The Gap

And what the heck is going on with hands and feet

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

Opportunity → Cross-Cloud Missing Photo Backup Checker

Framework → Brand Strategy Framework

Tool → Crow

Trend → Hands & Feet

Quote → The Gap

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Darren Marble on how to pitch your company in 60 seconds (Link)

• Mitchell Jones on why should stop trying to convince investors (Link)

Growth

• Jason Cohen on how the code is the enemy (Link)

• Victor Sankin on how a billionaire reads your cold email (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on how to steal your customer’s profitable ads (Link)

• Jerry Neumann’s Taxonomy of Moats (Link)

ICYMI

• Luis Chavez-Mattos on the AI agents every founder should use, live (Link)*

• Hiten Shah on what a founder’s job really is (Link)

• Omri Dan shares 3 ways to validate your startup idea (Link)

• Bindu Reddy on what companies will look like in the future (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Cross-Cloud Missing Photo Backup Checker

Aggregation theory lives on.

Between your company and your personal life, you probably have photos spread out across iCloud, Google Drive/Photos, Dropbox, etc.

A simple service that pulls those into a single dashboard and gives you a full-spectrum view of all image assets in your life could be genuinely more useful.

I mean, Apple’s new UX for the Photos app is pretty terrible anyway, right?

🧠 Framework: Brand Strategy Framework

I founded a company where someone got a tattoo of our logo.

Building a product people love is what matters, but building a brand people identify with can bring them deeper into your product’s world.

It’s how WeWork was able to launch a school for kids while they were a just subleasing office space as their core product. Not everything works, but the point is having customer love and trust gives you room to try because they actively want you to succeed.

And now the perception of taste and brand is more important than ever, as AI makes iterating on products easier.

This brand strategy framework from Ebaq Design is a useful way to develop a brand, even early on when it feels like you barely have enough time to keep the lights on:

Write out this grid on a whiteboard with your co-founder(s) and fill it out. Start on the top left and move down, then right.

Try not to over-intellectualize it. It’s really easy to spend too much time figuring out your brand. If you deeply understand your customer and their problems, your instinct will often be closer to what they actually want to see from you than anything else.

🛠 Tool: Crow

Does anyone really want to click through a bunch of menus to navigate to where they want to get on a website?

Crow is betting that users will prefer simply chatting with an LLM to take them where they want to go.

It’s an interesting product — if your site just has a couple pages, your site visitors probably don’t feel the problem Crow solves (yet). But where Crow could become really interesting is as a tool to help other AIs navigate your site.

As agents become a larger share of the site traffic, your robots.txt file may not be enough to help them get the information they want from your site quickly.

Something like Crow could act as an air traffic controller for them.

📈 Trend: Hands & Feet

If you missed the Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw saga fully — catch up here (30sec).

For the initiated, we saw how insanely strong the appetite is for agentic AI. Clawdbot was being searched for on Google more than Claude Code.

An agent that can reliably go and do things on your behalf within the apps you use, by knowing how to navigate them (feet) and take action (hands), is an idea that’s obviously existed for quite a long time.

But OpenClaw actually feels like a new level of agency for LLM-based AI. It has real autonomy, persistent memory, and proactivity. Check check check.

It paints a pretty interesting vision of the future, which I’m going to go deeper on in Saturday’s issue.

💬 Quote: The Gap

Matt Paulson, who wrote the tweet below, has a private jet.

When you do $50M in annual revenue, a jet is a realistic way of getting more done IRL.

But while having a jet is flashy, Matt spent years grinding on building a newsletter-based business (yes, it’s a $50/year business still fairly centered around email newsletters) way before Beehiiv, Substack, and Kit made it cool.

It was contrarian.

It was not sexy.

It was (and still is) based out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota — not exactly a major startup hub.

Those 10,000+ hours to get to the point where a jet is an option are hard.

No one is going to be cheering you on most of the time.

How hard will you push? How will you handle the inevitable failures? Can you keep it all together?

The gap is where you find out exactly who you are.

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