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New partnership alert!! Excited to announce that Black Flag is partnering with xAI to give founders free credits and direct access to Grok - xAI’s family of powerful, multi-modal, real-time models. Across essentially any end product you're applying to Black Flag with, Grok will deliver: - Deep reasoning across text, code, and context - Faster inference and improved function calling - CUI: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth just announced that Grok is being adopted for handling Controlled Unclassified Information If you're building in critical technology areas important to the West - space, energy, autonomy, cyber - the next generation of secure software will be built with Grok and you can now get a head start through Black Flag. Only 18 days left to apply to Black Flag’s January batch - apply at the link in the comments!

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Imagine 🤔 .... 🗑️ trashing a product you've sunk time into. Building, marketing, selling. Thinking about it between Pickleball sets. Just because the data it needs isn't accessible through API. Not the end state anyone desires. 🙂‍↔️ Partnering with every ERP, Payroll, HRIS & Accounting platform out there to build API's just isn't scalable. It distracts your product team. Slows feature builds. And slows the rate at which you can acquire new customers. Not to mention half the time the API lacks data you need. Enter Deck.

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I sat down with Saurav and dropped the truth about why your tech startup should, or shouldn't, be doing cold email. For context, I've helped hundreds of startups with their outreach (portfolios from YC, FirstRound, Techstars, NFX, a16z, etc.). 1️⃣ Cold email is pretty much mandatory for early B2B startups You don't have capital for ads. You don't have time to build audience. You need those first customers, FAST, to tell you what features actually matter. But first, you need a sales process in place. Doesn't have to be perfect, but if you have no clue how to convert a lead into a customer, you're literally setting money on fire. 2️⃣ Cold email isn't just for lead gen Tech founders, how often do you contemplate which features to build without knowing if anyone actually gives a sh*t? How often do advisors tell you to "talk to your users" when you only have 3? Spend $300 on some domains and test your hypothesis directly. People will tell you. 3️⃣ Personalization math that nobody talks about Personalization won't save a broken campaign, but it can double conversion on winning campaigns. For those with A+ in high school AP calculus: personalization can 2x your lead flow... but 2x of zero is still unfortunately zero 😂 Full episode on Spotify (Outbound Wizard), but I'll leave the link in the comment 👇

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BeReal sold for $500,000,000. Me and Omar Zeineddine think we can build something bigger. We aren't the most cracked devs nor do we have funding, but we do know what BeReal got wrong and that is our leverage. Today we sat down with 6 of our beta testers and just listened. What stood out to us the most wasn't even about features, it was about behavior. Here are some things that they told us they like about using Vlogit, Inc.: -They like how you don't just see a moment in your friends day as you would with just a photo, but rather you get to see their whole day - How its only targeted to their friend groups and they dont have to worry about other people watching or if their posts are "post worthy" - They love how you can always come back and rewatch you and your friends vlogs - They also said the app has motivatived them to do more with their days so they can show their friends Now more importantly, here are some of the things that they didnt like as much: - The biggest thing was that there isnt much to do on the app right now when you are not picked to vlog - When mentioning a public feed, they didn’t find see themselves watching that many vlogs from strangers unless it was a curated feed (i.e., a feed built for their own preferences.) Those parts matter more than anything. BeReal proved that people want something more authentic, but they failed to adapt to shifts in user behavior. We plan on listening to our users to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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