Martin 👀

Plaid raised $575M at $6.1B.

That's less than HALF their $13.4B peak in 2021.

This isn't growth money. It's financial housekeeping.

This money is covering employee tax bills on expiring RSUs.

Not exactly rocket fuel for a fintech darling.

Startup motto should be: “Build what hurts, not what looks cool on Product Hunt.”

Getting into Google is cool. Making them feel threatened is cooler.

AI won’t disrupt SaaS overnight. It’ll show up as a line item in some VP’s budget and suddenly five roles go missing.

Most business failures aren't market failures or execution failures. They're imagination failures.
Entrepreneurs hit invisible ceilings they've built in their own minds long before hitting actual market ceilings.

Most startup marketing problems aren’t funnel problems.

They’re identity crises. If you can’t name your customer in one sentence, you’re already lost.

All the APIs in the world will not save you from the curse of marketing to “everyone.”

Hit 40% MoM growth? VCs suddenly "believe in your vision"

Land a $50M exit? Industry crowns you "visionary genius."

Meanwhile, Mom still asks when you'll get a job with dental insurance.

Startup trauma is character development. You’re just building lore for your future podcast.

Every founder thinks they’re building a product company. They’re not. They’re building a psychology company with a backend.

The bugs you fix in people take way longer than the ones in production.

Love seeing startups with $150k+ executives doing $15/hour tasks because "we're not ready to hire for that yet." The most expensive way to run a company is having your best people do your simplest work.

You can't A/B test your way to product-market fit or discover breakthrough features by testing small variations.

The best insights come from customer conversations, not dashboard metrics.

First-time founder:

6 months building, 58-page deck, 12 rejections, $500K raised.

Second-time founder:

"I'm doing a thing again" in a whatsapp.

$5M committed before appetisers.

VCs fetishise past exits.

Agentic workflow:

because saying “automated to-do list” wasn’t sexy enough for a deck.

Running your own biz: 50% thrill, 50% therapy bills. Clocking in suddenly sounds like a spa day.

Most people think startups are risky. But betting your whole life on one boss’s mood? That’s the real gamble.

Your job is stable… until Dave from Finance gets promoted and suddenly you’re “not a culture fit.”

Want honest feedback on your product?
Add a buy button.

Weird Ideas Win

2025+ is about knowing what weird idea to build, not how to build it.

With modern tools, anyone can launch a product. 

The space is crowded with capable builders.

Distribution still matters.

But creativity is the magnet that attracts users organically.

Every founder has two browser windows open during investor calls:

Window 1: The pitch deck they spent 200 hours perfecting

Window 2: Google search for "[insert whatever the investor just asked] + definition + example"

"We're angel investors who hold a permanent board seat, can never be diluted, and require weekly status updates"

This is what your parents think when you tell them you're starting a company.

The startup that 'came out of nowhere' and landed that big company as their first client? The founder's college roommate is the VP of Product. The most valuable startup asset is the web of favors you've accumulated over the years. This is how things actually work.

Companies: "People are our greatest asset!"

Also companies: Delays hiring for months to "save money"

Then: Pays 3x more when senior talent quits from burnout

This never appears on the quarterly report.
Penny wise, future foolish.

High-performing teams aren't built through consensus or forced proximity. They're built by interesting characters who can fight over ideas Monday and still choose to grab drinks together Friday.

"Product-led growth" rarely works without relationship-led sales. The founders claiming they "grew without salespeople" usually had phenomenal customer success teams doing sales without the title.

Love watching founders dismiss their engineers' concerns only to blame "technical debt" six months later. Same founder who said "just make it work" now wondering why everything breaks. Meanwhile the engineering team has that group chat nobody knows about where they called it all.

The biggest reason businesses fail isn't lack of funding or poor timing. It's experts being ignored by leaders who don't want to hear "no."

Tech startups keep chasing AI features while basic user problems sit unfixed. Your customers don't want machine learning. They want their password reset to work the first time. Solve the boring problems before building the exciting ones.

Everyone obsesses over what VCs think but nobody pays attention to what early customers actually say. Founders spend months perfecting pitch decks while ignoring support tickets. The funding isn't the validation. The repeat purchase is.