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- Startups Are Built in the Quiet Work
Hey y’all - It’s tempting to believe startups are made in boardrooms, pitch decks, or viral product launches.
But here’s the truth: the most enduring companies are forged in quiet, unsexy work.
Messy dashboards.
User complaints.
Endless spreadsheets.
Customer discovery calls that lead nowhere until one finally clicks.
While the world is busy admiring another Series A raise or million-view post, the smartest founders are deep in their Notion docs or reworking that tiny button users keep missing.
If you're building in the shadows, you're not behind you're just doing the real work.
Here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → “Micro-Procurement SaaS” for NGOs & Small Schools
Framework → R.A.F.T. For Early Customer Conversations
Tool → Scribe
Trend → Startups Hiring “Head of Customer Love” Roles
Quote → The fastest founders don’t fall in love with their product..
PS - Become a member to get access to my founder membership including an engaged community, fundraising support, fireside chats and more.
🔗 Mohit’s Picks
My favourite finds of the week
28 Best AI Tools for Marketing (With Examples) [2025] [Link]
Best AI Meal Planners : Tools That Help You Plan Meals and Eat Better [Link]
Startup's whale buys 10k more since last tx (4d ago) [Link]
How Toyota and Lexus UAE's Jacques Brent is Leveraging Vehicle Electrification to Build Greater Brand Trust [Link]
Being a lone PM at a startup and referring to "the product team" [Link]
How to Earn Cash and Rewards by Sharing Referral Links? [Link]
Fighting AI with AI: This bootstrapped Pune startup is making deepfake detection easier [Link]
💡Opportunity: “Micro-Procurement SaaS” for NGOs & Small Schools
Every day, teachers, admin staff, and NGO field officers scramble to buy basic supplies chalk, notebooks, snacks, water cans, classroom repairs.
How do they manage this?
- Via WhatsApp chats, handwritten registers, Excel on someone’s old laptop, and blurry bank SMS screenshots.
No central tracking. No audit trail. No purchase verification.
This creates inefficiencies, delays, and most importantly wasted funds meant to support grassroots education.
Opportunity: A lightweight procurement SaaS built just for these contexts.
✅ Mobile-first PR (Purchase Request) system
✅ Digital receipt uploads + invoice storage
✅ Approval flows (auto reminders to admin heads)
✅ Vendor mapping + fraud flagging (duplicate detection)
Monetize by partnering directly with NGOs or via CSR budgets from corporates supporting education initiatives.
Call it: “Zoho Books Lite” for the rural education sector.
This product creates transparency, improves trust in funding usage, and unlocks operational scale all from one quiet, fixable pain.
Sometimes, the least glamorous problems build the most resilient companies.
🧠 Framework: R.A.F.T. For Early Customer Conversations
Product-market fit doesn’t come from “building fast.”
It comes from asking smarter questions early and often.
A simple yet powerful framework for every founder, PM, or sales-led builder during discovery calls:
R.A.F.T.
🔹 Recall:
Ask users to walk you through their most recent experience don’t settle for hypotheticals.
“When was the last time you purchased classroom supplies?”
🔹 Annoyance:
Uncover friction. Not just what happened but what bothered them.
“What part frustrated you the most?”
🔹 Frequency:
Is this a one-off problem, or a recurring one?
“How often do you go through this process per week or month?”
🔹 Temporary Fix:
Users already solve the problem. Learn how.
“What’s your current workaround?”
If the annoyance is high, the frequency is regular, and the current fix is clunky, you may have found your wedge.
RA.F.T. is more than a checklist it helps you validate pain before pitching solutions. And that’s what makes the difference between noise and insight.
🛠️ Tool: Scribe
Scribe auto-records your screen and generates step-by-step how-to guides in real-time.
Perfect for:
SOPs in ops-heavy startups
Sharing onboarding flows
Building team documentation at scale
No need to write another process doc from scratch.
Great ops teams don’t write docs they record once and ship playbooks forever.
📈 Trend: Startups Hiring “Head of Customer Love” Roles
Customer Support is becoming a thing of the past.
Smart startups are now appointing “Head of Customer Love” a role focused not on fixing bugs but building delight.
What they actually do:
Track drop-off points in onboarding journeys
Personally thank top users via surprise notes or DMs
Monitor 7-day and 30-day usage for early delight moments
Host quarterly listening circles user roundtables without agenda
Activate customer-led referrals with zero ad spend
This isn’t about lipstick on a product.
This is retention as a product strategy.
In crowded markets, your best advantage isn’t speed it’s trust.
A Head of Customer Love turns passive users into raving evangelists.
Because when people feel seen, they stay.
💡 If you're building anything user-facing ask yourself, who’s obsessing over their emotional journey?
Because churn doesn’t happen when people are unhappy.
It happens when they feel forgotten.
💬 Quote: Shishir Mehrotra, Co-founder & CEO, Coda
“Startups don’t die from lack of ambition. They die from lack of iteration.”
It’s easy to set ambitious targets, chase headlines, or ship massive product updates.
But the graveyard of failed startups is filled with founders who built beautifully and never looked back.
The real winners?
They tweak relentlessly.
👉 The sign-up form that converts 0.5% better
👉 The copy change that reduces churn emails
👉 The extra step removed from onboarding that users never noticed but suddenly stayed
Iteration isn’t sexy.
It doesn’t make headlines.
But it compounds.
And that’s why Shishir’s quote hits home.
If you’re stuck chasing scale pause.
“What’s one thing we can test this week?”
Then do it. And next week, again.
Startups don’t need to be grandiose to be great.
They just need to get better, consistently.
