Weekly Recap May 3-7

This week, we had two founders share the best way to approach fundraising and a CEO discuss how to build an e-commerce business that blends educational videos with product sales. Also, there were some challenging governance issues in the news, so we broke down the recent controversy at Basecamp and the Facebook Oversight Board's Trump decision.

• E1211: Facebook’s Oversight Board rules on Trump ban plus how to reverse engineer TAM & more
• E1210: Fundraising | Scaling Your Startup S2 E4 with SoleSavy's Dejan Pralica & Density's Andrew Farah
• E1209: Crafter’s Morgan Spenla on delighting makers with memberships, materials, and a marketplace
• E1208: Breaking down Basecamp’s tumultuous week, politics at work & more 

Click the image to watch or listen to the episode.

Facebook's Oversight Board Rules on Trump

The Facebook Oversight Board (set up apart from FB, as an 'independent' policy judiciary) ruled to uphold the ban of Trump for 6 months but criticized FB for choosing an indefinite suspension. For the Board to accurately assess the decision, FB needs to make a choice to reinstate the former President to the platform or ban him completely.

In our breakdown, Jason suggested that the solution for public figures with bad behavior on the platforms is to limit the number of posts they can make per day (also known as throttling), instead of banning them outright.

Also, we took a listener question on how to calculate TAM (total addressable market). Instead of a TAM slide, Jason suggests talking about your top 5 customers and understand why that's the case.

• Who uses the product the most?
• Who pays the most?
• Who gets the most value?
• Who gave the most suggestions?

Armed with this detail, it's possible to actually calculate a "bottom-up TAM" by looking at how many people out in the world match your ideal customer profile.

E1210: How to fundraise from Venture Capital

Two amazing founders at different stages of company building (Seed & Series C) shared their best tips for fundraising.

Dejan Pralica has raised $2M for SoleSavy, a paid community for people that love sneakers and want to develop an edge on the latest drops.

Andrew Farah has raised $100M for his startup Density that helps commercial landlords understand how their buildings are used.

Three takeaways to improve your fundraise:

• Meet with 20-30 founders that have raised VC who have raised venture capital and are one to two stages ahead of you and ask for advice on your pitch. (Bonus: If founders like what you are doing, they will invest in you and/or introduce you to their VC GPs that invested in them.)    
• Sometimes a No can become a Yes. Use investor updates as a way to re-engage investors, as they see your numbers increase and your vision play out, they can turn to a yes (Your WHY + Revenue Growth = FOMO). 
• When making a pitch deck, lead with Team, Product, & Traction, they are the most important things for investors.

E1209: Morgan Spenala CEO of Crafter

Top Tip: If you need to build out a customer service team, hire from Starbucks, they have been trained well and regularly deal with both complicated orders and customers.

Morgan is the CEO of Crafter, a company that provides curated expert workshops and high-quality sets of materials & tools delivered to customers' homes.

Her business partners with artists to create how-to videos for advanced crafting and pairs them with home-delivery of materials needed to complete the craft. About 50% of the revenue comes from monthly subscriptions where Crafter's customers receive a new "Crafter's box" and highly-produced instructional video.

Crafter is a perfect example of how to reinvent vertical-specific retail by creating a differentiated service and scalable way of doing business. The largest crafting retailer is Michaels with $5.3B of revenue, so there's lots of room for Crafter to grow.

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E1208: Breaking down Basecamp’s tumultuous week

During the week of April 26th after Basecamp Co-Founders announced a new set of rules suppressing political discussions at work. The week culminated with an all-hands meeting on Friday, April 30th that ended with over 1/3 of Basecamp employees (over 20 out of 57) resigning.

Jason's take: all political, religious or societal discussions should occur in-person (ideal), on the phone (less ideal but fine), but NEVER on internal chat apps like Slack. Slack, texting, and email all fail to capture the body language and tone required to have difficult conversations. These discussions should happen at lunch or outside the regular flow of business.

Thanks to our sponsors for this set of episodes: Linode, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, Twilio, OurCrowd, LinkedIn Marketing, Netsuite, Embroker, Rippling, Tiny Capital, Squarespace, Vanta