Collapse Your Talent Stack

And get access to a new creator marketplace idea I've been working on

Jul 11, 2023

Hey y’all!

On Saturday I shared a deep dive on 7 reasons Meta’s new app could fail. Join the community to get access to my library of over 40 deep dives, and a new one in your inbox each Saturday.

Today at a glance:

Opportunity → Stripe for Athletes
Framework → Pirate Framework
Tool → SaaS Discount Marketplace
Trend → Creator Marketplaces
Quote → Collapse your talent stack

💡 Opportunity: Stripe for Athletes

This is framed as Stripe for athletes but the rest of the tweet makes it clear the idea is bigger than payment processing. It sounds more like Copilot (or what Stir originally wanted to be) for athletes.

Athletes, especially now in the age of NIL where even college athletes are able to sell sponsorships, are a unique class of influencer so existing financial management solutions may not be a fit in the same way that they’re typically not a perfect fit for tech employees who receive a good portion of their wealth through equity-based compensation.

Ashton Eaton is a 2x Olympic gold medalist who has likely experienced this problem firsthand so he’d critically be able to win the trust of other athletes and kickstart usage of the tool.

I would only have one concern though:

How big is the market? The aggregate size of all NIL deals is $917 million. Granted, the market is growing rapidly since NIL has only been introduced in the last couple years, but that’s not large enough to support a venture-scale startup.

Non-collegiate professional athletes on the other hand are a bigger market, yes, but most either hire teams to manage these things for them or aren’t doing enough deals for this to be worth it.

The two paths I see here are either expanding the pie by initially focusing on making it significantly easier for athletes to match with sponsors or bootstrapping the idea and seeing what happens.

🧠 Framework: AARRR Pirate Framework

No matter how simple you make it, your users are taking a journey through finding and using your product.

Investor Dave McClure developed the AARRR Framework (aka the pirate framework) to outline the questions you should be answering at each stage in that journey.

What I like about this framework is that each step feeds into the next and that it’s another straightforward way to use NPS.

🛠 Tool: Giraffe

You know how founder communities and accelerators typically offer discounts on SaaS tools to all members? Well, Giraffe offers that to everyone.

They’re a SaaS discount marketplace that offers deals on everything from AWS and Notion to more niche tools.

To join you pay an annual subscription, and each deal on the site has eligibility criteria.

📈 Trend: Creator Marketplace

Brands are increasingly realizing that traditional marketing channels are becoming less effective. Consumers want to buy from the creators they trust.

Creator marketplaces match brands with creators who fit their niche. Often, this is for content creation (either sponsored posts or ads) but, increasingly, we’re seeing creator marketplaces for other tasks as well.

I’ve been working on one myself — it’s called Megaphone. It’s a platform that matches startups with the most reputable creators on Twitter and LinkedIn to engage and amplify their content.

Imagine the biggest creators you follow adding their massive social proof to all of your launches, and even just the various content that you as the founder (or your brand) creates.

I’ve already signed up creators with over 1.5 million aggregate followers in various niches. Take a look and drop your email to learn more.

💬 Quote: Collapse your talent stack

Ok, bear with me here because I know the screenshot looks like a giant wall of text.

Scott’s main point here is that startups should look to hire team members who can naturally act in multiple roles. Your designer is your product manager. He calls this “collapsing the stack” in the same way you would if a SaaS tool was able to manage multiple parts of your tech stack.

The best employees looking to work at a startup won’t blink at this. In fact, it’ll probably excite them and is a selling point for you to use — the extra ownership is likely something they feel is missing at their current job.