined his company, then the board signed anyway.
How a 60-person childcare firm closes for two full weeks a year
Haven shuts every club for a week in summer and the last week of December. The scheduling is set more than a year ahead, and staff are paid for both.
Solo founder runs CAD software she has never learned, via Codex
Yana Welinder builds garments, vendor outreach and a Stripe-connected storefront on her own, using a written spec and agents that drive the software for her. Here is the workflow she demonstrated.
Debt collector: overdue invoices can be recovered without court
A professional invoice chaser argues the escalation that gets a startup paid happens in letters and deadlines, long before a courtroom. The detail of that ladder has not been made available.
Signing the LOI is where founders start losing the deal
A letter of intent feels like the finish line. Five things go wrong after it, and most of them cost the seller money.
Quote double your biggest deal ever, and watch where it breaks
Jason Lemkin's exercise for founders going upmarket: take the next prospect that looks like your largest customer, ask for twice your highest price, and pay attention to what the deal demands of you.
Make the machine write your one-star review first
A prompt that asks an AI to play the disappointed venture capitalist, the recruiter or the Amazon reviewer. The technique costs nothing and the criticism arrives before the audience does.
Earned media supplies 84% of AI citations, study finds
Muck Rack looked at more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Paid placements accounted for 0.3% of them. Your homepage is not where the machines do their reading.
Half of founders lose the CEO job by year three
Noam Wasserman's study of more than 200 US startups found 50% of founders were no longer chief executive by the company's third birthday. Most did not go by choice. The practice below is about the three things that change first: the calendar, the bench and who gets to decide.
Founder rebuilt her sale process after four deals collapsed
Christine Slocumb says one buyer walked a week before closing. She rewrote how she screened the next one.
Beauty founder drops ad agency, learns Meta Ads herself in a day
Allison McNamara of MARA Beauty took her Meta advertising in-house after tiring of the results. Inc. reports her return on ad spend then nearly doubled.
Buyers had picked a winner before sales ever called
A consultant who has spent 15 years interviewing buyers says the deals were lost in the research phase, not the demo. One SaaS company doubled its conversion rate by fixing the buying experience instead of the sales team.
Clay tells staff: writing a document should take longer than reading it
The sales software company has put a rule in writing about how long internal documents should take to produce. The detail of how it is enforced has not been published.
A two-year waitlist, 2,000 names, and a decision not to grow
Decware builds low-power valve amplifiers slowly enough that buyers queue for two years. The waiting is the strategy, not the symptom.
Sutherland's Buc-ee's lesson: fix the pain nobody else fixes
Ogilvy's vice chairman argues that repairing a neglected customer annoyance beats adding features or cutting price. The example he reaches for is a chain of American petrol stations known for its lavatories.
Answer one question and you have a comms strategy
A ghostwriter who has drafted for founders says most of them freeze at the same point: they think they need to be vulnerable or contrarian, when all they need is a reason they started.
One search fix, then $10,000 of catering in two weeks
Kevin Walker runs six food businesses around Chicago and does not claim to understand SEO. He says rewriting his restaurant's website for search brought in $10,000 of catering orders inside a fortnight.
How one consultant cut 20 hours of weekly admin with Claude
Grace Clarke says she now runs her service business on tools she built herself: an hourly pipeline, a proposal maker and a replacement inbox. The method is copyable; the price tag is not stated.
Three AI firms hit $100m ARR. Multiples ran 50x to 100x
Harvey, Sierra and Legora each crossed $100m in annual recurring revenue within nine months. The venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz argues the gap between their valuations is not explained by how fast they grew.
Three places to put a press logo where buyers actually pause
Coverage in the footer does nothing, argues a marketing adviser writing in Entrepreneur. His case is that the same logo works only when it sits beside a price, a form or a bold claim.
Launch to a Facebook group before you buy a single ad
A team that says it has worked on more than 200 consumer brand launches built its own brand inside a Facebook group instead of paying for reach. The detail behind the tactic is thin, but the sequencing is the lesson.
PostHog has 187 SKILL.md files. Here is what it learned
The company says its teams have published 226 agent skills internally. Its engineering newsletter sets out the rules that keep them useful, and the failure modes that don't.
YC partners say one word gives away an AI-written application
Applications to Y Combinator have grown 60% longer in three years, and the word "wedge" now appears in more than a fifth of them. Two partners have said publicly what that tells them.
Why AI models cite third parties 84% of the time
Two industry surveys suggest the coverage you cannot buy is now the coverage that counts. Here is how to get it without a retainer.
Cloned voices hit money managers: one check stopped them
Cheap voice cloning has made impersonation calls easy to run at scale. The defence reported by Inc. is unglamorous: verify every sensitive request through a separate channel.
One vendor in 30 asked how the product went. It cost $50
Jason Lemkin signed up for more than 30 APIs this year. Exactly one company sent a question instead of a sequence, and got a 400-word product spec back for the price of some credits.