Subscribe here | Unsubscribe here | Sept 4, 2025 | FIV #92

✅ Today’s Checklist:

• A guide to becoming part of the top 1%

• How to deliver “this is for me” moments on a startup budget

• Building explorable brand universes using AI

QUICK LINKS

🌱 Growth. Superlinear returns. A must-read essay for founders.

🤖 AI tools. It’s been about a week since Google dropped Nano Banana. These are the wildest use cases so far.

🌟 Personal development. A map to reach the top 1%. A blog.

🚀 Startups. The modern business plan. 1-minute read.

📢 Advertising. An AI-generated video ad that’s racked up 15 million impressions and counting. Good concept, better inspo.

How to Deliver “This is for me” Moments on a Startup Budget using AI

Every founder wants to stand out. But here’s the problem: your customers are being spoiled. Netflix knows what they’ll binge next. Amazon guesses what’s in their cart before they add it. Spotify feels like it reads their diary.

So where does that leave you—building a company without their budget, their armies of data scientists, or their algorithmic wizardry?

The easy trap is to assume personalization at that level is out of reach. But here’s the opportunity: you don’t need millions to deliver moments that feel tailored.

In fact, you can do it faster, cheaper, and often better because you’re closer to your customers than the giants will ever be, and you’ve got affordable AI to help you.

Let’s break down how to pull off hyper-personalization on a scrappy startup budget—practical steps you can act on this week.

Step 1: Focus on the Smallest Useful Data

You don’t need massive datasets to personalize. What you need are signals—clues about what your customers care about. I call this the smallest useful data.

Instead of collecting everything, zoom in on one or two points that tell you the most:

• Did they click “eco-friendly” when browsing your products?

• Did they stall at step 2 in onboarding?

• Did they answer “saving time” on your welcome survey?

Each of those insights is more valuable than 50 fields of demographic noise. They give you something actionable right now.

Start with AI survey assistants like Typeform’s AI or Google Forms AI analysis that can summarize open-text answers and cluster them into themes, so you’re not buried in manual sorting. Even ChatGPT can take raw-form responses and suggest top customer motivators in seconds.

Pipe the answers into Airtable, Notion, or a free HubSpot CRM. That’s enough to start tailoring messages.

Step 2: Tag and Segment Like It’s Your Superpower

Big tech carves customers into thousands of micro-segments. You don’t need that many—you just need the right ones.

Here’s a simple framework:

• Motivation: Why are they here? (E.g., cut costs, grow revenue, save time)

• Stage: Where are they in the journey? (E.g., exploring, onboarding, upgrading)

• Action: What have they done—or not done? (E.g., opened three emails, abandoned checkout, shared with a friend)

When you know these three, personalization gets easy.

👉 Tool to try: Kit (formerly ConvertKit), Beehiiv, or Mailchimp tags can do this automatically. Even a Google Sheet with three columns—Motivation, Stage, Action—can get you moving. Additionally, AI CRMs like Attio or Clay can auto-tag leads based on behavior.

Step 3: Steal Netflix’s Simplest Trick—Copy

Netflix personalization isn’t just algorithms, it’s language. They change thumbnails, swap titles, and add “Because you watched X…” That’s classic ad copy doing the heavy lifting.

You don’t need Netflix’s copy lab; you need a prompt and a free AI writer. Tools like Claude and ChatGPT can spin up 5 versions of a subject line tailored to different tags in under a minute.

And you can take the same approach to your emails, dashboards, and product experience.

• Email: Replace “Your weekly update” with “Because you explored our AI tool yesterday…”

• Product: Instead of “Welcome back,” try “Welcome back, ready to finish step 3?”

• Onboarding: Swap “Get started” for “Get your first product live today.”

Those small changes feel like magic to a customer.

👉 Tool to try: Most platforms have conditional text or merge tags ({{FirstName}}, {{Tag}}). Even simple rules like “If eco-friendly = yes, show headline X” go a long way.

Step 4: Automate Just Enough

Personalization doesn’t mean automating every interaction. It means automating the repetitive so you can show up more human where it matters.

Example: send a semi-automated video welcome. Record a 30-second clip once, then layer in 10 seconds of custom context.

Use Loom (excels at walkthroughs) or HeyGen (AI avatars—you can even clone yourself digitally) to make this painless—and customers will feel like you rolled out the red carpet just for them.

Step 5: Borrow AI Instead of Building AI

You don’t need a team of engineers to match personalization giants. Today, you can rent their firepower for pennies.

• Product recommendations: Clerk.io or Recombee

• Dynamic email variations: Claude or ChatGPT

• Customer support: Intercom bots or ChatGPT API for FAQs in a human tone

Plug-and-play AI tools give you the “wow” factor without the burn rate.

Step 6: Test Fast, Decide Faster

Personalization dies when it gets stuck in over-planning. Big companies can spend quarters fine-tuning. You don’t have that luxury, but you do have speed.

Try the 7-day experiment cycle:

• Days 1–2: Choose one signal to personalize around.

• Day 3: Build a simple test (e.g., two subject lines for two tags).

• Days 4–6: Run it live.

• Day 7: Review results, double down, or kill it.

This cadence keeps momentum high and puts you ahead of slower, bigger competitors.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Instead of guessing, you can ask an AI model to predict which variant will resonate with Segment A vs. Segment B before you even run the test. Not foolproof, but a faster starting point.

Step 7: Surprise and Delight

Hyper-personalization is about relevance and delight. The unexpected touches that make customers talk.

Examples you can steal:

• Send a handwritten note when someone hits a milestone.

• Drop a hidden “Easter egg” inside your product if they log in at odd hours.

• Offer a surprise bonus to your most consistent engagers.

These moments don’t cost much, but they create stories. Stories travel further than ads.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Use a handwritten notes service like Simplynoted to personalize your letters at scale.

Why This Matters Now

Your customers are drowning in generic. Their inboxes are full of templates. Their feeds are cluttered with sameness.

When you make someone feel seen—when they open an email that feels written just for them or log in to a product that seems to “get” them—you win attention, trust, and loyalty.

And here’s the kicker: big companies can’t fake intimacy. They’re too far away from their customers. You, on the other hand, are close enough to build it naturally. That’s your edge.

Your Move This Week

Pick one spot in your funnel—onboarding, checkout, or post-purchase. Identify the smallest useful data you have. Build one micro-personalization around it. Launch it within seven days.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to feel personal.

Do that consistently, and your startup will feel like it has a Netflix-level engine humming behind it, even if all you used was Google Sheets, a free CRM, and a little creativity.

✅ Action step: What’s one data point you already have that could power a personalized experience? Choose it, build one simple test, and roll it out this week.

Sean’s Pick of The Week

World-Building with Google’s Nano Banana

TechHalla used Google’s newest AI breakthrough, Nano Banana, to generate a Google Street View of Hobbiton—hobbits gardening, smoking pipes, and living their best Shire life.

Fun to look at, but here’s the founder takeaway: this is exactly how you can prototype full-fledged explorable brand universes. Whether it’s your future storefront, customer community, or product world, playing with prompts like this gives you instant concept art to fuel pitches, campaigns, and investor decks. Think of it as world-building for your business.

Spin up your own “brand street view” and see what your company’s universe could look like.

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