Chan Jong (CJ) Na

I made 100+ calls with web3 founders this month and… 99% of projects & businesses are unhappy with the KOL they had. This is just because of KOL managers. This is their framework: search the first ‘KOL’ with social proof (mainly bots) that can post or retweet. This KOL just wants his money for a one-shot round. But a good KOL manager is someone who finds the perfect influencer for the project in need. How to spot a good KOL? 1️⃣ Verify the niche. Example a gaming project will prefer a gaming influencer with 2k followers rather than an engagement farmer with 100k. 2️⃣ Check the engagement regarding the following count. 3️⃣ Watch out for the quality of their content. If they only post for clients it's a red flag. If they also post for their own personal brand (and without engagement farming) It’s worth the try. 4️⃣ Create framework for his partners 5️⃣ Make processes for his KOL Did you have a bad experience with KOLs and why? Share it below!

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What I learned from Jerry Yang & Larry Page TL;DR: Technology companies launching disruptive products should religiously focus on end-users above everything else, including partners. Solve end-user problems and everything else follows– adoption, revenue, and partners. Yahoo! & Jerry Yang (2006) In 2006, phone calls were expensive and based on time & distance pricing. Skype changed all that with VoIP, which bypassed telco networks and made super cheap calls using the Internet. They already amassed 34 million users and were growing at insane rates. At the same time, Yahoo Messenger had over +110 million users worldwide. We could leverage this userbase and create a VOIP product to challenge Skype. Yahoo had all the advantages on paper: the brand, the users, and the technology. So, with the leadership of Brad Garlinghouse, we built a competing product with a very disruptive pricing plan – 1 cent/min; Skype's pricing ranged from 2-3 cents/min. However, a week before the launch, Jerry Yang paused the project at a partner’s request. ATT-SBC was concerned our pricing would cannibalize its own voice business. Yang did not want to upset that relationship. Ultimately, Yahoo missed its opportunity, and Skype was off to dominate the VoIP market. Google & Larry Page (2008) Before the iPhone, companies had to negotiate with mobile carriers to get their apps on phones. Google was struggling to secure deals with Verizon for Google Maps and a new phone concept, Android. Around the same time, the FCC planned to auction 3G spectrum. Google pushed for open application and open device requirements on the carriers who won the auction. This infuriated the carriers. They argued that such conditions would decrease the spectrum's value below the $4.8 billion auction floor set by the US government. The FCC was leaning towards the carriers. The agency did not want to risk the auction not meeting the government's financial goals. Google's only option was to participate in the auction to ensure the minimum bid. Inside Google, the decision to bid was intensely debated. Android founder Andy Rubin argued the carriers would hate us and never partner with Android; Chris Sacca argued that bidding was the only way to guarantee Google's future in mobile. Page sided with Sacca. Page’s rationale: “. . . the carriers already hate us. If we don’t bid, they would hate us and not respect us.”  We bid, the openness provisions were triggered, and we secured a path for Google apps on 3G. Sixteen months later, Andy got his deal Verizon –  Verizon Droid! Page was willing to sacrifice mobile carrier deals to ensure Google’s products were universally accessible to its users. He played spectrum poker with $4.8 billion to achieve that result. (cont. below)

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There's now no shortage of options for open source model hosting providers. i.e., take your pick for Llama 3 (Groq, Together AI, Telnyx, etc.). Am I wrong in thinking the only real difference now between them is speed, cost and readability? If so, this space just became commoditized quickly and reminds me of the telco provider wars where its a race to the bottom on price. Which means the cost of running AI applications is approaching something close to zero... 🤯 #ai #cx

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Congrats Irvin Zhan for getting the #1 spot on ProductHunt today with Subframe * The team has been working on subframe for ~2 years * Irvin was an engineering manager at Airkit.ai and has been an early employee at several startups * Subframe is pre-seed * Browse hundreds of beautiful, designer-approved templates to kickstart your designs * Refine your designs by drag-and-dropping in Subframe’s visual editor using real components, not mockups * Export your designs to high-quality React/Tailwind code by copy and pasting Subframe is unlike existing tools out there in that: * We help you build your actual product, not just marketing pages. You can create screens like dashboards, settings pages, chat bots, and more. * Our editor is easy and intuitive for non-designers. We are an alternative to Figma that gives you guardrails like choosing colors, which takes the guesswork of “making things look good”. * We work within your codebase. After you build something on Subframe, the UI code you copy/paste is all yours. You can hook it up to your custom business logic, without any lock-in. Hard work pays off! View it on producthunt: https://lnkd.in/dndJGaud

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Composable Work --- it's not just a framework; it's a paradigm shift in how we approach collaboration and project execution.

