Steve Sewell

TWO OR THREE-STEPPING TO SERIES A A lot of software founders are still trying to raise a $4-5M seed round from a pre-revenue standpoint to get to Series A. I get that we all want more buffer nowadays but it's also a harder calculus to go from pre-monetization, to early customers, to giving yourself enough sales cycle time in order to hit $1-2M ARR proxy for a strong A. Which is why inevitably, more founders end up having to raise messy extensions/bridges/Seed II or whatever you want to call them. So my advice is that IF you have the luxury of starting a company today, PLAN AHEAD. Even prior to even raising your first angel round. Break up your path to Series A into 2 or 3 tranches of mission-driven capital. Each tranche has a clear goal that you can rally your team and investors around. For example: First tranche to build the product and get early design partners. Second tranche to get to $300K of ARR. Third tranche to get to Series A. This will help support higher operating discipline and awareness. Incremental purchasing and hiring decisions will instantaneously shorten your runway in a way that a larger $5 million seed round obfuscates. And you'll be motivated to find GTM efficiency faster in the journey. Great habits for long term success. For context, Peter Walker of Carta recently sent an update on the arduous path from Seed to Series A. The survival rate is about 1/2 of what it used to be: "Something like 20-24% of startups that raised a seed round would graduate to their Series A in 24 months or less. For companies that raised their seeds in H1 2022, only 13% have made it to Series A across the 6 industries in the chart."

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This week on the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: I speak with Mike Taylor about his new book, Prompt Engineering for Generative AI: Future-Proof Inputs for Reliable AI Outputs, as well as the skill gap in performance marketing. Find the episode by searching for "Mobile Dev Memo" wherever you consume podcasts.

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In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet is really useful. I've been playing around with Claude's coding functionality and artifacts. Claude Artifacts basically allow Claude to generate content based on your prompts. This includes code, designs and even interactive stuff like simple games in a separate window. You literally watch Claude build what you want in super fast speed! I was explaining to an entrepreneur the difference between venture debt and venture capital. It's a bit difficult to illustrate the difference in equity dilution when a founder raise venture debt. I decided to generate a very simple venture debt dilution calculator using Claude. Checkout my artifact below and please give me ideas on features I should add onto my super simplistic creation. 🙂 https://lnkd.in/g3zBi2cd #AI #Claude #Copilot

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Like many the folks at Knapsack, I was pretty excited to see what Figma was going to announce today regarding design systems connectivity. There is a lot to be stoked about with typography, component metadata, etc. and a lot of great moments (I'm not just talking about the elevator music that was🔥) However, I keep wondering how much engineers (and their managers) are going to be willing to commit to including and maintaining extra code in their repository to be able to them see it presented back to them in Figma. It is an odd cycle. Take a design of a component from Figma, build some code, add specific code to allow you to connect it back to Figma... all to see the thing you built in Figma? This feels like swimming upstream? (obligatory salmon pic attached) Wouldn't it make more sense to just gather data from Figma and put it in the place developers already work? Would love to understand what you all make of this, especially dev voices.

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🔮 What's the future of developer platforms? ☠ Or the death knell for open core companies? Get the answers (and more) from Ethan Kurzweil; longtime partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and soon-to-be founder of a new, early stage venture firm. In his time at Bessemer Ethan invested in Launchdarkly, Twilio, PagerDuty, Intercom, Twitch, SendGrid, HashiCorp and npm. He's seen it all, you won't want to miss his takes on what's next and what isn't going to work. I'm sharing our closing lightning round questions here, but the full interview (which is much juicer) can be found at calyx.substack.com. ⚡Lightning round questions!⚡ *What's the developer platform that you respect most?* 🔶 Zapier. It's the ultimate democratizer of development for 4,000 different esoteric use cases and some not so esoteric use cases. And they built it in a way to allow anyone to use it. *Who is a developer GTM leader you respect?* 👨 Adam FitzGerald at HashiCorp. Disclaimer - he’s a Bessemer operating advisor. He is the best thinker to help companies structure developer evangelism programs at scale. *Unpopular opinion re: dev tools?*  💼 That a lot of dev tools shouldn't be businesses. Many should be free or part of a larger developer platform offering. The difference between tool and platform can make a big difference as to whether you have a sustainable business. *How do you feel like you’re able to uniquely work with developer-first companies?* ⚾ I’ll keep it to one for the lightning round: I’ve gotten lots of experience with false signals. If you’re a founder working on a startup sometimes you’ll respond to a false signal and it’s hard to go back and unwind those choices—we have lots of experience with developer platforms and can help founders avoid those pitfalls. Disclaimer: Ethan would never use emojis like this. He actually...doesn't use emojis!? I've just added them in an attempt to improve readability on LinkedIn... enjoy!

