Another Excuse Newsletter

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter. It isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

Today, we’re going to try something different and make the segments a little shorter. Let me know if you prefer it.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective - How we spend our days
🔨 Tool - Persado
🍿Consume - Raising Money
📖Concept - Hofstadter's Law

Latest Podcast Episode

In today’s episode, I chat with Liam McCreedy, the Co-Founder of an app called Quench. A delivery app that started delivering alcohol at university and scaled to groceries and pharmaceuticals. He recently exited the business and we discuss the whole process from start to finish.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Quench started
• Bootstrapping tactics at the beginning of the business
• How they acquire funding
• Scaling
• Lessons learnt throughout
• Post-exit life

You can check out the episode here.

Perspective

How we spend our days

The picture above can be interpreted in many ways, depending on what stage of your life you’re in.

I find retirement interesting because our life expectancy has increased over the years, but the retirement age has hovered around 65.

Which means we’re retired for longer than we used to be.

Many think not having a drive or purpose can affect your wellbeing and when I look at this image, all I think about is making sure I’m able to keep busy and active for as long as possible.

I know it may be easier said than done once you reach that age, but if I have it in mind now, I believe I can by then.

How does this image affect your perspective?

Tool

Persado

Persado is a generative AI platform that gets people to act.

Basically, it’s a b2b marketing platform that takes a look at all your copy and sales funnels and makes them better.

The goal is to convert more leads into paying customers and I think we all could learn a lot from a tool like this.

It’s a pretty versatile tool applicable to any industry. A few examples of the use cases it solves are cart abandonment, acquisition, onboarding, retention, pre-collections, and customer service.

There’s always something to tweak or A/B test. You can check out the tool here.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

Raising Money

This is a great Tweet thread by Brett Adcock.

If you’re looking to raise money for a new business, there’s no one better to learn from than Brett.

A few highlights:

→ Investors are max momentum investors. Consider them a “No” unless you are seeing constant forward motion

→ The capital raising lessons in Ben Horowitz’s book are great, the hard thing about hard things. Worth a read.

→ Doing the upfront work of mapping out every “qualified investor” is the most important step of every fundraise I do.

→ Meetings from cold emails needs to be 80% of your pitches. If <80% you’re under optimized.

→ Be prepared to chew glass and stare into the abyss

→ If earlier stage, never hire a banker, you need to learn how to do this yourself.

→ Be determined and persistent. You are knocking down doors.

I recommend reading the whole thing and taking notes.

Concept

Hofstadter's Law

Hofstadter's Law is about everything, usually taking longer than you think, even after taking Hofstadter's Law into account.

It highlights the problem that we tend to be overly optimistic about our estimates.

It’s a great reminder to be cautious when setting deadlines and to allow for additional time for unexpected delays or complications.

We never do this and we struggle to meet expectations because of it.

Simply by me pointing this out and you taking it on board, in theory you should better manage expectations and possibly even allocate resources better to minimize frustration and actually complete projects on time.

That’s my theory, but I’m not sure if you will take it on board.

If you do, let me know. And let me know if it helps at all.

Thanks for Reading

Now start something!

P.S. Feedback is welcome and needed! If you’d prefer to send me an email and not respond, you can do so here: [email protected]

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