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Solve for information asymmetries! Architecture & Civil Engineering - Layout interpretation ~other industries: Healthcare - <Prescription> interpretation Financial Products - <Subject to market risks documentation> interpretation Loans - <Fine print> interpretation There’s going to be a slew of startups commercialising this year with a value prop of simplification using AI

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PSA: If you send a founder product nits + feedback with concomitant screenshots/mocks you instantly vault into being an S-tier user. (Friction logs are even better, of course.)

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Don't Be Fooled By DAU/MAU - It Hides Your Real User Activity! When founders want to see how engaged their users are, they look at the (Daily Active Users) / (Monthly Active Users) ratio metric. While it only gives a single, blended average. It doesn't show where users fall across the activity spectrum. So instead of relying solely on this ratio, what should founders analyze? Analyze the Power User Curve. It's a 30-day histogram which graph the number of days per month users were active, provides a more detailed breakdown of user engagement to identify and understand power users. 1️⃣ When The Curve Smiles A curve that looks like a smile - with high bars on the left and right - it shows that users are highly engaged and returning to the app daily. As the product can create more power users, the curve will shift further towards the right side of the smile. Facebook has a very right-leaning smile curve, with more than 60% of its MAUs coming back daily. 2️⃣ A Left-weighted Curve When the curve is left-weighted, most users only have activity one day a month. By this activity metric, the product has very few power users. That's okay, not every product is built on daily returning users. An investing product like a professional network like LinkedIn is bound to have a more left-weighted Curve. Low engagement simply means the company must extract more value from each engagement and create revenue with a business model that isn't tied to daily usage. 3️⃣ Trends & Cohorts Seeing how the curve changes over time will show if a product getting more engaging and why. A positive shift towards the right means a cohort of users is finding value in the product. This can illustrate how a new release or feature is bringing users back more often. Likewise, products like Uber or Thumbtack would want to look at cohort trends by geographic location to see how their product is developing in different areas and building network effects. 4️⃣ Customizing Your Curve To get the most from your curve, customize it to your business. It doesn't need to be viewed on the 30-day scale. A SaaS/productivity product focused on the workweek and weekly active users might want to look at their power users on a 7-day histogram, and the activity doesn't need to be app opens or logins. The curve can look beyond visits by using a deeper action that is more likely to show users getting or creating value. A publishing platform might want to look at “posted content” activity to identify its small contingent of power users. This is how YouTube could look at its creators, or eBay at its sellers. There's no silver bullet for how to look at user engagement, However, the Power User Curve visualizes user activity distribution, helping identify power users and understand how to monetize the product around them, rather than relying solely on blended average metrics. . Source: Andrew Chen (Partner at a16z) #startups #metrics #users #activity #MAU #DAU #fund #funding

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A software engineer I interviewed yesterday just changed everything... Let me explain: Yesterday, I was on an interview with Frank Ramos. A software engineer we were talking to for the new Full-Stack Engineer role started telling us about how much he loves the platform. He told us he was turn his favorite song lyrics into the short-form videos on the ossa.ai platform, and then sending them to his wife. Right away, my founder cap was put on, and we started asking questions about what he liked and what he thought could be better. One thing he mentioned was that the landing page could be more clear about what the product does. He was right. Our headline on the landing page was currently "The #1 AI-Tool for Short-Form Content Creators." That headline doesn't tell a new visitor what the product does. Right after the call, I created a ticket in the engineering backlog for our Head of Growth, Brennan Duncan, to change the headline to "Text to Short-Form Video In Minutes." Since that conversation yesterday morning, we have seen a significant jump in conversion rates. Moral of the story? Always be learning and listening to your users. P.S. - We just dropped a massive new feature that no other company in the world has thought about trying to create. You can check it out below. ⤵ https://lnkd.in/gZh_bPpM

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 🔥 "How many engineers does it take to replicate Docusign as a software product in 2026?" Sarah Guo dropped this thought-provoking question at last week’s panel. Answers from the eng/product leaders at top companies were eye-opening: Scott Densmore: 10 engineers Romain Huet: 5 engineers Ainsley Escorce-Jones: Just 1 Lee Robinson: 1-2 engineers Say hi to a future where rewriting major software might be simpler than you think. Reach out to me if you are planning to do that! 🙋🏻‍♂️ PS: Take a look at what Gil Arditi is working on at Morph.ai 💡 #software #sdlc #softwaredevelopment #llm #ai #ml #largelanguagemodel #copilot #gpt4

