Thomas Meier

@rod_mallo I'm fomo maxxing over here!

if you come across this founder, don't believe a word he says

@nicochristie show me the magic

Introducing Shortcut — the first superhuman Excel agent. Shortcut one-shots most knowledge work tasks on Excel. It even scores >80% on Excel World Championship Cases in ~10 minutes. That's 10x faster than humans. Our early preview is live. Just comment for an invite code.

@cedric_design @TrueformCo @framer Sehr cool @cedric_de und höchste Zeit. Viel Erfolg!

Very stoked to present you the all-new @TrueformCo agency, officially launching today 🚀 Since last year, a new era of how we build for the web has started. AI and lowcode tools changed the game, and this is our focus. We craft apps, platforms, and websites using @framer, @lovable, and code (very rarely though). It's time for a new perspective. Cut your launch time in half. 🔗👇

@andrewchen @bader_stefan how is it looking for B2B?

The people you attract with referral programs, free trials, coupons, and gamification — folks who are “incentivized” as a broad umbrella category — are usually MUCH WORSE than organic ones. Worse LTVs, worse conversion, less engaged, and so on. In a previous life, I headed up Uber’s $300m+/year referral program (“give $5 and get $5”) and learned a ton. Much of the learnings apply to the next wave of gamified consumer apps, web3 games, etc. So why are these users worse? When a new product comes to market, usually the team will measure a baseline set of metrics around lifetime value, etc. if the numbers look good, they might say OK let’s roll out some incentives and get more users like this. Spreadsheets are built, budgets are planned, growth is forecasted, and the new growth project kicks off. The problem is, all of these forms of incentives usually end up attracting a different type of marginal user that wouldn’t have signed up earlier. They are less qualified, more discount seeking, and behave differently. There is negative selection. This is especially true when the product has been out there for a while and the core market has mostly been saturated. You also see significant amounts of fraud as users scheme to profit from the incentives. This could be a simple as creating a new account to grab an incentive or it could be something much more organized and nefarious. This is why core metrics like LTV and engagement can often be half as good or lower, which is often enough to defeat the mathematics that justified the program in the first place. The only solution is to make the customer acquisition natural rather than artificial. If users invite other users, because the product becomes better as a result, then acquisition will naturally happen. An example of this is at Dropbox, which pioneer many of the early referral programs around, giving and getting free space. By the time I was an advisor, a few years later, most of the growth had shifted towards people sharing folders with each other, the act of doing so provided to both parties. The referral program still existed, but had moved to become a small slice of the total pie. The ramifications of this are wide, especially on the world of web3, consumer apps that are gamified, etc. First, it tells you that if you take a game or an app that does not have inherent engagement and retention, it is not enough to add gaming mechanics. If anything, the new mechanics might make things worse, not better, as they attract a group of users who respond to the mechanics, but wouldn’t otherwise use the underlying product. I think we saw a lot of this in web3, where incentivized attracted speculators early on, but struggled to find fun gameplay to attain actual users. Similarly gamified consumer apps (the trad kind) might attract and sustain a certain type of user who is happy to engage in any gamified app, and who will quickly move on because the underlying app doesn’t engage either. Final story on this from Uber, funny enough the referral program on the driver side attracted very positively selected users. Whereas the rider referral program got discount seekers, the drivers were highly money motivated. Because they were so motivated and signed up for larger referral bounties, they actually performed better after sign up. Even though referrals was 15% of sign-up they were well over 30% of first trips. Incentives are a form of selection and you need to make sure you know what you’re selecting for.

@rod_mallo you would love it here despite the high prices @rod_mallo 😜

@nicoup @heikirk

Today I’m proud to launch Context, a CLI and open-source corpus for the python ecosystem - 4M quality embeddings of the top 1218 Python Libraries. $ pip install fleet-context or download to get the entire python universe. Here’s why this is game-changing for both Devs and LLMs

@FarzaTV let me know next time you're around

Spent a week in Switzerland. Got a cabin in the mountains and got to spend time just quietly reading + thinking about new ideas. Feeling solid. Back to SF tomorrow. Back to work baby.

Applications are NOW OPEN for Kauffman Fellows Class 29! Learn more and apply here: ctt.ec/ndTZ9+

Excited to announce the Developer Marketing Tool Report 2023. 🙌 Head over to our website to get access to the report. It’s free. No contact details required. If you get value from the report, please share it. ❤️🔗 crowd.dev/post/developer…

@amyrlewin @InvestEuropeEU VC is not a game of averages

European VCs outperform US counterparts over past two decades, according to new report from @InvestEuropeEU 👀 sifted.eu/articles/europ…

@nicolasosharp @attio In Reports I want to filter for "this year" (e.g. YtD), "last month", "this month" (MtD), "this week" (WtD)

What's a feature that can be built in 6 hours that you'd love to see in @attio? 👀 DMs also open!

@nicolasosharp @attio publicly share lists. talking about viral features!

@samuelgil @samuelgil in mint condition 🏃

⛏️⛏️⛏️ #roadtovalencia

And here comes our latest addition to the team. Welcome @HenrikReimavuo to @lightbird_vc! So stocked to have you aboard! 🎉 medium.com/marcau-partner…

@bader_stefan @robindchnt @ItxasoLondon @annelieajami @jasmiinhe @chrija @_mohannadali @SadlerRory @utzle @AkashBajwa96 @Kamski @madelinelawren @Pitch @softr_io @typeform @airfocus @gmelius @sendtrumpet yes, @sendtrumpet needs a mention! not biased of course 😜

@onemoremeier @robindchnt @ItxasoLondon @annelieajami @jasmiinhe @chrija @_mohannadali @SadlerRory @utzle @AkashBajwa96 @Kamski @madelinelawren some of my🇪🇺 PLG favs: @Pitch, @softr_io, @typeform, @airfocus, @gmelius, @sendtrumpet

1/11 Based on popular demand I'm starting a #EuropeanPLG list for the B2B software realm but want to leverage the power of the crowd to build it. Before we start lets define what product-led-growth (PLG) actually is:

@joncgore @robindchnt not to forget, being close to customers.

@robindchnt is the main reason access to capital or access to talent?

Meeting more founders who are building something in AI and leaving Berlin (and moving to SF)

@nicolasosharp @attio Group and ⭐️ lists

11/11 If you'd like to add companies to the #EuropeanPLG list , please use this form to submit suggestions: airtable.com/appITDjTdLxuWa…

10/11 What are your favourite European PLG companies? @robindchnt @bader_stefan @ItxasoLondon @annelieajami @jasmiinhe @chrija @_mohannadali @SadlerRory @utzle @AkashBajwa96 @Kamski @madelinelawren