John Koelliker

Founders spend weeks on a deck. Investors spend minutes. That's normal. It's volume. VCs see 1,000+ decks a year. They're not reading line by line. They're qualifying fast. A deck doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be clear in 60 seconds. What matters: → Claims that hold up → Numbers that make sense → A story that's easy to follow What rarely matters: Fonts. Animations. 47 slides. Weeks of work don't help if the first minutes don't land. Platvix shows you what investors screen for before you hit send.

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Multi-location operators obsess over cost per acquisition. The ones winning obsess over revenue per member. This is a hill that I will die on. A gym with 2000 members paying $150/month is a $300k/month business. A gym with 200 members and one extra offer is a $600-900k/month business. Same members. Same facility. Same team. The only difference is what else you're solving for them. Memberships can't be the only thing you offer if you want to make more profit. It is just to comparable to every other gym. Every other decent sized business doesn't just sell a core offer. If create other ways of creating revenue - gyms aren't great at this. It gets people in. It creates trust. It builds the relationship. But the moment someone walks through that door, they still have problems you haven't solved yet. Problems they signed up to your gym hoping would eventually go away. They want to lose weight but have no idea what to eat. They want more energy but wake up exhausted every morning. They want real results but can't stay consistent the moment they leave your four walls. You've solved the training problem. You haven't touched the other 23 hours of their day. And the truth is someone else is charging them for that. A nutritionist. A supplement brand. A headspace/meditation app. Gym Clothes and Gear. All of it. Revenue that flows straight past you every single month because your offer stops at the front desk. Your members are already spending the money. They're just not spending it with you. The fix isn't complicated. You don't need more members. You don't need a bigger space. You need a second offer. Then a third. Each one solving a deeper problem at a higher level of service. Each one giving your members a reason to stay, to progress, to feel like your gym is the only place that actually gets them. $150/month membership → $400/month premium coaching tier → $300 Supplement package. Same 200 members. Completely different business. Completely different life. The gyms winning right now aren't the ones with the best equipment. They're the ones their members can't imagine leaving, because they solve too many problems to ever walk away.

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2 Comments

If you're building a company in 2026, I just wrote the roadmap for you (as someone powering inventory for retailers, marketplaces, and platforms at a $1B GMV run rate). Take it, run it, and build around it:

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This is exactly what I meant: if agents are coming — and they’re coming at a scale we’ve never seen before — they’ll retrieve and consume information in fundamentally different ways. There’s no guarantee they’ll rely on Google as the default source of truth. And that’s why GEO will eventually split from SEO, even if today they still look pretty similar on the surface. Note: 1. Written using AI, thoughts & opinions are mine. 2. SEO / GEO are fundamentally different even today. And I am not talking that GEO is for ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude. #SEO #AEO #GEO #AIAgents #AIVisibility

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After running 4,000+ A/B tests for DTC brands, I keep seeing dead stock treated as a loss - when it's actually leverage waiting to be used. SNOCKS scaled from 10-15 products to hundreds. With that many SKUs, some inevitably flop. One example: a bucket hat that just never sold. Sitting in the warehouse, taking up space, doing nothing. Instead of writing it off, we used it to solve a different problem: increasing average order value. We tested adding the bucket hat as a free gift in the cart, unlocked once someone spent €80. Not a discount - a gift, tied to a spending threshold. The effect: people who'd normally buy one item started buying two, just to hit the threshold and get the gift. Result: +4.01% revenue. And it cleared out stock that was otherwise dead weight. Now it's a standing playbook for SNOCKS - any product that isn't selling gets repurposed as a gift threshold instead of sitting in the warehouse. No matter what you sell, this is a test you can run this week. Want us to find gaps like this on your store? Book a call: https://lnkd.in/ebxMGfbV

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Your location might be your fundraising edge. Yes, even if you’re in the Southeast. Most founders assume they need to fly to Silicon Valley to raise capital. But some of the most active early-stage investors in the Southeast are actively looking for their next breakout company. And they’re not discovering those founders through cold emails. They’re discovering them on stage. Pitch competitions aren’t really about the check. They’re about getting in front of the right investors, all at once. One strong pitch can compress months of outreach into a few real investor conversations. That’s why Seed the South matters. If you’re building in the Southeast, this is one of the rooms you want to be in. Applications close in 2 days. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/e2RhnKQS

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This is very true. The valuation trap is real. But I don’t think this is a YC story. It’s a market story. We’re seeing the exact same thing here in Israel. Seed rounds at 30–40M for companies with no product, no real validation, sometimes barely a prototype. Not second-time founders. First-timers. I’ve personally seen more than 20 rounds like this just last year. This isn’t about YC “pushing” companies. The system as a whole hasn’t adapted. The cost of building collapsed. The speed of iteration exploded. But pricing logic stayed anchored in 2021. When capital doesn’t recalibrate to reality, it doesn’t just create paper risk. It creates structural fragility. Good companies get boxed into impossible expectations. They are forced to grow into valuations instead of growing into product-market fit. That’s how promising businesses die early. The tragedy isn’t overvaluation. The tragedy is killing companies that could have become durable, profitable, meaningful businesses. This isn’t a YC issue. It’s a venture industry inertia issue. And the longer it takes to adjust, the more collateral damage we’ll keep seeing.

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Three years ago, Patrick Spychalski was an intern on our team selling Clay tables for $200. Last week he sold his Clay agency in a multi-million dollar deal (I'm guessing, he won't tell me the numbers). If you want to start your own Claygency, here's the inside scoop on how he went from Clay intern to exited founder: First off, this moment is particularly meaningful for me. I've had a front-row seat to The Kiln getting started, setting the standard for what's possible, and emerging as a leader within the Clay ecosystem. But more than that, it's been so cool to see how much Patrick and his co-founder Mathias Powell have grown over the years, and I'm so so proud of them and their team and all they've built to this point. Now to the fun stuff... The Clay ecosystem is bopping, and the people want to know the dirty deets!! And how they can make bank too. So I sat down with Patrick and got into them: - The pricing journey that took The Kiln from $200/table to $20K/month retainers and their real retention numbers - How bringing on Mathias was the inflection point that made the business scalable - Why specialization matters now in a way it didn't 2 years ago (and examples from Clay agencies crushing it in Europe) - Why Patrick says they "could have been significantly bigger", but staying smaller made them more valuable - The hardball questions Patrick asked 2X that proved they would be better together At the end, Patrick shares what made 2X actually want to acquire The Kiln and his advice for anyone starting a Clay agency in 2026. Watch below! P.S. What do you want to know about building and selling a Clay agency? Patrick said he would do a little AMA in the comments. Ask away 👇

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