Building got easy, so easy that everyone built a tool and made marketing brutal.

You probably have that idea for a product you want to build, maybe you've already built it -- but you know that marketing is expensive. And prices are only going up as the markets are being flooded.

You try to do social media organically, but the shit just doesn't take off.

If you had money, no problem -- the problem is, you don't.

I recently came across a new strategy, which is cross-integrations.

I put a widget from my platform on another, and let their users use it and get value from it.

It took 24h to set everything up, cost nothing upfront, and then it generated a 32% CVR. All paid with through rev-share

And because it's so easy to set up, if the collaboration doesn't generate anything, no one loses.

Lmk if you guys have any questions, happy to answer!

New to streaming, started maybe 2 months ago.

Just like podcasters go on podcasts to share and grow audiences, does it work the same way with streaming?

Anyone interested in trying to do a dual stream just to see what happens??

I'm helping an AI company which is "the founder operating system that keeps every dollar - raised, generated, managed, deployed - visible in one command center" to find integration opportunities with other SaaS startups.

If you have a SaaS that sells to bootstrapped, pre-seed to Series A founders. Just about to raise or have just raised.

Or, if you're selling to early stage VC funds, accelerators, incubators, venture studios, startup communities or any organization has a co-hort of startups.

And you solve a problem related to "the dollar journey". (RevOps, fundraising and investor relations, workflow automation, agents etc.)

We want to integrate your SaaS into this tool for added exposure and as a distribution channel for you.

A similar integration I've done got 32% conversion rates. We have all the infrastructure to get set up quickly.

Feel free to send me a DM if you're interested.

Some of the coolest success stories I've heard in startups' journeys are usually the ones where they just randomly go to an event or randomly find the perfect partner to collaborate with on X.

It feels like everyone I talk to has a relatable story where they met someone, they had an idea to work together, they both got really excited, but then it all fizzled out in the details.

When it comes to the contract, when it comes to the payouts, when it comes to the compensation, when it comes to the IP, when it comes to all that tricky stuff that has to do with a collaboration (where it's not just one person delivering something to the other person that then pays them in exchange for doing so).

I want to see how many of the people reading this post have experienced the same problem of a really cool collaboration opportunity that fizzled out.

I'm also open to brainstorming what we could do to perhaps fix this because I really do believe that the right collaboration can create a quantum leap in a startup's journey, especially early on

So I basically facilitate startup collaborations for a living. I've done 19 so far. I'm helping almost 200 startups and here are some takeaways that I've learned:

After I set up a collaboration for a startup, they always ask, "Why would I want another one?"

My answer is quite simple because there are different use cases based on where you're at in the journey.

Validation stage

If I'm talking to a startup that is at the validation stage, I know how to use rev share collaborations for validation.

Instead of doing pre-purchases, getting forms, and doing market research, which usually aren't that good an indication of what you want, what you want is skin in the game.

Ideally pre-purchases but that's really hard.

The second-best option I found is convincing people who know the industry you're trying to break into to help you bring your business to market through rev share collaborations.

What that does is it kills two birds with one stone.

You have knowledgeable people in this space, that are putting skin in the game through upfront work without any certain compensation.

If you can do that with two, three, or four people, even one is a sign of validation.

Additionally, they now bring the resources, expertise, network, and access you need to actually get your startup to market.

Scaling stage

The second step in the journey is when you're at the scaling phase, when you already have something that's working and you just need to scale.

If you can figure out a way to do that systematically with multiple collaborations, it basically gives off the same illusion as having unlimited money because you have theoretically unlimited access to resources.

If you can figure out how to do that through rev share collaborations, this I like to call resource financing. I find it quite fun.

Enterprise stage

The last step is when you're an enterprise, you're up and running, and you have scaled your business.

You have your corner of the market.

The next step here is to evolve, to not get stationary, to not get eaten by competition.

The way you do that is through innovation.

To innovate once again you need skills, resources, and access, which you now have internally.

You use collaborations to mix the internal with the external.

You use collaborations to allow employees in your organization to come up with their own ideas and collaborate freely internally and externally, most likely through rev share or profit share collaborations, to then get the validation and then scale it.

It's the same playbook on repeat but now you have systems for it internally.

I've spent the last four to five years studying collaborations and how it's applicable in different steps of your journey. I just wanted to share this with you guys hoping it was valuable.

Will you be able to get more done working alone? Yes absolutely but it still comes with some massive limitations.

The other thing to keep in mind is that this drive that AI lets you work alone will lead to a more decentralized economy.

We will see a massive influx in new small highly specialized SaaS businesses, freelancers, and agencies operating as one-man companies, meaning they will have a very small share of the market.

They will be highly specialized and highly efficient due to AI yet resource poor in the sense that they're only a one-man show.

If they only sit on one niche they will struggle to expand beyond that because it requires capital, network effects, and access to new different markets.

