The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 99 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Blomfield: Rails excels in AI coding due to consistent online training data
“Rails is a 20 year old framework with a ton of well-established conventions. A lot of Rails code bases look very, very similar. And it's obvious to an experienced Ruby on Rails developer where a specific piece of functionality Should live, or the right Rails w…”
Blomfield: AI coding assistants easily tolerate imperfect voice transcription errors
“And the AI is so tolerant of minor grammar and punctuation mistakes that it honestly doesn't matter if the transcription's not perfect.”
Blomfield: Optimizing for dwell time ignores product quality and taste
“When a team and a product manager has a number to work towards, and in this case, like dwell time or engagement or number of minutes each user uses a service, like a well-meaning product team, in my experience, like tends to optimize and optimize and optimize …”
Blomfield: Products requiring user-made tutorials indicate flawed UX design
“When people need to, like, record long videos telling other people how to use your product, you've probably done something wrong.”
Blomfield: Changing familiar consumer UX always triggers massive user backlash
“You change something that people are used to, you're going to get millions and millions of people screaming about it, whether it's good or bad.”
Blomfield: Small-group social networks require non-ad monetization models
“A social network that kind of constrained itself to that smaller group might be really interesting, but Then you have to find a different way to monetize, because you're not getting as many eyeballs, as many hours of viewership, therefore your ad revenue goes …”
Blomfield: When a product becomes a common verb, it has won
“When your product gets the verb, you, you've won.”
Blomfield: Great companies bring meaning to their name, not vice versa
“And I think ultimately, the best companies bring meaning to the name often, rather than the other way around. Monzo doesn't mean anything.”
Blomfield: Founder CEOs have moral authority to enforce product vision
“This is where I think founder CEOs do have an advantage. They have the kind of moral authority of like, I started this company, and this is what I believe, and this is where we're going.”
Blomfield: Founders without enterprise experience drastically underprice B2B software
“Often when you haven't worked at a big company, you don't have good calibration about what kind of prices these companies tend to pay for software. And so you might think of the last time you bought software, you know, a subscription to GitHub or ChatGPT, and …”
Blomfield: Price B2B software at 25% to 50% of value delivered
“I typically pick somewhere between 25 and 50% of the value you're delivering. So they keep roughly two-thirds, you keep roughly a third.”
Blomfield: The value equation gets 80% to 90% of pricing right
“If you just stop with that value equation, honestly you'll get Eight to 90% of the pricing spot on.”
Blomfield: Cost-plus pricing always results in underpriced software
“Some people like to do a cost plus a margin pricing, and it just always ends up with you underpricing your software.”
Blomfield: Software startups should target 80% to 90% gross margins
“Really you should be aiming for software margins of like 80 or 90%.”
Blomfield: Enterprise Buyers Are Typically Wary of Uncapped Usage Pricing
“People typically are wary of totally uncapped usage-based pricing, so you might want to put a cap on that.”
Blomfield: Matching Existing Software Pricing Structures Improves B2B Sales
“Really, if you can mirror the way they are used to paying for other software, the better you'll do.”
Blomfield: Publishing fixed enterprise pricing leaves money on the table
“If you choose a price randomly and put it on your website for an enterprise contract, you are certainly leaving money on the table. You'll overprice the product for a whole chunk of customers who don't get that much value out of it. So you've lost them entirel…”
Blomfield: Enterprise compliance features enable up to 10x higher pricing
“Often it's things like SOC two audit reports or single sign on or audit logs or compliance reports or, Data being kept in certain geographies, things like that that really individuals and small companies don't really care about, and enterprises find absolutely…”
Blomfield: Target a 5:1 ratio of new ARR to salesperson compensation
“So a good rule of thumb is about a five to one ratio between new signed ARR and total compensation for a salesperson, including commission.”
Blomfield: Long B2B software pilots are counterproductive and lack customer buy-in
“In general, offering a really long free trial or a pilot is counterproductive. The customer's not actually bought into using the product, and so what you want to do is keep these pilots or these proof of concepts really, really short. Maybe a couple of weeks, …”
Blomfield: Startups should pitch direct founder access rather than fake company size
“What you should do instead is play to your strengths as a startup. Say to your customers, you can have the phone number of the founders and we're on call, 24 seven to come and fix your problems. You're certainly not going to get that from Salesforce or Oracle …”
Blomfield: Startups are priced correctly when they lose 25% of deals
“And when you start To lose more than 25% of potential deals based solely on price, you're now probably in the right ballpark. So you don't need to win every single deal, and if every single deal is closing straight away, you're almost certainly underpricing.”
Blomfield: Over-optimizing early pricing is a big mistake for startups
“And just remember, if your company is successful, these initial five, 10 customers you sign up at the start are going to be a tiny, tiny fraction of the revenue you make over the next five years. And so It's more important to start signing deals and getting to…”
Blomfield: Early-stage sales is about filtering ideal customers, not convincing everyone
“And so it's about filtering. Early stage sales is way more about filtering down to your ideal customers than trying to convince the other.”
