How to Build a Sticky Product, Raising a Venture Fund, and Understanding Sacrifice

A newsletter for founders & friends (33rd edition)

Hey 👋

Welcome to the 33rd edition of Re:VITALIZE, a newsletter with tactics, strategies, and stories on building companies plus cool things we’re seeing in the future of work.

Did you miss last week’s newsletter about getting your first 1,000 customers, recruiting women to join your company, and subreddits for million-dollar business ideas? Subscribe below so you never miss another👇

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Top 3 Tweets

🥇 Raising a $5M Venture Fund

paige finn doherty 🚢 @paigefinnn

last year at behind genius ventures, we raised our first $5m venture fund from 120+ world-leading tech investors. i was 22. here's what i would have told myself a year ago about fundraising for the first time...[a thread]

🥈 How to Build a Sticky Product

GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg

How to build a sticky product: Make your product feel more like Nintendo's Super Mario video game Goal: make me want to play it and reach Bowser to save Princess Peach I use the "Octalysis framework" everyday to make products feel like more a fun game than a boring chore:

🥉 Understanding Sacrifice

👨🏻‍💻☕️ @hunterwalk

anyone who says you have to sacrifice *everything* for your startup to succeed is dangerous anyone who says you don't have to sacrifice *anything* for your startup to succeed is naive

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Resources

• How to avoid one source of fatigue

• How to get a response to your cold DM or email

• 3 things to look for when hiring a PR agency

• Lessons from 80+ angel investments

• 15 Paul Graham essays to help you build a unicorn

• When to hire an executive assistant

• Insights on creating a financial model for your startup

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Future of Work Reads

• Why Virtual Offices Are the Future of Remote Work (Nasdaq)

• Will Robots Take Your Job? How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Future of Work (Reader’s Digest)

• Creative skills will be crucial to the future of work. They should take centre stage at the jobs summit (The Conversation)

• Cutting Parental Leave Is Bad Business (MIT Sloan Management Review)

• Nervous about recession layoffs, employees are toning down remote work and higher pay demands (Fortune)

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The World of VITALIZE

• This week on The VITALIZE Podcast we had Marlon Nichols, the founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in visionary founders building the future that the world wants to see, and helping entrepreneurs bring the future into focus to find their breakthrough moment. They recently announced their $203M Fund II!

  • Watch on YouTube

  • Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

• It was Caroline’s birthday this week!

• Open jobs at Vitalize portfolio companies

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Written by Justin Gordon, Director of Marketing at VITALIZE, a venture capital firm and nearly 400-member angel investing community for everyone investing in U.S.-based B2B software founders in the work revolution. Find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

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