I scout for a handful of investors in Silicon Valley. One of my jobs is to cut through the noise and surface the gems. Every so often, someone sends me a blurb that s crisp, compelling, and makes me want to learn more. When that happens, I usually take a meeting and sometimes even make intros.
That said, most blurbs I see aren t great. Founders are flying blind because no one s willing to be brutally honest with them. Let s fix that.
We're drowning in dashboards. Impressions, click-throughs, followers, reach, saves, shares but not all things are equal. Telling, is there a metric you're meant to be keen on, yet in actuality, you're not? Maybe you: Don't care about likes but are ridiculously fixated on replies Track shares but never take the time to check reach Are concerned about DMs only because that's where the magic happens We're building a social tool on the social web and taking a lot of time deliberating about what's truly important, and what just looks good on a chart. Would be great to hear your own opinion regarding what you're paying attention to (and what you're not).
Something I've run into repeatedly and I can't tell whether it's the platform, my settings, or just me.
I found a comment on my own intro thread that had been sitting there 20 days. It was the most useful piece of feedback anyone has given me on this platform, someone had taken the time to pull apart my positioning properly, and I only saw it because I happened to be scrolling my own activity. No notification appeared. Same thing again this week with two people who tagged me on launch day. So I was three weeks late to both.
Two months post-launch, quick one for other makers: our upgrade-to-Pro flow was quietly broken for weeks; every webhook came back 200, no errors anywhere, and not one real purchase actually flipped a user to Pro. Turned out I'd built it assuming our payment provider signs its payloads as Stripe does. It doesn't. Fixed now, but "200 OK" apparently just means your code didn't crash, not that it did anything. Anyone else shipped something that looked totally fine and was quietly broken the whole time?
I have a bad habit of trying new tools even when the one I'm using is perfectly fine.
I'll see something new, think it looks better, move everything over, spend time learning it... and then end up back on the old app a couple of weeks later.
But then there are other apps I've complained about forever without replacing because switching feels like too much work.
I've read a lot of conflicting views on this ... I'd love some advice.
We're about to relaunch our news platform ... which has been locked behind an "invite code" for a few months in ~beta state ... and we'd like to create some buzz!!..
