#37. The Silent Killer of Great Products⚔️
Hint: It’s not bad UX. It’s obscurity. Here’s why attention now beats features, specs, and price.
Hey there, smart builders!
Welcome to the 37th edition of More Than Buzzwords — your weekly lineup of startup takes, brand truths, and strategy gems that cut through the noise.
This week’s edition is all about choosing your lane and building with clarity. From picking the right customers to showing up with a story that actually sticks, the theme is simple: growth happens when you stop trying to please everyone and double down on what matters.
Here’s what’s inside:
🔹 Tweets That Matter – 4 sharp takes on consumer positioning, why attention beats features, the underrated power of systems, and why “work smart” only makes sense after you’ve worked hard.
🔹 Startup Spotlight – Metaforms, the AI startup quietly fixing the bottlenecks of a $130B industry and giving market research agencies their leverage back.
🔹 The Big Idea – A raw and refreshing podcast with Hayes Barnard on grit, growth, and why comfort is the enemy of ambition.
Whether you’re building a product, scaling a team, or just looking for that push to keep going, this one’s packed with ideas you’ll want to carry into your week.
Let’s dive in. 👇
Tweets That Matter
No doubt, X.com is a noisy place. But hidden in the chaos are hundreds of brilliant minds dropping their daily journeys, hard-earned lessons, hot takes, and nuggets of pure value. That’s why, in every edition of this newsletter, I bring you four of my favourite tweets worth pausing and reflecting on.
Let’s unravel this week’s tweet sheet.
1. Pick Your Side 💥
We're in the midst of a consumer schism:
• Premium buyers: Pay more for better
• Value buyers: Pay less for acceptable
The middle is disappearing
You need to choose a side
This tweet rightly emphasises that if you’re stepping into any consumer-facing business, you need to pick your side early.
Trying to cater to “everyone” is like trying to sail two boats at once – you’ll just end up in the water.
Yes, there’s room to expand into both ends later on (Nike sells $40 tees and $400 sneakers), but in the beginning, your positioning needs to be laser-sharp.
Who are you for? The customer who seeks the best or the one who’s fine with “good enough”?
Both require different storytelling, pricing psychology, and product decisions. Pick the one that loves what you’re uniquely building, double down, and own that space before you try to conquer the rest.
2. Attention Beats Features 👊
your product isn’t losing to “better” competitors
it’s losing to the ones your market can’t stop hearing about
attention > features
story > specs
brand > everything
In 2025, “build it and they will come” is dead. You can have a product that’s objectively superior, but if nobody knows it exists, it’s like having a Michelin-star chef cook in an empty restaurant.
This tweet brutally highlights how people buy stories before they buy features.
A brand with half the functionality but a compelling narrative can run laps around you simply because they’re everywhere – on your feed, in your conversations, in your mind.
This isn’t about faking it; it’s about mastering how you show up. Tell your story so well that people can’t help but repeat it.
Craft a brand so distinct that even when they’re not buying today, they’re thinking about you tomorrow. That’s when attention starts compounding into loyalty.
3. Systems Scale You 📈
If you want to work less, fix your focus. If you want to grow faster, fix your priorities. If you want to do both, build systems.
This tweet is as honest as it gets – systems are the secret weapon for doing more with less.
They’re how you turn chaotic effort into predictable outcomes.
Automations, templates, workflows – these are growth accelerators hiding in plain sight.
These systems ensure your output just isn’t tied to how many hours you grind. And, that’s exactly how you scale without burning out.
In today’s AI-driven world, the tools to do this are right at our fingertips, yet so many still rely on brute force. Smart work means making the right work easier, faster, and more consistent.
But of course, even the smartest systems need a strong foundation. And that’s where hard work comes in, which is exactly what the next tweet unpacks.
4. Earn Your Smart 🤓
Harsh truth: 'Work smarter not harder' is dangerous advice. First, work hard to understand what 'smart' even means. You can't outsource the real grind.
This tweet is the reality check we all need. Smart work sounds glamorous, but it’s built on a bedrock of hard-earned experience.
You can’t skip to efficiency if you don’t yet know what works.
The people who seem to breeze through tasks are drawing from years of trial and error, not just clever shortcuts. That’s why the early days are all about showing up, putting in the hours, and mastering the basics – even when it’s repetitive or unglamorous.
Hard work doesn’t just produce results; it teaches you the nuances that make smart work possible later on. Without that grind, your “shortcuts” won’t actually take you anywhere.
Here are the four tweets that intrigued me the most this week. Which one made you rethink the most?
We’ve seen how sharp ideas on X can shift the way we think about business. But learning from industry experts is one thing and executing those lessons in a way that truly turns the tables and grabs attention? That’s a whole different game.
New startups emerge every other day, but only a handful come up with extraordinary solutions to ordinary problems – the kind that quietly change lives for the better.
This week’s Startup Spotlight is one such story.
Startup Spotlight: Metaforms 🤖
How two founders are quietly fixing the bottlenecks of a $130B industry and giving market research agencies their long-lost leverage
Sometimes, the biggest revolutions don’t come from flashy consumer apps or viral products. They come from solving the dull, back-office problems that nobody brags about but everybody struggles with.
Metaforms is exactly that kind of startup. It’s a startup that is quietly tackling the bottlenecks choking a $130 billion market research industry.
