Frameworks

Moat-First Acquisition Screen

Buy hard-to-break businesses with durable customer pull, then resist unnecessary change.

Angel Deal-Flow Differentiation Flywheel

Earn access to strong founders by publishing expertise and proving useful value

Bottom-Up Funnel Forecasting

Build revenue from observed funnel behavior, then confront the gap

Decide-Today Runway Math

Cost cuts only buy runway if you make them now; every month you wait permanently destroys optionality

The Attribution-Autonomy Pricing Matrix

Pick your AI pricing model by plotting value attribution against product autonomy, then climb toward outcome-based.

The Cancellation Ceiling (Maximum Customer Cap)

New customers divided by cancellation rate is the hard ceiling on how big you can ever get.

Finance6 steps

Willingness-to-Pay Before You Build

You don't choose whether to have the pricing conversation — only when. Have it before you ship.

The Front-Loaded Advisor Equity Structure

Equity only, a three-month cliff, vesting front-loaded to the value, and an exit built in

Enterprise Land Price Floor (Defendable ACV)

Land enterprise deals at 75K-150K — a cheap land price poisons your expand.

LTV Expansion Over Top-of-Funnel Expansion

When capital is cheap and rivals buy growth, grow the value of organic traffic instead.

Price Your Product Like Your Roadmap

Treat pricing as a living system revisited every 6-12 months, not a set-and-forget decision.

The Downturn Pricing Playbook (Never Drop the Price)

Three moves that protect price integrity in a recession: de-feature, non-pricing actions, change the model.

The Early-Stage Sales Comp Ramp

Pay 50/50, give away 100% of quarter-one bookings, then hold reps to closing 3-5x their take-home.

Beat-Your-Plan Fundraising: Trade Dilution for Trust

Pitch numbers you'll hit, eat the lower valuation, and turn every passer into a future lead.

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Contribution-Margin Payback Period over CAC

Judge acquisition ROI by how many months of contribution-margin profit it takes to repay CAC, not by CAC or LTV:CAC.

Day One vs Day 100 Feature Packaging

Free the features that create the aha moment; monetize the features whose value only emerges at scale.

Dual-Sided ROI Equation

Price each acquisition to include the cost of acquiring the other side it needs, then push to your payback threshold

Expand the Pie with Performance Triggers

Break the salary band by making it 'we' and tying pay to outcomes

Match Price to Value with a Value Metric

Pick the unit of value your customer gets, then charge against it so revenue scales as usage grows.

Net Revenue Retention Above 100% (and Why NRR Lies)

Expansion revenue must beat churn, but NRR flatters you — watch logo churn too.

Subscription Funnel Benchmarks

Category-dependent conversion thresholds for judging whether a subscription funnel is healthy

The Cross-Functional Pricing Process

Stand up a pricing committee, mine demand and willingness-to-pay with structured surveys, then set price.

The Five Doors Into Investing

Angel, scout, SPV, fund, or fantasy portfolio — pick your entry into investing by autonomy vs. effort tradeoff

The Gross-Margin Short-Circuit

Use high gross margin + healthy churn as a fast litmus test for whether a business is truly differentiated

The Life MBA Reframe

Set a runway budget, name it an investment in yourself, and give people a socially legible story for it.

The Value-State Test for Crossing the Chasm

VC money buys a change in your company's value state — you have crossed when you no longer need the next round.

Value-Anchored Outcome Pricing

Price the outcome, not the seat; set the number from customer value and let cost be your problem.

Reactive Pricing After Demand Signal

Let users pull pricing out of you, then validate willingness-to-pay and margins

The Quarterly Pricing Cadence

Stand up a pricing committee and do one small monetization thing every quarter, forever

Cost-Allocation Pricing to Fuel Word-of-Mouth

Allocate every real cost to the customer who caused it, raise heavy users, cut everyone else's price

The Value Metric Pricing Model

Charge on a metric that scales with value so acquisition, retention, and expansion self-correct

Price Like a Product (and Unbundle Deliberately)

Align price to where value and cost actually accrue, and kill defaulted freemium and mis-packed SKUs

The Sip Seed Round

Get capital committed but pull it down only when needed, so you keep optionality and psychological freedom

The Unit-Economics Bubble Test

A real bubble is when the businesses don't work, not when prices are high; and if everyone calls it a bubble, it isn't one

Token Budgets as a Trust-Proportional Resource

Kill the token-spend leaderboard; cap AI spend like any resource, sized to trust in someone's ROI judgment

Deferred-Buyout Creative Pricing

Keep the exploration phase cheap by billing rights separately, so a late pivot doesn't mean you already paid to own dead work.