Bryan Hunsinger

7 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HARDWARE STARTUPS It’s hard to understate the difficulty of the v1 launch of a consumer hardware company. I see a ton of new HW startups coming out. Here are some counterintuitive recommendations… 1) Target a small market for v1, not a large market. You need a small number of people to love your product and this will earn you the right to build a v2. You have to understand your v1 will not make you a successful company. Your v1 needs to prove that you deserve to exist in the first place. In the case of WHOOP, we started with pro athletes who were willing to put up with our v1’s short battery life and flaky Bluetooth connections because they so desperately needed Sleep and Recovery data. A broad consumer base would have rejected it. 2) Be great at no more than 1-3 things. If you try to be great at more than that, you will build a hardware that is mediocre at a wide range of things. You won’t think it’s going to be mediocre, but it will be. 3) You want a small launch. Not because you want small sales but because you want to have a steady ramp. It’s much better to do 100k of sales steadily over 12 months than in 2 months with a huge drop off. Keep in mind you need to manage your manufacturing partner and that there’s nothing better or more efficient than steady and predictable. 4) CAC is your enemy. Referrals are gold. The magic of referrals is that they signal high NPS and they help you grow steadily. Again everything that helps you have a steady HW manufacturing plan is good. Building a referral program for v1 launch is a good use of your time. 5) Be excellent at Software. Turns out being good at both Hardware and Software is a hard thing and something that your BIG COMPANY competitor is actually not great at (excluding Apple here). For some reason, there’s such a magnifying glass on the Hardware development, that Software is then overlooked by consumer startups. Don’t make that mistake. You can be great at both. 6) You should spend an unreasonable amount of time and money on ONE aspect of your Hardware. Could be the design or a technical breakthrough. But something needs to be SPECIAL. In our case, we designed a modular battery pack that allowed Whoop to be charged without taking it off your body. This made our development timeline much longer, but it allowed us to achieve something that no other wearable has achieved since: 24/7 health data. 7) Finally, have an unrealistic belief in yourself and your team. You are not supposed to succeed and the odds are stacked against you. Building hardware takes confidence and you’re up against big players who will rip you off. We went so far as to leave a message for our competitors on our circuit board (pictured below). In the case of Amazon and others, the prophecy came true. If you’re building consumer hardware, I wish you nothing but success. It will be super hard, but super rewarding. Good luck 👊🏼 #consumer #hardware #wearable #startup #whoop

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*Shopify BEATS on Q1 earnings* - I listened to Harley Finkelstein at 2x speed so you don't have to.. Highlights below 👇 In Q1, Shopify beat on both revenue and earnings with increased payment adoption and rapid growth as well as continued wins in the enterprise segment. Notable wins included BARKBOX, INC. PrettyLitter, Overstock, WYN BEAUTY by Serena Williams. A quick rundown of the #'s Gross Merchandise Value: $60.9B ( ⬆ 23%) - same growth rate as Q4. impressive to see that growth rate sustained at increasing scale. Revenue: $1.9B (⬆ 23%) - up 29% when adjusting for the sale of Shopify Fulfillment Network to Flexport. Gross Payments Volume: $36.2B (⬆ 32%) - most importantly GPV grew to 60% of GMV up from 56% in 2023 which means they're capturing more share of payments via Shopify Payments which means more revenue. Looking closely, their take rate also is increasing as Shop Pay increases penetration Subscription Solutions Revenue: $511M (⬆ 34%) - mainly driven by price increases and increased merchant adoption. MRR: $151M (⬆ 32%) - interesting 🚩 this is only up $2M from Q4 2023, so QoQ MRR growth is actually a tepid < 2% Shopify Plus accounts for 32% of MRR, a decline in share from Q3 last year. This is one of those hard-to-reconcile counter-narratives to everything the team says on these earnings calls about enterprise and moving up market. Gross Profit: $957M with GM at 51.4%. It's interesting to watch this GM oscillate on revenue mix for the quarter. Q4 is payments heavy which is traditionally lower margin whereas more of the revenue in Q1 comes from SaaS and subscriptions and pushes margin up. GP is what pays the bills so great to see it growing so quickly Free Cashflow: $232M (12% FCF margin and doubling YoY) - Shopify continues to become a cash-generating machine that will allow it to reinvest in its platform and growth to up the pressure on incumbents like Salesforce and Adobe. THE MAGIC METRIC - Shopify talks about increasing the Attach Rate, but I don't think they spend enough time on it. Ultimately, it's the number that drives this business and the long-term shareholder value of the company. Attach rate is defined as (merchant revenue/merchant GMV). Effectively, it's how much of their customers' revenue they capture as revenue to the platform. However, it's the ultimate balancing act - if too high competitors can steal share, too low, the business doesn't grow. The way to continue to justify increasing this take rate is to build valuable net new features where merchants have no problem paying incremental dollars to Shopify because they're either adding more value to the business or replacing other costs in the PnL. This is why Shopify Editions is such a big thing! Currently, Attach Rate is at 2.99% and growing QoQ The Look Ahead to Q1 2024 Looking forward, Q2 is forecasted to be in line with expectations set at the end of last year, so no surprises there. Good quarter Shopify!! #shopify

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Bold prediction for 2025: Investors will pay founders to access their venture data. Founders own their data and grant access to investors for a fee. This shift promotes transparency, trust, and efficiency in fundraising, while giving startups a new revenue stream.