Think of a global brand launching sneakers in a new country. To figure out if locals will actually buy them, the brand hires a research agency. That agency now has to recruit the right people, build a survey, code it into a platform, clean messy data, chase quotas, run interviews, and then package all of this into insights.
It’s a grind. It’s also why agencies, despite growing demand, often have to turn work away. They don’t lack projects. They lack bandwidth.
Metaforms spotted this pain point and built AI agents that slip into existing workflows. Instead of replacing researchers, they act like force multipliers. One agent converts survey questions into code. Another flags fraudulent responses before they ruin a dataset. Another manages panel vendors or tracks quotas across multiple countries.
All the boring, manual “glue work” that eats up time is now automated. Which means research teams can say yes to more clients, deliver faster, and protect their margins.
The results are already impressive. In just six months of commercial launch, Metaforms has signed four of the world’s top 20 research agencies, including Strat7. They’re processing over 1,000 surveys every month and every single customer who started with one AI agent has expanded into more, resulting in a 100% expansion rate. That’s the kind of adoption curve most startups dream about.
The funding story is equally strong. Metaforms just raised $9M in a Series A led by Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), with Nexus Venture Partners and Together Fund joining in. The money will go into tripling the team, expanding into new areas like automated report generation and voice-based research, and deepening integrations with tools agencies already live in such as SPSS, Confirmit, Decipher, and more.
The message is clear: they don’t want to rip and replace systems. They want to embed themselves into the workflows agencies already trust.
But the real reason Metaforms could be the next big thing? They’re making professional-grade research accessible again. Agencies no longer have to turn away smaller clients because of capacity. Startups testing early ideas, mid-sized brands exploring new markets, even Fortune 500s needing faster turnaround – Metaforms lets agencies serve them all without burning out.
And crucially, the founders – Akshat Tyagi and Arjun S – know the problem firsthand. They built Metaforms after struggling to access quality research themselves as early-stage founders. That empathy shows up in how they’ve designed the product: not as a shiny replacement for researchers, but as a lever to help them do more of what actually matters.
Metaforms isn’t promising to “kill” agencies. It’s helping them survive and thrive in a market that’s demanding more, faster, cheaper. That might just be the kind of quiet fix that ends up shaping the future of business decisions everywhere.
So, what’s your take? Do you think of Metaforms as a game-changing model or just another buzzword fix? Share your thoughts with us!
If you’ve been a frequent reader of this newsletter, you know how much I enjoy podcasts. For me, they’re like a portal into a room full of geniuses – giving me a peek into their mindset, growth journeys, and how they view the biggest businesses shaping our world.
This week, I stumbled upon a podcast that felt like a breath of fresh air. The hosts openly acknowledged their setbacks, shared relatable struggles, and still showed how you can win big in business. Keep reading to find out why I absolutely loved this one!
The $4B Man: How to Win Big in Business
From failing first grade and battling dyslexia to building a billion-dollar fortune — that’s Hayes Barnard’s story.
In this rare conversation with Shaan Puri, Hayes pulls back the curtain on his journey from being the underdog to building companies worth billions. And let me tell you, this isn’t one of those fluffy “follow your dreams” stories. It’s real, raw, and packed with lessons that feel just as relevant if you’re running a business, writing a side project, or just trying to get through a tough season in life.
Here’s what stuck with me:
👉 The valley is the value. Most people give up too early. Hayes says the difference between failure and success often comes down to how long you’re willing to sit in the pain. When everyone else quits, that’s your opening to gain ground, grow tougher, and build staying power.
👉 Comfort is the enemy. He makes a strong case for why comfort zones quietly kill ambition. Growth only happens when you’re leaning into uncertainty and stretching past what feels easy.
👉 Find your tribe. Hayes moved from Missouri to Silicon Valley not just for opportunity but for energy. He wanted to be around ambitious people who believed in big, bold ideas. “Proximity cuts both ways,” he says. So surround yourself with people who make you dream bigger.
👉 Block the noise. He openly admits he has “thin skin.” His solution? No Twitter wars, no scary movies, no energy vampires. The inputs you consume shape your mindset, and he protects his like a fortress.
👉 Sacrifice is the price. At one point, Hayes was living in a tiny San Francisco studio, eating late-night burritos away from his family, just to be in the heart of the action. Painful? Yes. Worth it? That sacrifice helped grow SolarCity into the largest solar company in the U.S.
And then there are the stories such as working with Larry Ellison, being pushed to “level 11” by Elon Musk’s insane work ethic, and realizing early on that you can sell almost anything online.
But here’s what makes this episode special: it isn’t just a highlight reel of billion-dollar wins. Hayes talks about the self-esteem issues that came from failing first grade, along with what he calls his ‘daddy issues. He talks about the bruises and doubts. And yet, he also shows how those very struggles forged the empathy, drive, and vision that made him what author Jim Collins calls a Level 5 Leader.
My takeaway? Success isn’t about being the smartest or smoothest in the room. It’s about staying when others quit, choosing growth over comfort, and surrounding yourself with people who stretch your vision of what’s possible.
This episode is less of a business masterclass and more of a life recalibration. You probably know a lot of what Hayes says, but hearing it from someone who went from being labeled “slow” to building billion-dollar companies hits different.
If you’ve been coasting, doubting yourself, or just needing a push, this is the listen that’ll bring you back into gear.
And that’s a wrap on the 37th edition of More Than Buzzwords!
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