E1053: Ask Jason! Catching an investor’s eye with a cold email, what founders/investors often overlook during pitches, COVID’s impact on Jason’s deal flow, domain name hacks & more!
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2020
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
2:18 Kate asks what founders & investors often overlook while pitching/being pitched, and what they should focus more closely on
6:58 Daniel asks about Jason's next book
8:59 Avery asks for advice on performing customer research
14:27 Dan asks what common traits Jason sees in the best founders and tangible steps to gain these traits
19:55 Shahpar asks what kind of cold emails catch Jason's eyes
22:10 Amy asks for the top 5 books Jason would recommend to an aspiring founder
27:18 Andrew asks Jason how his deal flow has been impacted by COVID-19
30:27 Dharma asks about the importance of a startups name/domain name and any hacks getting a better domain name
34:54 Pedro asks how to improve customer retention when acquisition goes down
39:57 Ivan asks how Jason is "sizing up" founders without meeting them in person
42:10 Gerry asks whether to offer a freemium version of a product OR to offer the full product free for a limited window before looking to convert
46:51 Naiem asks whether to push new products searching for product-market fit OR focus on improving existing products
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody thanks for joining us it's another asked Jason episode of this week in |
| 0:04.0 | startups and we got all of these amazing questions from our new slack room which you can |
| 0:09.3 | join by going to this week in startups dot com slash wait for it slack you all know slack you're all using it at work as we're remote |
| 0:17.3 | Well we started our own slack instance it now has 25,000 members and we have all these great rooms including the book club, including |
| 0:25.6 | S Jason, including small wins, we have one for every city, state, and country, we have ones |
| 0:31.4 | for every profession or job function like design and |
| 0:34.0 | uX or developers, and they're becoming very robust and there's lots of great |
| 0:37.7 | conversations going on and really no marketing. We just bounce anybody who |
| 0:41.4 | uses the slack for marketing and we only keep the people |
| 0:44.4 | having intelligent discourse about this podcast and growing startups and investing in startups. |
| 0:49.3 | On today's show I answer a dozen questions and boy they were great questions how do you catch an |
| 0:54.4 | angel investor's eye in email this is a really great question the top five books I |
| 0:59.8 | would recommend to an aspiring founder I gave more than five I think, and why you should read those books, what investors are looking for in a virtual pitch versus a real world pitch. |
| 1:10.0 | And if my deal flow, people want to know if my deal flow has gone up or down during the pandemic, |
| 1:15.0 | it's the answer might be something other than what you think, so stay tuned. |
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| 1:36.7 | Notion. |
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