Smart Hacks

Champions are the insiders who advocate internally for your product. Mark Treacy's framework covers four stages: define what a champion is for your deal, identify who fits, actively build them up with ammunition, and assess whether they can actually deliver internal influence.

FTG's key picks from Meredith Chandler's 16 SaaS sales leadership lessons: earn trust with the team before pushing playbooks; hire consciously, not fast; obsess over discovery to identify what is broken; buyers need ROI, not more product details; pricing confidence sets the tone.

Carilu Dietrich's hack, exemplified by the AntonGPT built around Lovable's founder: it solves the problem that the personal CEO brand drives growth but CEOs rarely have time to produce content.

VC partner Andreas Goeldi demonstrated the approach with ChatGPT-4 on a startup valuation; it is a low-cost way to sharpen thinking on funding trade-offs, not a replacement for judgment.

Distilled from landing a role over 1,400 people applied for.

From Joel Hellermark's crowdsourced list: pick an area you know well, take 5 minutes and teach me everything; what distinguishes someone good from someone exceptional in your role; tell me about unexpected initiative you took, then about another; what critical feedback was hard to hear; what is the most valuable lesson you learned from a colleague.

Steph Spyro's pragmatic hack: the news flood is only a trickle on those days, so a founder's pitch lands when journalists may be craving something to report.

Tolerating subpar performance too long does not just delay a decision, it sets a new, lower standard for the whole team.

Framework from a guest post on Lenny's Newsletter on leading teams with AI leverage.

Early hires can make or break a company; a list of eight questions compiled by a former Stripe COO helps extract the feedback you actually need to hear despite discomfort or legal caution.

Set up a shared workspace (like FigJam) with a card per team member; the result is a more connected team that knows their work and relationships matter.

The five questions: (1) Which current customers get the most out of your product? (2) What traits do your best customers share? (3) What recurring objections come from lost opportunities? (4) Which customers are easiest to upsell and why? (5) What do your closest competitors' customers have in common? Most companies think they know their ICP but have never run this exercise.

Advice aggregated from top European VCs speaking to Sifted; investors expect detailed command of growth and retention metrics.

AI search compresses hours of media-list research into minutes; the outputs still need a manual accuracy check.

From the Revolut Recruiting Playbook published by Nik Storonsky's VC Quantum Light: (1) prefer ambitious junior problem-solvers who thrive in dynamic environments over corporate profiles; (2) run three interviews beyond the skill assessment: problem-solving, a values-and-achievements bar raiser, and people management for leadership roles; (3) build a sales-like recruitment team with cash performance bonuses tied to quarterly hiring quotas.

Brutal honesty upfront filters out average candidates instead of attracting them; Bolt took a similar no-bs approach.

Meredith Chandler's advice against relying on personal relations and buyer emotions: ask quantifiable questions, do the cost math with the buyer, and make the business case undeniable.

Examples: 'Join 70,000+ creators' instead of 'Get started'; 'Try X in 5 mins' instead of 'Sign up'; 'Get first chapter free' instead of 'Buy it now'; 'Get a free 15 min consult' instead of 'Contact us'; 'Take a 2 min tour' instead of 'Explore'.

Do your homework so the VC matches your sector, stage, region and ticket size. Keep the subject under 60 characters with a key fact and a standout trait (e.g. serial entrepreneur). Write as if the investor knows nothing about your industry. Use email tracking to time follow-ups.

Bain & Company guidelines as LLM chatbots take over search and decision-making steps humans used to do by browsing; keyword stuffing and authority-farming pages lose.

Disabling Control Centre stops thieves from flipping on airplane mode and vanishing from your Find My map; implement now, not after the panic.

Daniel Dippold's five characteristics of updates that actually make an impact on the board; many founders question the value of updates because theirs meet none of these criteria.

Brett Jansen's point: most teams cannot answer either question, yet being crystal clear on why anyone should buy is the difference between a great product and hit sales targets.

The checklist: start 2+ weeks early with one handover doc, do a walkthrough, update accesses, notify clients, set crisp out-of-office replies, block the first day back meeting-free and say so in the OOO, and add what-if notes plus quick Looms for tricky tasks. A sloppy handover exposes every missing doc and hidden silo.

Skip-level meetings are a direct line into the organization for insights you otherwise never hear; the questions are what make them work.

Dave Bailey's playbook: 5-minute daily check-ins for the first 2-3 months; make the exec pull knowledge from you rather than waiting for pushes; align them to your vision early (you hold the vision, they cascade it); build plans together and default to founder context when visions clash; use async Loom updates over meetings; run a monthly alignment check assuming misalignment exists. Onboarding is how you build trust fast, not micromanagement.

Maximilian Fleitmann's weekly cadence keeps the reflection benefit of journaling at a sustainable cost, and doubles as a running record of your founder journey.

Over 80% of new products fail. 'It's much easier to open your mouth than your wallet': make sure you know which side your product feedback is on before going to market.

Josh Grant of Webflow also observes that AI-sourced traffic converts roughly 6x higher than traditional SEO traffic, making content refresh rate a growth lever.

Themed or ask-me-anything office hours bundle team interruptions; the goal is to not be so busy you forget how to be exceptional.

The principles from the VC arm of Revolut's CEO: (1) treat performance as a top CEO priority with a standardised way to identify high performers; (2) create a scientific, fair framework distinguishing great from poor performance; (3) turn reviews into a quick quarterly process that saves manager time; (4) give exponentially increasing performance-based equity bonuses on individual, team or company performance; (5) maintain salary benchmarks so above-average talent always gets above-average pay.

Observing and listening before making changes builds acceptance, and working the list eventually gets you to the really sticky issues.

