Weekly 🔥 21: Lessons from Big Tech’s growth slump
Welcome to another edition of our newsletter! You’ll receive practical startup advice straight to your inbox every week.
In this week’s edition, we share:
- Three learnings for startups after big tech’s Q3 earnings beatdown
- Good news writers, decentralized newsletter platforms have arrived
Let’s do this.
What can startups learn from Big Tech’s earnings beatdown?
Venture capitalist James Langford, who has provided over $900M in capital to +80 companies, believes public market investors are punishing Big Tech for several strategic errors. He also believes this offers valuable lessons for startups to learn from:
- Forecast customer demand to help guide your capital allocation decisions — Hiring driven by the desire to grab talent before your competitor does rather than customer demand? Wrong move. Ideally, startups are hiring based on necessity, driven by customer demand.
- Create a detailed plan to achieve your revenue targets — When times get hard, a solid plan is more important than ever. Start forecasting top-line by understanding your market opportunity and all aspects of your funnel, then budget accordingly.
- Recurring revenue models are more valuable in downcycles — Tougher economic cycles are a reminder of why companies moved towards subscription-based revenue models. Those with sustainability in their cash flows are at an advantage.
👉 Read more: Three Learnings for Startups after Big Tech’s Q3 Earnings Beatdown
Decentralized newsletter platforms have arrived
We are moving from the content access economy to the content ownership economy. The latest tech to be revamped by Web3 is the newsletter, and Paragraph.xyz is the first decentralized newsletter platform. Tim Denning outlines the benefits:
- Full ownership of your content — Paragraph.xyz uses a permaweb, so your content will always be owned by you and can never be lost. You also own your social graph, a ledger of who you follow and who follows you.
- Faster loading times — The average newsletter or social media page takes about one second to load. Paragraph.xyz takes 200ms. This is a big deal for SEO too. The web version of your newsletter content is more likely to be found if it loads quickly.
- It’s forcing other platforms to shape up — Users are getting smarter and will soon demand to own their data. When that happens, it will become even easier for writers to make money online and build prosperous futures.
👉 Read more about the Web3 newsletter: The First Decentralized Newsletter Platform to Pay Writers Has Arrived