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Day #4 of observations from attending Home Care 100 this month: There is a cambrian explosion of "AI scribe for OASIS docs in <15 min" startups currently underway in Home Health. A new one of these is launching every few months. I'm certain we'll see 2x AI scribe vendors at the next HC100 in January. And so, I listened for the overall positioning of these products by the vendor and buyer at Home Care 100. It sounded like this: HH CEO: “I need a solution to lower the caregiver burden of clinical documentation” HH Vendor: “I offer AI to reduce the burden of clinical documentation” This may sound like a "checkmate" match between what the CEO is saying, and what the vendor is offering. But it isn't. The CEO actually has a business model problem. They cannot afford to sufficiently pay for the time it takes for caregivers to complete clinical documentation. And so, they are stuck looking for solutions that minimize the cost of personal time on documentation that caregivers have to absorb. Solutions that offer AI and the promise of driving down this cost down for the caregiver are the start, but not the endgame. If I were not building Arya, and wanted to build a standout documentation product, I would build an "AI-powered clinical documentation agency", not an AI scribe. Here's what this AI-powered documentation agency would sound like: 1. We eliminate 90% of all clinical documentation at your company. We do it at 1/10th the cost of a traditional outsourced documentation shop 2. We do this by a human-in-the-loop AI solution, that allows our human documenters to work 10x faster than DIY 3. Under the hood, we integrate with *all* the best AI out there (incl. ChatGPT) in a SOC2+ HIPAA guaranteed environment. We decide the best AI+human workflow to use for each documentation on the fly. Regardless, you always pay a flat rate, and we absorb the risk or AI vs human effort 4. Your caregivers approve each human-in-the-loop documentation. We don't publish anything to the EHR till it's approved 5. We guarantee a <1% error/ change rate on our documentation from caregivers, or we offer some money back I did some back of the napkin math to see what the economics of an such an agency might look like. With the current math, the caregiver is still absorbing upwards of $10 worth of time per OASIS documentation. If an AI-powered agency drove this cost down to the single digits per doc, might HH agencies be able to work this into their financial model and take this off the caregiver's plate entirely? Here's hoping for a "we've got you covered on the documentation " caregiver benefit coming in the future. #homecare #homecareagencies #HC100 #homecare100 #homehealth

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A lot has been written about #startup #strategy. I'm not sure as much has been said about day-to-day tactics for startups, including how to think about your #stack, how to think about #hiring, and perhaps most importantly, how to maintain your sanity in startup life. Some outstanding and very candid advice here from founders and leaders at Tailscale, Fastly, CircleCI, and many others.

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GitHub’s CEO Thomas Dohmke demoed Copilot Workspace in his TED Talk, which was released late last week. (GitHub published a blog post about it at the end of April). This looks like an incredible achievement in AI coding and potentially a world-changing technology - for the better. It could soon allow anyone to bring their vision to reality with an AI coder that can not only write code for small components but also: 1. Write a suggested spec. 2. Convert the spec to a task list 3. Write all the code on that task list 4. Verify the code 5. And more… Copilot Workspace can take in your entire codebase and propose step-by-step tasks to turn your existing app into your desired vision. READ MORE >>

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You think building a startup requires a lot of effort? Consider the effort required to live a life without aligning your soul/self with market and community. Best time to plant a tree/build a startup-- 10 years ago. Next best time is right now. Try this: https://lnkd.in/ggF8bGbv

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Timing in investing is like catching a wave: if you jump in too early or too late, you might miss the opportunity. Making decisions at the right moment can mean the difference between significant gains and losses. It's about being patient, seizing opportunities, and understanding when to act based on market conditions and trends. Successful investors know that timing is not just about luck; it's a skill honed through experience and careful observation of the financial landscape.

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fast retrieval of recognized images is a base level technology which will affect several areas of science and business applications. https://lnkd.in/gS4v_y5j

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Building early stage startup momentum? Make sure your speed-to-help is measured in minutes. In today’s environment, you can’t wait days for help. You have to get unstuck fast. With timely advice, execution quickens. Thats the power of a safe-space community that’s built on ‘giving’. It’s our foundational value. You should give what we are building a try.  Zero risk.   DM me to learn more. We’re happy to tee up a call. Happy Wednesday, ya’ll. ———— Please consider ♻️ with founders in your network. As early stage founders, we at times, are a problem away from sinking or propelling forward.

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