Founder Weekly (Issue 684 May 7 2025)

Welcome to issue 684 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

The Playbook for Tomorrow’s Voice-First Enterprises

Voice is the most natural, accessible interface—already used across 8.4 billion devices worldwide.

This guide reveals how leading enterprises are capitalizing on the shift to voice to reduce missed calls, improve customer access, and deploy scalable AI agents in just weeks.

From strategy to execution, learn how to turn voice into a competitive edge for your business.

Get the full guide

General

The State of Startup Media

The article explores the evolution of startup media, highlighting how founders, VCs, and tech thinkers increasingly use blogs, podcasts, and newsletters to control narratives and build communities in a crowded digital landscape. It argues that true influence comes from "hyperlegibility"-clear, targeted communication-and that the modern "Republic of Letters" fosters both competition and serendipity, with the act of creating content compounding value for both audience and creator.

How I Created Perfect Wiki and Reached $250K in Annual Revenue Without Investors

The article details how the author built Perfect Wiki-a proprietary, non-open-source internal knowledge base tool-growing it to $250K annual revenue without outside investors. It highlights the product’s journey, business model, and lessons learned, while noting limitations like lack of markup language support and in-house deployment options.

Product Purgatory: When they love it but still don’t buy

This post explores the concept of "purgatory" in startups-a state where a company is neither failing nor succeeding, but stuck in stagnation, making it hard to decide whether to persist or pivot. It discusses why this state is so common, the psychological toll it takes on founders, and the importance of making decisive moves to escape it.

The Advisor Trap: Stop Paying for Name-Dropping Rights

Why most startup advisors aren’t worth the cap table space.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Growing a passion project to $300k ARR with a $0 CAC

How Mallory Contois mastered the community-led growth (CLG) flywheel through experimentation, design and trusting her instincts.

How to price AI

The cheat sheet for B2B founders.

Money and Finance

Founder First, Unicorn Second: Fixing the Broken Model of Venture Capital

A data-driven approach to why investing in founders creates better outcomes than chasing unicorns.