No Design, No Budget, No Problem

Why “Almost Ready” Is the New “We’re Live”

August 06, 2025

Hey — It’s Charlie.

Welcome to the latest edition of Great Startups! Here’s what’s in store:

  • So Broken It Worked: The MVP Story No One Saw Coming

  • Cold Emailing: The art of cold-emailing a billionaire.

  • Low Prices = Low Confidence: Stop Underselling Your Startup

  • The $500 Hack: Your Startup Doesn’t Need a Fancy Name—Just a Working Credit Card Limit

  • Targeting Made Simple: A step-by-step guide to finding your perfect customer.

  • Hidden Startup Debt: The silent killer that’s slowing growth.

Get ready to dive into these power-packed insights for founders and growth enthusiasts!

Resources

  • How to rank content that ranks with LLMs. (LINK)

  • You're doing quarterly planning wrong. (LINK)

  • The art of cold-emailing a billionaire. (LINK)

  • David Politis on doing whatever it takes to stay in the game (LINK)

  • Sam Blond on how to generate more demand. (LINK)

ICYMI

  • YouTube plans crackdown on repetitive, AI-generated videos. (LINK)

  • Netflix is getting into short videos with a new vertical feed for mobile. (LINK)

  • Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping. (LINK)

  • The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained. (LINK)

  • 1X will test humanoid robots in ‘a few hundred’ homes in 2025. (LINK)

  • Ray Dalio built a $14B empire by following core success principles that took him from humble beginnings to founding the world’s largest hedge fund.

  • Iman Gadzhi and Pierre de Preux launched a SaaS and hit 7-figure ARR in 9 months by moving fast, using Iman’s audience, and solving a real problem.

  • Lenny Rachitsky and Jen Abel on how to approach founder-led sales.

  • Carta shares 50 slides packed with insights for founders from 45,000 startups.

  • How One AI App Founder Makes $20K+ Monthly—and How You Can Too!

Your Startup Doesn’t Need to Be Ready — Just Live.

In startup land, chasing perfection is one of the biggest traps founders fall into. The truth? No great company started out perfect — Amazon lost money for years, Airbnb was just air mattresses, and Google was literally called BackRub. This post dives into why trying to get everything “just right” before launching actually slows you down. Real growth happens when you launch messy, learn fast, and keep iterating. Waiting for perfect means you’re wasting time while others are out learning from real users and building momentum.

Failure isn’t just part of the game — it is the game. Whether it's SpaceX’s early rocket explosions or Instagram pivoting from a clunky check-in app, every misstep was a stepping stone. The key is to build a culture that celebrates lessons from failure, launches early, and adapts fast. This mindset shift — from perfect to progress — is what separates startups that fizzle out from the ones that eventually win big. So yeah, fail forward, launch that rough MVP, and remember: done is better than perfect, especially when you’re building something new. (LINK)

Ok that’s it for this week, We keep refining our newsletter content, just hit reply to let us know what you think about this issue.