How to use free, sticky apps to fight CAC

What. A. Week. Amirite? 😅

New Podcast Episode

Codie Sanchez did a $2M first close on her new fund... with one email. She's using it to buy "boring" business and I love it.

Ed shares a random startup pitch with me. To put it lightly, I hated it... and I explain why I felt that way.

I'm not a fan of Techstars' latest fund for underrepresented founders. (I love investing in underrepresented founders, btw. This thing, though, feels weird to me.)

Grab it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Podcasts or Google Podcasts -- and let me know what you think! 🙏🏼

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​Starbucks and the "digital Third Place." I openly admit that I know very little about NFTs and Web3... but when I see the smartest people I know working on companies in the space, investing their money into these things and, now, more mainstream companies announcing their own entry into the space. It seems like it's all here to stay... and it's worth learning more.

QR codes in restaurants and bars. QR codes have been around for a decade or more... but didn't really see much widespread adoption till the pandemic lockdowns forced restaurants to deliver their menu in a "contactless" way. And, more recently, I've heard a number of anecdotes that Coinbase's Super Bowl ad earlier this year drove more mainstream usage of QR codes everywhere. But, yet, every restaurant or bar owner I know can't tell me any usage numbers...

So... I may or may not have quietly replaced the QR codes at a couple bars across DC just to see what kind of numbers I'd get... 😅

On average, ~3,000 scans per month. Per location. Just at small local bars. There's even more interesting stuff in the data... more on that in a future newsletter.

Free, Sticky Apps. North Star continues to see ~11,000 daily active users and CAC remains high across all of our portfolio companies. Growing a company has always been hard... but it's harder than ever in 2022. So, half-baked thought here...

There are three kinds of people on your website at any given time:

1. Someone that's ready to buy right now. They're going to convert before you finish reading this.
2. Someone that's thinking about buying something from someone soon. They're on the fence, they're clicking around to see what you've got, they're trying to figure you out.
3. Everyone else.

Every company I meet is trying to find more of that first group. That thinking makes sense: get more sales today, the rest will figure itself out.

But what about that second group?

It seems that most companies either don't think about them at all... or... they assume that the second group will come back through some combination of retargeting, social media and luck.

What if you pushed that group towards some sort of free app(s) that provides them enough value to use regularly?

Who's doing this today? (Genuine question, btw. Hit reply and let me know!)