Catalog

Proposal — Loom · AE Onboarding Playbook Pilot

On Tuesday you said the eight incoming AEs have "no shared playbook" and that "ramp is going to kill us by Q2". You put current ramp at "14 weeks if we're honest" and a loaded AE at "about $140k".

Success: first cohort productive — first closed deal — inside 6 weeks instead of 14.

You said → What we do about it
"no shared playbook" → two-week build with your top two reps, delivered as a 5-day onboarding track
"ramp is 14 weeks" → week-1 to week-6 milestones with a manager checklist, so ramp is measured, not felt
"we tried a doc once and nobody read it" → every module ends with a recorded role-play a manager reviews in ten minutes

Timeline: build weeks 1–2; cohort onboarding weeks 3–8; review week 9.

Investment: $18,000. Payback: 8 AEs × 8 weeks saved × ($140k ÷ 52) ≈ $172k of ramp cost recovered. Breakeven at one AE.

Next step: a yes by Friday the 13th to start the build on the 16th.
Risk you raised: "our reps won't do homework" — modules are under 20 minutes and done live with the manager.

PILLAR — "The async standup playbook: how 14 distributed teams dropped the 9 AM call"
Keyword: async standup (~1,900/mo) · Intent: informational, late-stage
Gap in current top results: none give a template by team size; all assume 5–8 people.
H2s: Why the sync standup breaks past 3 time zones / The 3 formats by team size / Slack + Notion templates / What to do when nobody posts / Daily vs weekly / Tools compared honestly

Supporting articles
1. "Async standup template (Slack and Notion versions)" — async standup template (~720) · transactional · links to H2 #3
2. "Why your async standup is being ignored — and the 3-line fix" — async standup not working (~210) · informational · H2 #4
3. "Daily or weekly async standup for a 6-person team?" — daily vs weekly standup (~140) · comparison · H2 #5
4. "Async standup across 5+ time zones: what actually works" — async standup timezone (~95) · informational · H2 #1
...
Publishing order: 1, 2, 4 first (quick wins, low competition), pillar in week 3, remaining support weeks 4–6.

Top 5 unmet needs (67 interviews)

1. Onboarding takes too long — 41 customers
   "I gave up before my first usable result." (I-12) · "Two evenings to set up something I wanted to try in ten minutes." (I-38)
   Trigger: trying the product between meetings, on a phone.
2. Sharing with the team is friction — 33
   "I ended up screenshotting the dashboard into Slack." (I-05)
3. Integration with the existing stack — 29
4. Pricing surprise in month two — 24
5. Progress does not sync between devices — 18

Early signals
- Offline mode — I-12, I-38, I-51: "I'd pay for it to just work on the train." Unprompted in three separate interviews; not noise.
- Public API — I-22 only.

Contradictions
- 14 customers want fewer notifications; 9 want a daily nudge. Both groups are under 30 days in.

Say vs. want
- Say: "more features." Want, from behaviour: the three they already use to be faster. (I-07, I-44)

Follow-ups for next round
1. "What did you expect to have working within ten minutes?"
2. "Who else looks at this, and how do they see it today?"

Convergence
1. D2C ed-tech CAC has risen 30–40% over 18 months — McKinsey (n=200 companies), a16z note, Coursiv S-1 excerpt. Representative: "blended CAC up 36% YoY" (McKinsey). Confidence HIGH.
2. Subscription outperforms one-time pricing for content products — all four. Confidence HIGH.
3. Trial length matters less than trial-to-paid messaging — three of four; the fourth is silent. Confidence MEDIUM.

Biggest disagreement
McKinsey: auto-renewal optimisation is the largest revenue lever. a16z: cohort-driven retention beats it. Stronger side: McKinsey — 200-company sample versus a16z's four anecdotes, and McKinsey's data is 2025 while a16z's examples are 2023.

The question none of them answers
What happens to LTV when you send an honest reminder before auto-renewal. Likely gap: no operator has run it at scale, and the consultancies are paid by companies that do not want to.

Read or measure next: your own month-3 retention by acquisition channel — every source above assumes it is uniform, and for your decision it is the number that matters.

Weekly briefing — AI search and research tools, 29 Apr – 6 May

1. ChatGPT Deep Research extended to 30-minute runs with export (OpenAI release notes, 2 May) — Why: your "research faster" lesson shows a 5-minute run; the screenshots are stale. Do: re-capture by Friday.
2. Perplexity Spaces adds shared instructions for teams (Perplexity blog, 30 Apr) — Why: your team-research module assumes personal Spaces. Do: a one-paragraph update.
3. Google AI Mode expands to 12 countries incl. DE and ES (Google blog, 1 May) — Why: 40% of your traffic is DE/ES; organic click-through will move. Do: watch Search Console for two weeks.
4. Anthropic raises Claude file limits (Anthropic docs, 3 May) — Why: your "upload 400 pages" lesson can cite a bigger number. Do: nothing yet.
5. Perplexity reported raising at $18B (The Information, 5 May) — unverified, single source — affects nothing you ship.

Safe to ignore: the "AI search is dead" essay — opinion, no data.
Quiet item: AI Mode ad formats mentioned in a Google developer note (4 May) — if ads enter AI answers, your CAC assumptions change in Q3.

Edited draft

AI lessons that take 15 minutes a day. Used by 12,000 professionals in 40 countries. Start your free 5-day trial.

Change log
- "a revolutionary AI-powered learning experience" → "AI lessons that take 15 minutes a day" — "revolutionary" is a tell; 15 minutes is a number the reader can picture
- "empowering professionals worldwide to thrive" → "used by 12,000 professionals in 40 countries" — abstraction replaced with proof
- "Begin your transformative journey today" → "Start your free 5-day trial" — the actual offer is more persuasive than the metaphor
- cut "seamlessly", "cutting-edge", "unlock" — adjectives with no referent
- "trusted by teams" → [NEEDS NUMBER] — kept, but it needs a count or a name

Weakest remaining line: "40 countries" is impressive only if the reader is outside the US; consider replacing with a named company.