Being Comfortable Being Sloppy
Being Comfortable Being Sloppy
And how people are automating YouTube channels
On Saturday I shared a members-only deep dive about how non-technical founders can make progress even without technical co-founders. Join the community to get access to it now.
Today at a glance:
Opportunity → Google Test
Framework → The CUP Method
Tool → SaaS Pricing Explorer
Trend → YouTube Automation
Quote → Be comfortable being sloppy
💡Opportunity: Google Test
Googling (or prompting) is a skill. All engineers know this. What if candidates got tested on it?
$20 per candidate is an interesting idea for an MVP, but there’s also likely a subscription revenue play here. You could expand beyond a Google Test into prompting for various job-specific purposes as well.
A potential target market (that’s growing) for this is startups that hire a lot of remote workers, in particular VAs.
🧠 Framework: The CUP Method
The CUP method is a prioritization framework that helps you go from idea to product-market fit. It’s most useful in the 0 to 1 stage, before you’d consider something like “jobs to be done.”
It’s broken down into three steps:
Current Primary Goal → A single goal you can reach in the short term.
Unique Value Proposition → What makes your startup different from alternatives?
Pain Points → What major problems are your users experiencing?
🛠 Tool: SaaS Pricing Explorer
SaaS pricing is tough. This SaaS pricing explorer lets you track, analyze, and explore over 1000 different software products pricing strategies.
This is a great way to learn from other founders, spy on competitors, and iterate on your own pricing.
📈 Trend: YouTube Automation
Have you heard about “faceless” pages on YouTube? The trend is also referred to as “theme” pages on Instagram.
Basically you create an account about a specific topic and create content for it without ever showing your face, and you “automate” the growth and maintenance of it with various tools.
Calling them “automated” is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but people are building empires by running many of these at the same time with small teams.
Here’s an example:
Alux is a channel that mostly creates videos with stock images and voiceovers, along with various branded elements.
They talk about wealth building and success — pretty typical aspirational content structured as Buzzfeed listicle-esque videos.
You can see what I mean in this video.
They’ve been able to repeat this format time and time again — they’ve put out 2,400 videos and have over 4 million subscribers.
They don’t publish their revenue numbers but considering they’ve built a school, an app, courses and more it’s safe to say they’re raking it in.
What I love about this is that the same person could run countless channels like this by using a repeatable playbook in different niches.
💬 Quote: Be comfortable being sloppy
First time founders often think their product needs to be perfect before launching. Second time founders know the opposite is true.
Once you have an MVP, put it out into the world and get feedback from customers, then iterate from there. It’s okay for your first iteration to be sloppy.
Netflix’s co-founder Marc Randolph agrees:
🔗 Houck’s Picks
Peter Thiel’s Reddit AMA answers on AI, tech, and startups (Link)
Series A expectations in today’s venture market (Link)
How to avoid the startup death spiral from Mercury’s founder (Link)
Insights on the Sale Process of 3 venture-backed companies (Link)
A goldmine of content and insights from Keith Rabois (Link)
The difference between great consumer founders and the rest (Link)
💡 How I Can Help
Here are 2 ways for me to help you close your fundraise, find PMF, or accelerate growth: