Sarah Schmidt 
“Most founders overpay for performance and underpay for control.” The market keeps proving a strange thing about Cloudflare: many small and mid-sized sites grow faster, rank higher, and run cheaper on the free plan than on the Pro plan. Not because Pro is bad, but because most teams buy the wrong features, click the wrong … Read more
“The next tech monopoly will not win on code. It will win on who users trust with the truth.” Investors now price transparency like a growth lever: companies that disclose more, earlier, and in public tend to raise faster, pay lower capital costs, and keep talent longer. The market is starting to reward “show your … Read more
“Open source does not kill revenue. It moves where the revenue shows up on the P&L.” The money in open source sits in plain sight, but it rarely sits in license fees. The revenue pools appear in hosting, support, security, compliance, training, and integrations. Investors do not fund “free software.” They fund distribution, lock-in of … Read more
“Influencer marketing will not die from lack of reach. It will die from lack of trust.” The market already priced this in: brands that handle influencer disclosure properly see higher long-term ROI on sponsored content, while those that ignore the Federal Trade Commission’s rules quietly burn money on campaigns that will never compound trust. The … Read more
“Startups do not blow up AWS bills because of traffic. They blow them up because of choices.” Investors rarely ask a founder “What is your CAC on Google Ads vs LinkedIn?” without a spreadsheet. Yet those same investors often accept a vague answer when they ask “What are you spending on AWS?” That gap is … Read more
“The next 1,000 fastest‑growing agencies will not do most of the work they sell. They will own demand, not delivery.” The market is rewarding agencies that sell SEO without actually doing SEO. Revenue grows faster when you control the client, the pricing, and the margin, while a white label partner handles the execution quietly in … Read more
“In the next funding cycle, founders who cannot prove they actually wrote their content will see content-driven growth models lose at least 30% of their perceived ROI.” Plagiarism used to be simple. Someone copied your blog post, your pitch deck, your product page, or your whitepaper word for word. You sent a DMCA notice. Maybe … Read more
“The fastest web server is not the one with the best benchmark. It is the one that keeps your revenue graph pointing up when traffic hits at the worst possible time.” OpenLiteSpeed and Nginx sit in a strange place in founder conversations. Every second or third technical cofounder swears by one of them. Most growth … Read more
“Anytime a plan says ‘unlimited,’ assume there is a spreadsheet somewhere that proves it is not.” The market keeps buying “unlimited bandwidth” like it is a flat rate for growth, but the contracts say something else. Most startups that switch to an “unlimited” plan hit a soft cap between 3x and 7x their average usage. … Read more
“The fastest way to cap your revenue is to sell your time instead of your outcomes.” The market rewards outcomes, not hours. Agencies that switch from hourly billing to value-based pricing often see revenue per client rise 30 to 300 percent, while client churn falls. That is not magic. That is simple math: when you … Read more
