Fin Sunday Edition #3
Pints, Perplexity, and why splitting the G is not a thing — the weekly recap from the team behind Fin
“It was easier to invest when being a founder was uncool”
This week Des sat down for a pint (or two) with Stripe co-founder John Collison.
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The whole conversation is great — we’d recommend giving it a listen. Here are the bits that stood out:
Des’s ‘four horsemen’ of AI investing:
Revenue backed by usage.
Usage tied to a real business impact.
Deep and differentiated AI, not a thin wrapper.
Positive unit margins (or at least a clear path if you’re not there already).
“When you look at so much of the AI landscape, you’ll see so few businesses that have all four. It’s a rare sort of air to be in.”
Marketing is hard, selling is harder. You just have to constantly reinforce that you believe in your product to a ludicrous degree, and back up your claims.
Listen to your customers. Tech companies are still too in love with our own product visions and less likely to listen to customers and the pragmatic things that they want. You can’t data your way out of listening to people.
“People massively underestimate what it means to have a happy customer base”, Des said during a conversation about pricing. (“You guys are the poster child for the transition from per-seat SaaS pricing to usage-based pricing”, Collison noted). He owned up to the confusion of previous pricing models and said it was the first order of business to fix back in 2022.
Don’t become a founder for the social clout. Both agreed that there’s a boring, unglamorous playbook for making products work, and it doesn’t come from self promotion — it’s about writing code, talking to customers, and avoiding distractions — and people who are incurious about that will not succeed.
And to close, Des talked about productivity and Intercom’s 2X plan, but he pointed out that boosting productivity with AI isn’t just about shipping more — the real win comes from removing distractions. For example, our designers are now shipping fixes to front-end paper cuts, so now engineers don’t get distracted by those requests, and can stay focused.
On Prototyping
Des pointed out how prototyping with AI helped us get Fin Insights out the door:
“I had this idea of what if I could build a particle extractor…”
Some great prototyping in action from ÌníOlúwa Abíódún, Senior Product Designer, showing how she built her own tooling with AI to help prototype a new landing page for Fin Voice.
She used Comet to explore creative concepts while working in Midjourney, wrote a python script to build a tool in Claude to turn images to SVG particles and then built sample pages to visualise WEBGL animations.
“It’s my AI sidekick at this point,” she said. It’s a great insight into exactly the kind of freedom AI gives to designers—give it a watch.
The Ticket on Shipping
We talked about how we manage to ship 500+ product launches a year over on our podcast The Ticket.
Paul on Hiring
Paul took us on a journey through how he’s thinking about hiring for marketing.
What got us talking
“It’s unreal”
We were super excited by Comet, the new browser from Perplexity. (The free version is available to students for now, but there’s a waitlist and a pro version).
“The first 30 minutes are gold”
We loved hearing Julie Zhuo on Lenny’s podcast talking about leadership and the end of middle management.
And we were also all talking about this thoughtful perspective on the question of a financial bubble surrounding AI, from Azeem Azhar on Exponential View. There was another good take on this post on the AI Daily Brief.
The take in one sentence:
“We still use train tracks and websites, even though their bubbles burst a very long time ago.”
Our parting thought
Des said it best while having a Cheeky Pint:
“You have to go too far before you know you’ve gone far enough.”
See you next week!