The Co-Founder Memo #003

A product co-founder in your inbox.

Happy Sunday!

Juan here from The Co-Founder Memo.

Today:

1. From the Lab: What being good at "product" really means
2. From the Trenches: The AI skills every tech person needs
3. From the Chair: Cold outreach in 2025
4. From the Feed: Top music to laser focus

Let's go!

🧠 From the Lab

What being good at "product" really means

Last Sunday I shared about an internal workshop we ran at Jams.

These past days we started working on many of the tasks that came out from that workshop.

And one of those was for me, and probably the hardest one:

Defining for good what we mean when we say "We want to be a top product agency".

This is part of a process I'm going through about defining the vision of the company for the next years.

What does "product" even mean?

As I also mentioned last Sunday, code and design are being commoditized more and more.

So: we don't have any excuse not to execute those two incredibly well, and we need to reinvest in becoming really good at shipping not design and code, but products.

Shipping a product means translating "vision" into product.

A founder's vision (from one of our clients as an example):

"We want to build a golf-club style app for private equity investors and industry experts where they can connect, share deals and create groups".

We translated that to:

"[App name] is a mobile and web app that helps private equity investors, deal makers, entrepreneurs and industry experts join a highly-vetted private community. Through [AI agent's name], an AI co-pilot with expertise in industries and capital, members will be able to tailor the app's content based on their background and interests, do market trends research, create deals and groups, and connect with like-minded members"

Plus everything that came with that translation process (journey, well defined features, a well defined set of users, a scope, an MVP, a backlog with prioritized features, and a long term roadmap).

Above all, this translation comes with big understanding of the business and the customers after lots of back and forth conversations with the stakeholders challenging their idea and their vision, and asking a ton of the right questions.

This usually means we rethink the vision, together.

This is what "product" means, at least to me.

Some skills that come with that:

• shaping sessions facilitation
• writing
• estimating (w/ team)
• sketching
• researching other similar apps/products/businesses, or other non related products that are cool
• talking to stakeholders and customers
• prototyping with AI (v0, Lovable, etc)
• researching competition
• challenging the initial scope proposed by stakeholder (if there's any)
• testing
• having 100% of the product's ownership
• continually learning about AI's possibilities within the product (AI features)
• helping create an identity for the product
• staying curious

I know this sounds like a lot.

But these are skills product teams should have, especially nowadays in the age of AI and AI assisted tasks (writing, coding, documenting, wireframing, etc).

Shipping code is one thing.

Shipping products is an entire different game.

A hard one.

But absolutely worth learning.

What are your thoughts on this? What's your current challenge with your product or product team?

🔧 From the Trenches

Related to all the product stuff I talked about, I keep thinking about a few core skills that Product Managers and product people in general SHOULD have as must at this point.

Pretty basic ones:

• writing, and writing well (there's no excuse with tools like Claude)
• using AI notetakers to record conversations with stakeholders or customers
• using those transcripts to document requirements, feature ideas and feedback
• using v0 or Lovable as sketching and wireframing tools, for clearer PRDs

I'm afraid to say that not so senior people should do this without excuse at this point.

Some more stuff on the trenches if inspiring to you:

• We learned that we structure our Figma files so damn well that the transition from Figma to Bubble (auto layout + dev model) is crazy fast for our developers.
• How we're standardizing our estimates: empty whiteboard, write down every project we did in the past, look for patterns and repetitions across projects, prioritize the ones that have the most consistency and repetitions, and start estimating (using XS, S, M, L and XL effort scale). Output: a beautiful spreadsheet with a few simple formulas to estimate a project every time we either start a new one or simply add new tasks to an existing one.

💭 From the Chair

I've been working on this huge FigJam file analyzing all my past LinkedIn posts from the past months, understanding patterns and metrics, and also reviewing past deals on my CRM.

Lots to do:

Since I've grown Jams to where we are in the past 2 years 95% on referrals, it's time to double down on customer acquisition.

I'll be setting up a few loops focused on:

• sending 20 daily connections to my ICP on LinkedIn
• sending cold messages on LinkedIn after having been connected for a while
• sending a few dozen cold emails (slowly growing to a few hundred) per day to my ICP from 2 domains / email addresses

I've been talking to a few outreach agencies (and even hired one) and learned a very important insight:

Yes, cold outreach works.

But:

1. It takes A LOT of volume, experimentation and iteration to book calls
2. Volume comes with technical requirements
3. If on LinkedIn, the platform has certain rules for connection requests and messages, so for volume, you just need more and more accounts (real, genuine and authentic people's accounts)
4. If you want to do volume on cold email, you just need a pretty complex tech stack: dozens of domains, dozens of email accounts, warmups, a tool to build a list, a tool to find valid emails and enrich the list, a tool to find buying intent, a sending tool, and the list goes on and on

I'm kicking things off next week. Will be sharing results along the way.

Oh and also got to share a cool run + coffee with the local Founders Running Club:

🔗 From the Feed

Interesting stuff I consumed:

• Finished the book Grit, absolutely loved it. Recommended!
• Started listening to Hormozi's 100m Leads (related to the cold outreach stuff mentioned before).
• Listened to Tim Ferriss and Rhonda Patrick's most recent chat. Full of geeky and interesting stuff on supplements, cognitive diseases and fasting.
• Listened to Greg Isenberg and Jonathan Courtney discussing Alex Hormozi's recent book launch and how crazy it went. They go through the entire funnel (emails, text messages, landing pages, offers, and different fragments of the event).
• I've been updating my "Deep Focus" folder on Spotify with cool music to crank on my headphones with isolation mode when I'm doing time blocks of focused work. A few suggestions:
  • ​The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (everything they did is incredible)
  • ​Whiplash by Justin Hurwitz (also did other great scores like La La Land)
  • ​Trio by John Patitucci, Vinnie Colaiuta and Bill Cunliffe (incredible instrumental jazz)
  • Cool hack: turn on "autoplay" on your Spotify settings so once an album finishes it keeps playing similar deep focus music

If you made it so far, thank you so much!

Until next Sunday,

Juan

P.S. If you know a non-tech entrepreneur who might benefit from reading this, please share.

The Co-Founder Memo goes out every Sunday. Join 1,000+ founders moving faster and smarter here.