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Hello #franchise brand leaders...sharing for visibility...in case you have not seen this RE: Wordpress v. WP Engine here is what you need to know in summary --> At the core, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg has publicly accused WP Engine of profiting from WordPress resources without giving back to the community, leading to a block that cut off WP Engine’s access to critical WordPress.org services like plugin and theme updates. Though a temporary reprieve was granted, the future remains uncertain. 💻 What does this mean if your website is hosted on WP Engine? Access Disruptions: You may face issues with automated updates for plugins and themes, which could leave your site exposed to vulnerabilities. Service Interruptions: If WP Engine doesn't resolve the dispute, future service disruptions could worsen, forcing manual updates or even a switch in hosting providers. Long-Term Uncertainty: The conflict may create instability in WP Engine's ability to operate within the WordPress ecosystem, so it’s worth keeping an eye on developments and preparing alternative plans. If you rely on WP Engine for hosting, make sure you back up your site and monitor the situation closely. 🛠️ https://lnkd.in/gfPkPrrh

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How to pitch: The company has zero traction —> “We’re early” You only have 2 customers —> “We’re working with design partners” You currently have no revenue but hoping some pipeline finally closes —> “we’re on track to exit this year at $3M ARR” You’re in the natural kill zone of a FAANG —> “We view them as partners rather than competitors” There’s no way the tech can actually work —>“We’re manifesting the future” And of course: One of your developers uses Co-Pilot to write some front end code —> “We’re an AI company”

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Most self hosted CMS’s are installed on a VPS or Virtual Private Server. Simple and reliable. Think open source software like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla. At SetSeed we use them too. In fact, we’re about to roll out a fully automated system that spins up a VPS for you on demand. You can manage or we can manage for you. We’re also rolling out VM’s or Virtual Machines for high availability and extra redundancy. P.s. A virtual shot of me, in the machine, for fun. #happydays eh David Altena 😉 #vps #vm #cms #selfhost or #hosted

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Last quarter Dave Gerhardt told me to let Eli Rubel re-do our RB2B website and branding. The current version is a $79 webflow template called “SaaS”. When I spoke to Eli, I told him I only care about one thing: Give me ugly, shocking branding that at least 80% of people in SaaS will hate. Why? Here are the 5 reasons I want RB2B to have hideous branding that makes peoples’ skin crawl: 1. I hate the sterile, inauthentic typical Silicon Valley SaaS branding. Take a look at 6Sense’s website and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The soft color palette, the politically correct stock photos, the stupid robot, the endless buzzwords … It all makes me want to vomit. 2. I believe that pattern interrupt is the best marketing strategy. Nails on a chalkboard will make people stop and pay attention. And we are in an attention war, full stop. 3. Two years later, people start copying you. We rebranded Retention.com in late 2022. I loved it. It was weird, aggressive, strange colors, it didn’t look like any SaaS site I had ever seen. We did a poll when we were picking brands and it was dead last of the four options. That was a signal. I was not surprised to see that a wannabe competitor OpenSend copied us nearly identically 18mo later (seriously, go look at it). 4. I remember how weird Mailchimp’s 2018 rebrand was, and how it made me feel. Does anyone else remember looking at that yellow website and just thinking “what am I looking at?” This was after everyone and their mother in SaaS copied their prior branding. They are legends. Then Intuit bought them, and made them look like 6Sense :/ 5. Russell Brunson is my hero. I first saw the Clickfunnels site in 2017 and had no idea what I was looking at. It seemed like a kindergartner got ahold of a website builder and slapped something together in 1 hour I couldn’t figure out how he found people that looked like the actors in the explainer video. They looked so unapologetically “normal” … I had never seen anything like it. But they were actors (I think). I dismissed it as garbage, just like everybody else in B2B. But as I dug deeper, I realized that he was in the process of growing the fastest growing bootstrapped SaaS ever. Still, everyone wrote them off, nobody has tried to do what he has done since… Mostly because of who he is and who he was selling to. ____ TAKEAWAY Eli loves the fact that I want branding that is different from anything that has ever existed. Something that will make people FEEL something… Instead of this drab, bland, sterile, inauthentic crap that everyone else makes. Designers LOVE working on projects like that. He was like... “We could do the standard agency onboarding… or you could let us wing it”. I chose the latter. Last week we had our first call where he revealed the branding... I absolutely LOVED it. Below is my reaction as we went through what they put together. 👇 Want to see what’s behind the curtain??? Stay tuned…

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🚀 From a $10k MVP to 10,000+ Businesses Worldwide! 🚀 This is how Chris Ronzio, Founder of Trainual turned a consulting side-project into a global SaaS company. Chris shares his journey, from building the MVP with just $10,000 to scaling with smart Facebook ads and affiliate partnerships. Learn how he grew Trainual to over 10,000 businesses in 170+ countries—and raised $33.7M! If you want to scale your business or refine your processes, this episode is a must-listen! 🎧 https://lnkd.in/dwEuFbVv In this episode, we talk to Chris about: 1) Entrepreneurial Beginnings 2) How he founded Trainua 3) How to find your Product-Market Fit 4) Scaling Strategy with a small budget 5) The power of affiliate partnerships #Entrepreneurship #Scaling #SaaS #BusinessGrowth #Trainual

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