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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Claude's integration into our platform was a game-changer, generating high-quality, human-like content that perfectly captured intended tones and styles. The real magic happened when we put Claude in the hands of our own Nathan Thompson. With Claude-powered Copy.ai, Nathan's content creation process transformed overnight, allowing him to publish high-quality blog posts daily. Our customers slashed content creation costs, increased output, and created marketing and sales content that resonated with their audiences. Anthropic's commitment to responsible AI development ensures we provide customers with a safe, secure, and ethical tool. Copy.ai and Anthropic are shaping the future of go-to-market. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gtgaxm-H

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To all debating whether no-code should be used in build products with fundraising in mind: Investors often have a mandate to invest when there's a strong technical value prop or moat, which is why they're hesitant about no-code foundations. It's not about scale, compliance, IP, or security—modern no-code tools excel in these areas today. The real issue is the absence of deep tech roots that makes them wary. However, more open-minded investors or those focused on non-technical value props, moats, or other verticals usually have no problem with this approach. Better yet, they appreciate it for showing resourcefulness and avoiding overcomplication.

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Ep. 007 of The Feedback Loop is here! It's the first half of startup pitches from New York Tech Week, and from an almost-all-AI batch of companies. Joining me on this episode: returning fan-favorite, Jenny Fielding of Everywhere Ventures! For those not familiar, every week, a guest venture investor joins me to give granular and unfiltered feedback to founders on their storytelling and their concept. It's all about helping founders construct a better narrative for their move-forward -- because across fundraising, sales, recruiting, and company-building, it's the core narrative and pitch that can often hold startups back. And Jenny currently holds the tenure jacket as my guest co-host, with this being her 4th time on stage delivering quick insights and context you just can't find anywhere else. Massive shout-out to the founders featured: Matt Shenker building MatterMore, Karl White building Wroom, Trista V. building Nunchi, and Jeremy Da building Acrylic! Relevant links below.

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Normally I'm a huge, huge fan of John Cutler and his newsletter, which you *should* subscribe to if you want to learn how to be an effective dev or PM. However, his missive yesterday is off the mark. What he's observing is 100% a failure of leadership. People can blame the tools all they want, but if you're not creating a culture that supports these principles they go nowhere. https://lnkd.in/gdCg3-VR #PMI #softwaredevelopment #productmanagement #agile

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📣 Calling all Product, Engineering leaders! Apple and Android users can now FINALLY text each other like normal human beings! 🤯 RCS is here for iOS, and it's kind of a big deal. 🎉 While this means seamless communication across platforms, it also means a whole new set of questions for businesses. Let's break it down: WhatsApp: "I'm still the reigning champ of messaging, right?" 🏆 RCS: "We'll see about that." 😏 Business owners: "Okay, someone explain this to me." 🤔 Engineering teams: "Oh no!, this means a few more APIs and lots of logic building" Here's the deal: RCS is exciting for seamless cross-platform messaging, but it's also creating a new layer of complexity for businesses. - How does RCS fit into your existing communication strategy? - Do you need to rethink your entire messaging approach? - Is there any easy and a faster way to experiment? (Those using Fyno will be the happiest) These are the questions keeping many business owners up at night. But don't worry, you're not alone! DM me for a candid conversation about RCS and your business. Let's navigate this new messaging landscape together and figure out what it means for you. https://lnkd.in/gcrtdrGs #RCS #Messaging #BusinessCommunication #iOS18

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It’s THIS article (the second one in the post below): https://lnkd.in/dEdPxy62

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Next week is marking 📣 Trying to finish a few major code changes tomorrow. After the initial bump from Product Hunt and Hacker News traffic has subsided. I was able to keep users and customers -- but I will need to re-engage with new users and brainstorm on new acquisitions. Two main things: 1. Viral loop - the sharing loop is in there. I'd like to try to see if I can activate it. 2. Reddit launch - I'd like to launch to a few more subreddits to get new users and figure out additional places to launch.

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Thanks for the insightful pitch strategies. When can I get a slot to pitch to you?

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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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Sometimes I get so caught up opining on public software companies as a loosely (at best) qualified pseudo-analyst that I forget to talk about all the fantastically crazy stuff happening at Superfiliate.. Not today! It's safe to say we've had the most exciting months in our short history, and I want to shout out what was one of our best-received product releases thus far. Social Listening and UGC Collection Built on the back of a formal Meta / Instagram integration, our customers (at no cost) are now able to see all the content they're tagged in on IG and instantly download that content, request usage rights, add it to a Superfiliate landing page, and much more. The integration makes our users' lives MUCH easier as they're not switching platforms constantly. As importantly, merchants are able to identify creators/partners they aren't formally working with but are already tagging them on social. The best creators are the ones who love your product, and nothing says that like an organic post. More social platforms coming soon, but I'll let you guess who that might be 👀 It's truly a pleasure watching Anders Bill and the product, design, and engineering teams ship impactful, beautiful features at such an impressive clip. Investing in great people and processes compounds over time, and we're seeing that in a very real way right now, and it's only going to continue. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast As we say, rah rah!

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