Blomfield: 5% monthly growth is unlikely to yield breakout consumer success
“A good growth rate is 15% month over month. At that rate, you'll five X your user base every year. 10% monthly growth for consumer company is okay. It means you'll approximately triple your user base every year. Five percent a month or lower is unlikely to rea…”
Blomfield: Paid referral schemes are paid acquisition, not organic virality
“I would treat this as paid acquisition, actually. You're spending money to acquire customers, and if you stop spending, those customers won't appear.”
Blomfield: Top consumer startups get over 80% of growth organically
“The best consumer companies have a split of organic versus paid growth of something like north of 80% organic to 20% paid.”
Blomfield: Over-relying on Google and Meta ads pushes startup margins to zero
“You all take your margins to zero and Google and Meta end up making all the money. That's why it's so dangerous to be so reliant on paid growth.”
Adding three friends at sign-up boosted Monzo retention by 20%
“Because we had a bank account, but also this Venmo-like functionality built into the product where you could send and receive money, customers who added three friends from their phone book to their Monzo account so they could send and receive money, as they si…”
Blomfield: Startups should not obsess over exact definitions of retention magic moments
“Simply finding that kind of tipping point that looks about right from your metrics, and then agreeing with everyone that that's what you're going to optimize for, rather than being really pedantic about the exact definition is probably the best way to go.”
Blomfield: Early Startups Lack Scale to Split-Test Minor UI Tweaks
“Making buttons red or green, that's not really something you have the scale to split test until you're really at the size of Google or Facebook.”
Blomfield: Debating Metric Definitions Is Worse Than Having No Metrics
“Constant arguments about what your key metrics are even worse than having no metrics at all.”
Blomfield: B2B Startups Must Prioritize Revenue Over Gross Transaction Value
“And so almost always, especially for B to B companies, your key metric should be revenue. If you pick another number, take gross transaction value, you'll find that your employees, and eventually you might start optimizing for that number.”
Blomfield: Missing burn or runway in investor updates signals something to hide
“Those three numbers, revenue, burn rate, and runway are absolutely crucial to include. And if they're not at the top of your investor updates, honestly, I always assume this founder has something to hide.”
Blomfield: Retention flattening at 20% beats higher retention decaying to zero
“And it almost matters that they flatten out at any point as opposed to a high point. You know, I take a 20% retention that flattens out over a higher retention initially that goes to zero.”
Blomfield: Early-stage B2B SaaS startups should target 125% to 150%+ NDR
“The final thing, as a benchmark, any early stage B to B SaaS company should be looking at net dollar retention well above 100%. This is for several reasons. First of all, you've probably underpriced your product with your first launch. So you might charge 10,0…”
Blomfield: 110% to 120% NDR is a good benchmark for mature SaaS companies
“For mature companies in the same range, 110%, 120% is pretty good net dollar retention.”
Blomfield: Sub-100% NDR means fixing churn before increasing sales spend
“If your net dollar retention is below 100%, especially for enterprise B to B SaaS, something is wrong. You are churning off customers. They don't love the product. And I would invest in fixing that. Talking to customers and figuring out why they're churning of…”
Blomfield: Rebuilt Tumblr blog into custom software in one hour using AI
“I was on Tumblr and I migrated my blog to custom software I wrote in one hour on a train journey.”
Blomfield: YC startup Den is building a 'Cursor for knowledge work'
“There's a company in the current batch called Den, basically building cursor for knowledge work. That's trying to chain together all of these different MCP servers, which basically a way to call tools for agents.”
Blomfield: Major AI coding tools will soon auto-ingest error logs
“It's so powerful that pretty soon I actually expect all the major coding tools to be able to ingest these errors
Without humans having to copy paste.
If you think about it, our value being the copy paste machine is, is kind of weird, right?
We're like, we're l…”
Blomfield: Voice tool Aqua doubles input speed to 140 words per minute
“With Aqua, I can effectively input instructions at a 140 words per minute, which is about double what I can type.”
Blomfield: Startups must treat cloud and AI credits as cash costs
“So people at AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, giving out tons and tons of credits to startups. You should treat those as a cash cost. Don't assume you'll have unlimited credits forever. It'll totally mess up your margins.”
Blomfield: Monzo Reached 1M Customers Before Spending on Direct Marketing
“We got to a million customers at Monzo before we spent any money on direct marketing or advertising.”
Blomfield: Monzo killed a cheap acquisition channel due to negative customer LTV
“Back at Monzo, we found a particular money saving blog that was very, very cheap to get users from. They sent us hundreds and hundreds of users when we were eventually paying for advertising. It seemed very, very cheap, but the customers, it turns out, were de…”
Monzo defined active retention as at least one transaction per week
“So for Monzo, we chose one transaction, at least one financial transaction every week.”
Blomfield: Monzo maintained an NPS between +75 and +80 during his tenure
“Monzo, for example, hovered somewhere between positive 75 and positive 80 while I was there.”
Blomfield: Command of core metrics strongly differentiates founders to investors
“It's really easy to tell founders who are in command of their metrics versus founders who aren't. And it's really impressive when founders can talk about what percentage of their signups are DAU or WAU or what the annual revenue per user is. And we'll go into …”