The beauty of that is that the ones that sit on those accesses to new markets are simply other startups, other one-man show startups.

This new influx of SaaS startups, freelancers, and everyone and their grandmother building out a new AI tool using lovable, whatever, we can actually use that to our advantage.

Now we can actually use that to aggregate all of them. Imagine thousands of startups being one-man shows, all having their little tiny corner of a market, yet they could aggregate each other.

They can collaborate, they can work together, and that way as a network they can compete with the large conglomerates.

That's the only thing that allows that to happen because AIs can't take risk, AI can't be owners, and AI can't be legally liable for actions.

My prediction is that the new market will be significantly more decentralized, significantly more of a gig economy.

Yet that will form a network where every new freelancer and every new one-person startup will aggregate the rest of the network to leverage each other's resources and actually be able to sustain themselves, scale, and compete with a larger conglomerate. That right now seems to simply grow bigger and bigger and bigger simply due to their resources.

The AI consultants don't know the best way to implement AI.

The CEOs and executives rarely knows either!

Sure, everyone can come up with the genius idea of "automating processes".

And that's not a bad use of AI, but that's what everyone else will do as well.

But the real value unlock is in using AI for things that WASNT POSSIBLE before.

This is innovation, these are new things that has to be built.

So what is it? What should we build?

I dont know! Consultants dont know! The CEOs dont know.

But the employees DO!

The employees carrying out the work, are experts enough in their field to know what this looks like.

The ones on the front line, constantly talking to customers. They know.

And now with the same AI tools, they actually have the ability to build it out!

The best way to implement AI has nothing to do with AI, it's about getting an infrastructure where employees have the ability to build it out themselves and profit from it.

With complete freedom, but with access to the companies resources, and with full autonomy, and with AI to orchestrate the people together.

This is my experience from doing this kind of work, figured I could share for anyone that would be interested.

I had a meeting w my advisor holding a workshop with HR ODs PhDs (lemme translate: people researching how organizations are structured and how they operate. I think...)

The biggest revelation from that workshop is that project managers aren't needed anymore, because AI is better at orchestrating resources.

is this true?

What does this mean? What opportunities can we unlock by having AI as one master resource orchestrator, not being limited by the human brain's capacity?

Story time:

So we had a feature we wanted to add to my platform.

But it would be quite a significant feature to build out, and we don't even know if users would like it or not.

As I set up the to-do list and goals for my normal market research sprint, funnily enough an AI I built for myself to find collaborations came back with a suggestion. (I uploaded my linkedin network to it and connected it to my PM tool)

This was someone I KNEW PERSONALLY, completely forgot they existed.

And what was their technology? Something very similar to the feature I wanted to build out.

Instead of doing market research (I would probably go against anyways tbh), I reached out to my connection and suggested a rev-share collaboration.

We borrow their technology to implement on our platform as a feature, and if it makes us money, they got a chunk of it.

They where happy, to unlock more value from their tech. We where happy because we could quickly test with no downside.

The message with this post is that we have stronger networks than we believe. There's so much in our networks that could help us today, that we simply don't even think of, because it's too much data for our brain to comprehend.

But my AI managed to catch it, and thank god for that

All this to say, if you've at a roadblock right now with your business, try doing the same and see if it can help you.

You can download your linkedin connections manually, send it to an AI, and just see if any opportunity shows up. Because then you can reach out to someone you already know or is connected to.

Hope this little trick helps anyone!

My advisor is "old school", he's a project management expert being a program director at stanford.

What's his go-to project management tool? Basecamp.

I've never even heard of it.

Apparently it's what amazon used 20 years ago!

That's why he started using it, it had all the features he needed, and 20 years ago it was "hip"

I created an account just to use it with him, and you know what, it's exactly the same as all the newer alternatives (almost).

Just a bit more basic, less user friendly, and somehow even worse.

Why hasn't anyone come up with a new project management tool?

Like, properly new, not variations of the same.

I guess you could say that "what else is there to do?", but I don't know anyone who likes their PM tool, so clearly there are still problems waiting to be adressed.

Or have I missed something?

It's one of the biggest problems founders are trying to address.

People are building AI tools to validate ideas, tools to automate market research and all kinds of crap.

But here's the problem, data from the past has no significance whatsoever when it comes to predictions.

Just because you put it into a nice graph doesn't mean you can predict the future.

So here are my 3 favorite ways to actually validate ideas before writing a line of code. (it does not include any useless waiting lists)

Pre-purchases

You're building the product with the goal of getting people to pay for it. So if you can convince people to pay for your product upfront, that's pretty much the strongest indication. Why? It's a lot of skin in the game for the buyers.

This is actually a thing, it's how Elon Musk got started with Tesla.

But unsurprisingly, it's really really hard to do. Most ppl can't even convince people to pay when they have a finished product.