Distilled from ChartMogul data on customer upgrade patterns; when and how many customers move from monthly to annual drives much of SaaS growth.

Meredith Chandler's playbook for sales reps stuck in pipeline reviews and CRM checks: focus 1:1s on points growing your skills, be specific in goals, self-assess recordings before reviewing them live with your manager, and ask directly: what is the biggest gap in my skill set right now?

Pro tip: ask early whether wrapping up before the holidays is feasible; if the answer is no, move your energy to deals more likely to close.

Most companies mistake a goal or a to-do list for strategy. 'If your strategy could be copied, it's not a strategy, it's a wish list.' The Product Strategy Canvas walks through the seven choices.

From Sifted's guide against the always-on Slack bombardment: set clear goals and intentions so urgent requests do not override your blockers; create the right environment (a strategy memo cannot be written with 30 tabs open); plan your week consciously since time blockers are scheduled ahead, not improvised.

Steven Bartlett's toolkit, shared alongside his ADHD diagnosis and the hyperfocus that once made him propose to his fiancee and then disappear onto planes for a month.

Meg Gowell of Typeform collected 24 customer stories in one run: ask customers to share a win they had with your tool and offer to feature that win on one of your platforms, like your newsletter. The key is framing it as celebrating their achievement rather than requesting a case study.

David Booth's format: four bullets, no more, no less; each bullet one sentence, maybe two, never a paragraph.

Banks will not back early-stage FOAK, so debt comes from venture debt providers. Aim for de-risking, not revenue maximization; once proven, project finance unlocks institutional capital. From Sifted's FOAK playbook.

Al Chen of Galileo gave Claude Code access to all 15 repos; support teams stopped waiting on engineering and customers noticed.

Adam Robinson's lessons from reaching 150,000 followers over 36 months and 700+ posts, including a stunt of running his business on AI for a week during peak AI attention.

Larissa Holzki argues journalist resources have become scarcer while founder expectations grew more extreme; founders do not need a PR agency, and reaching out yourself teaches you why your story did or did not land.

Reviews are supposed to be objective yet carry emotional burden for both sides; a published scorecard from a proven high-performance organization is a concrete starting point even if you do not adopt its culture wholesale.

Ashley Mann's steps: identify those 5-10 publications, follow their editorial calendars and pitch relevant expertise, share genuine insights instead of marketing language, build editor relationships over months not weeks, and become the expert they call for industry commentary.

The a16z overview ranks the most used tools per category, giving teams a reference for which category of AI tool to adopt for which part of daily work.

From Beehiiv's State of Newsletters 2026 report based on 28bn emails.

FTG's 90-day checkpoint framework, built from over 60 podcast conversations with founders, operators and investors; a steep learning curve with genuine willingness to push through hard moments beats a polished start that plateaus.

Grace Andrews' case: your brand account tells the story, your people make it believable. Concretely: create a brief defining message and guardrails, provide tone guidelines with dos and don'ts, and share a strategy for how personal content amplifies brand content.

YC's playbook on what changes when AI is the operating system a company runs on rather than a bolted-on feature; one person with AI tools now ships features that used to need a team.

Boris Cherny's productivity practices for his own team; the prompt-review trick works across LLMs.

a16z's new rules of work; the closing warning is: don't be fungible.

Jeroen Van Hautte's company picked eight people from HR, marketing, product, finance and customer success; two focused days beat ten generic prompt-engineering workshops, and outputs included a document reviewer, a customer signal aggregator, and a content research pipeline.

Marc Snuikas' template for a Q4 review, built for startups that feel they are building the plane mid-air but still need to check they are not running fast in the wrong direction.

Guillaume Moubeche's list of the mindset and attitude behaviors that make operators stand out at a startup.

Lessons from ElevenLabs on token-based AI adoption measurement, which Meta, OpenAI, and Shopify already run with internal leaderboards.

Lenny Rachitsky's framework for operators deciding where to begin with agent work.

The tests FTG highlighted: (1) Who would you call from a 3rd world prison cell? That person is the highest-agency person you know. (2) Weird teenage hobbies signal ability to defy social pressure at the hardest age to do so. (3) High-agency people judge content on quality, not existing engagement, so they spot trends early and send you niche content.

From Lenny Rachitsky's compilation of 25 tactics from companies that cracked AI adoption; the biggest barrier is organizational change, not technology.

Garry Tan's rule for timing hires: slightly too late beats too early, because pain is the strongest signal a role is real.

Grant Lee's rundown of his most important growth learnings from scaling Gamma.

Geoff Charles' playbook decouples experimentation speed from release quality by moving the quality gate to general availability.

The phases for AI-native startups: Phase 0 Problem: understand the pain deeply before building anything. Phase 1 Launch: incorporate, bank, and ship your MVP in one weekend. Phase 2 Believers: create content, build funnels, talk to every user. Phase 3 Product-Market Fit: iterate fast, measure retention, default to profit. Phase 4 Scale: pour fuel on the fire with diversified growth.

Steve Schlafman's five-step framework for end-of-year reflection; Melanie Gabriel applies it every year and walked through it on the podcast.

Paddy Lambros' two-step playbook: (1) get smart without doing the job by booking 10-15 excellent practitioners back-to-back over 2-3 days and asking them everything; (2) reach out to executives you have zero chance of hiring, like the VP Marketing at Stripe or the CFO at Notion, because they will be brutally honest with you.

Harry Stebbings' five tips for founders and operators, who increasingly need interview skills in the era of podcasts and short-form video.

Grace Andrews' reframe: stop asking what should I post and start asking what should people believe about me. If results lag, adjust the belief statement, not the posting frequency.

Alex Berman cloned lead enrichment tool Clay with self-built AI agents; none of these builds are perfect or easy, but they show where self-built software is heading.