Max Levchin

Alexey's growth eng class is an awesome and refreshingly different approach to accelerating growth teams. I spoke last year and cohort had incredible talent, and Alexey really brought out what problems growth teams concretely face when getting wins. Take Alexey's class!

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Three lessons from building and launching a P2P payments app without doing the proper customer validation first (despite knowing better): 1) Building something you need is a great starting point - but not enough to validate an idea. As someone drawn to building solutions, I’m an early tech adopter. This led me to overestimate consumers’ willingness to onboard, especially with a P2P payments app that requires KYC/KYB compliance and relies on a network effect to be useful. 2) Manual solutions are often best to start with It’s good business to be in business - transitioning from ideating to operating as early as possible is the BEST way to learn effectively. While the move fast and break things mindset has attracted well-deserved skepticism, getting stuck in a multi-year build trap distracted me from critical real-world validation. 3) Consumer appetite shifts quickly In my case, the proliferation of free and instant P2P payment options like Zelle added additional pricing pressure that I couldn’t compete with. This disincentivized the consumer event/payment collection market, turning my bottom-up go-to-market strategy upside down. Pitch (https://www.pitch.fun) is currently on the back burner as I’ve begun building custom solutions in various industries to sharpen my skills, solve specific problems, gain a hands-on understanding of operations, pain points, and workflows, and build a network of experts to lean on as I keep my eyes peeled for high-impact opportunities.

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At Proplens AI we are building vertical AI (LLM) agents for real estate! 🏢 At times we do see skepticism around application of Gen AI to reimagine customer journeys in traditional industries like real estate, specifically in Asia. "Customer interactions in real estate will always be a high-touch human only workflow, how will AI add value here?". Proponents of these old school arguments tend to ignore the fact that AI is not all about automation, but also about enabling and empowering human professionals to deliver significantly better, faster, cheaper outcomes🎯in ways never imagined earlier. These arguments also ignore the evolving consumer behaviour in favour of transparency, information authenticity, responsiveness & personalization - areas where AI can directly amplify customer experience (CX) for real estate firms.✨ Sales and customer support professionals in RE firms spend significant amount of time in routine tasks like follow-ups, personalizing customer communication, information lookup & coordination tasks. Our AI agents make their lives simpler, enabling them achieve more! Win for businesses, employees & end consumers💪. #proptech #GenerativeAI #AIforRE

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Lenny Rachitsky interviewed Geoff Charles, the VP of Product at Ramp to learn how Ramp builds products. I read through the whole interview and pulled out 5 actionable pieces of advice for other fintech companies looking to improve their product: ✅ Prioritize Execution Over Planning: Ramp focuses on executing quickly rather than spending too much time on detailed planning. They believe that velocity is crucial in responding to changes and customer feedback. ✅ Empower Teams Closest to Problems: Teams at Ramp are empowered to make decisions and develop product roadmaps based on their proximity to the problem, fostering ownership and high-velocity decision-making. ✅ Organize Around Customer Outcomes: Product teams are organized around achieving specific customer or business outcomes, which helps align their efforts with company goals. ✅ Simplify Processes and Focus on What Matters: Ramp eliminates unnecessary processes and focuses on critical aspects that impact the user experience and product goals, ensuring speed and efficiency. ✅ Build a High-Trust, High-Accountability Culture: By fostering a culture of trust and accountability, Ramp enables its teams to take risks and make quick decisions, which is essential for maintaining high velocity and product success.

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Organizing an intimate meetup for high-growth founders building dev tool / Infra / b2b SaaS, together with Bain Capital Ventures this Friday in SF. If you've either: - Raised at least $2M or achieved at least $250k ARR for your current company - Or, you’re a repeat founder who has raised at least $10M or achieved at least $1M ARR in a previous company - Or, had a previous exit for at least $5M Please comment/DM to get tickets - 5 more spots left

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tl;dr: Finding external advocates for your product is one of the most foolproof ways to build developer trust. If you’re generous enough with your incentives, loyal customers don’t just become endorsers — they become revenue-generating machines. Your biggest fans could be generating 10% of your revenue. At ScraperAPI, our affiliate program did just that by converting loyal users into top salespeople. Here’s how we spotted the opportunity: We realized that a lot of our customers would outsource web scraping tasks to freelance software engineers who would use the same tool over and over again for different companies. That left us with a great opportunity to build relationships with those freelancers who had the potential to bring us more and more new customers over time. Here’s how we did it in practice: It’s super simple. We offered killer incentives to everyone involved: -25% recurring commissions for affiliates -10% first-month discount for the new customers they referred Because our product was well-designed and easy to use, freelancers were happy to recommend us over and over again.

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