Crowdfunding

This is another version of pre-purchases. It's having a lot of people invest a small amount into your business so you can build the first version.

Again, notoriously hard.

Rev-share collaborations

This is the most underrated one, and best "bang for effort". (my personal opinion)

To get validation you want random people to put skin in the game, it can either be buyers, investors, but another actor is team members and collaborators.

It's a hard promise to give early investors and customers, because the product will probably change a lot, with a few pivots. And the risk of them not liking it when it's launched is quite high.

However, if you can convince a startup or another person to help you build it. Contribute with their resources (other than money) to realize your idea, that's a very strong indication.

They agree that the problem is big, opportunity is big, and solution is good.

If you could have 10 collaborators (like I do) working 100% on rev-share when you're pre-revenue, that's a very strong sign of validation.

Not only is it validation, if you do it right, those are the people that will help you bring this to market faster.

2 birds. 1 Stone.

And also, if you can't convince people to collaborate with you on rev-share. You either have to improve your sales skills (because you're selling the same vision) or it's a sign to move on from the idea.

You can test this more quickly, with less risk, and immediate benefits.

It took me a long time to figure out what to look for, how to plan it, how to do the contract, negotiate the rev-share etc. etc.

Have like 30 failed attempts before I got my most recent 10 successful ones.

If you're curious in exploring this, I would love to help out so you don't fall into the same traps as I did.

You're fundraising cuz u need resources to either launch or scale your startup.

But those same resources you're bending over backwards for, are actually all around you already (for the most part)

You just have to ask yourself, "do u have to own the resource, or do u just need access to it?"

Many many startups have fundraised to acquire the resources you need.

What if u could just access those instead?

Through collaborations.

And it gets better.

Rev-share collaborations.

Access them, and pay only with the revenue they help you generate.

Shall we call it "resource financing"?

I wanted to share this because I have 10 of these myself.

I have a platform, I own 100% equity, paying $0 upfront, and we're growing 67% per month thanks to these collaborations.

I have help with development, I have help with operations, and a lot of help in distribution.

It's really hard to set up, so I'll be happy to help anyone interested in exploring this strategy.

It is heavily network effect driven and not very niche either.

But probably the network effect part that is why I don't have any paying users.

Anyone else been in this situation?

Now that everyone CAN build a software application, many people are doing it.

People from all corners of the world are building, bringing in a massive influx of new entrepreneurs.

New skillsets, new networks, new resources.

But everything is fragmented, everyone is alone.

If we combine our efforts, pool our resources, pool our marketing efforts, startups can start moving as conglomerates.

Don’t underestimate the power of collaborations.

Now that everyone CAN build a software application, many people are doing it.

People from all corners of the world are building, bringing in a massive influx of new entrepreneurs.

New skillsets, new networks, new resources.

But everything is fragmented, everyone is alone.

If we combine our efforts, pool our resources, pool our marketing efforts, startups can start moving as conglomerates.

Don’t underestimate the power of collaborations.

I never managed to click "stream", but I have everything set up.

What are the best tips?

What widgets should I add?

I'm thinking of doing Twitch and YT at the same time.

My idea is a stream where viewers can tell me about their startup or startup idea, and on the spot I'll help connect them with the best collaborators and give some advise (even though im no expert) to help them get off the ground.

Would this be a good idea? Any tips on making this "game show" strategy better?

I recently realized that finding the right collaborations with other startups helped me scale tremendously.

I pay them rev-share, so I have 100% equity, no upfront cost, 10 collaborators and growing 67% per month.

But finding the collaborators, planning the collaboration, negotiating the collaboration, managing the payouts.

it's a fricking full-time job!

yet collaborations takes place all the time, and we all know they're beneficial. But right now it often costs MORE to collaborate than what we get out of it.

If it was cheaper to get started, way more people would collaborate. Which I think would be a really good thing for everyone.

How can we make this easier?

Let's start with an AI as an orchestration layer, matching the right collaborators together so I don't have to look for them or wait for them to show up by chance.

Then something to plan the collaboration. A nice template or something.

Then it would need automatic rev-share, because I can't continue with calculating it manually (we're a tech startup, so low ticket high volume is a PAIN IN THE A*S). It needs to manage the calculations, currency conversions and payouts automatically.

And then it can use the plan to maybe automate the contract? Because every contract I've used is basically the same (deliverables or responsibilities for a % of revenue for a set time period and with a max cap). The difference is only the deliverables or responsibilities.

I would need a way to trust the collaborators as well, researching everyone feels redundant, but I don't want to just take a blind risk, especially if i want to move quickly.

What else would this need?

I'm asking because I'm building a platform with the features above.

I want more people to collaborate so cash strapped startups can scale without needing to pay for things upfront.

Would love your thoughts and feedback on what move we can add to make it nice!