Stuart Balcombe

YC’s best advice is “default alive” - have enough cash to survive without the next raise. Great advice… nobody f*cking does it. Paul Graham (the founder of YC) once said he’d raise $500K, get ramen profitable, and probably never raise again. The guy who’s seen more VC deployed than ANY human alive basically says he wouldn’t use it more than he absolutely has to. But the reason no one listens to this advice is because founders are delusional about their own companies. We think what we have is better than what it actually is, and we can’t help ourselves. Our startups are our babies. We have a totally unrealistic and out-of-touch view of them. It’s way too easy when you have a little bit of traction to go out there and raise way too much money. Then you’re set on a path to burn forever. “Default alive” is a great concept. Maybe 1/100 YC companies actually do this. YC knows it, and they fund them anyway.

139

50 Comments

Every startup has a product roadmap. But what about a go-to-market roadmap? Paul Williamson built one that scaled Plaid from $3M to $300M ARR 🚀 In this episode, he breaks down how to build a forward-compatible go-to-market roadmap that evolves intentionally from scrappy v0.1 experiments to multi-year strategy. Key takeaways from the conversation: 1️⃣ Build GTM like product. Plaid iterated through 9-10 GTM versions in year one (they treated GTM as a roadmap, not a static plan). 2️⃣ Make your GTM roadmap “forward-compatible.” Each version should extend the last, not force you to rebuild from scratch. 3️⃣ Not all inbound is good inbound (writing this while at INBOUND!). Plaid filtered for value (not volume), routing low-value use cases to PLG instead of sales. 4️⃣ Pattern recognition beats volume. The team learned to spot ICPs vs. anti-patterns by manually reviewing deals daily. 5️⃣ Run daily standups (twice). In early days, Plaid used AM/PM GTM standups to refine qualification and learn fast. 6️⃣ Sales-led ≠ better. Some customers were better served via PLG. The team used human routing to steer deals appropriately. 7️⃣ Go-to-market must match product readiness. Moving upmarket required SLAs, uptime, SSO. Roadmap GTM and product together. 8️⃣ Avoid overbuilding too early. The best GTM orgs feel slightly behind…just enough to stay lean, focused, and adaptable. 9️⃣ Your comp plan shapes sales behavior. SMB-style comp delayed enterprise deals. Fixing this reduced cycle time and risk. 🔟 Write it down. Documenting the GTM roadmap helped align the org and communicate clearly with technical founders. -- 🎧 Tune in and subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you like to listen by searching "The GTMnow Podcast." 💡 GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund. Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

21

6 Comments

The automation agencies are coming. Every big shift in tech quietly creates new job categories. Right now, we’re watching them play a major role in the growth of a unicorn SaaS business and driving a big chunk of their growth. Automation agencies are not a niche experiment anymore—they’re becoming so core that even the sign-up flows of billion-dollar companies are using it as a classifier. When platforms start designing around a profession, it’s a signal: 1. The profession is already moving serious revenue. 2. The ecosystem is gearing up to serve it. 3. The winners will own the workflows of thousands of businesses and potentially their payment processing and beyond. This is the early innings for automation agencies, but the infrastructure is coming. If you're building in this space I want to hear from you! #Automation #AutomationAgency #AIAgency #N8N #AI

27

9 Comments

Fundraising CEOs: Know your numbers cold. Not just the obvious ones. Know things like underlying growth drivers, cohort-level retention changes, why NRR dipped last month, user behavior patterns and so on. If you don't know your KPIs as CEO, you won't get a second meeting. No exceptions.

22

DTC founders doing $1-5M: Your margin isn't "tight." It's leaking. I've audited supply chains for 17 years. Here's what I see every time: Founders scaling fast. Revenue climbing. Profit… stuck. Not because they're bad operators. Because COGS has 47 places to hide margin killers and most founders track 3. Supplier price increases you never approved. Freight surcharges buried on page 4 of the invoice. "Handling fees" that didn't exist last year. You can't negotiate what you can't see. Find your profit leak → https://lnkd.in/gqVsScBY

1

Stack leverage 📈 Some startups grow to challenge incumbents because they manufacture momentum. It´s like they line up a domino sequence where every win makes the next win easier, each ~1.5× bigger. Most teams tend to push on same-size (or even smaller) dominos and call it progress. But if your dominos are the same size, you’re busy - not compounding. Stacking your dominos right has never been more important. Which domino are you pushing next?

36

3 Comments