[Playbook · Free · Ungated]
After the YC announcement.
YC gives you a reason to be noticed. This workbook helps you turn that moment into customer conversations, useful evidence, and an audience you still have six months later.
- A first-30-days customer loop: five calls, two learning posts, one demo.
- A six-month sequence — orient, demonstrate, prove, own — with exact outputs per phase.
- A 45-minute weekly system and a scorecard tied to movement, not vanity reach.
No email required. PDF opens in a new tab.
The announcement is the easiest attention you will ever get. Your batch is public, the logo does the explaining for you, and for about two weeks people reply to your messages. Then the post scrolls away and the calendar goes quiet.
This playbook is about the six months after that. It is a working document, not a theory piece: every section ends with something to write, send, or publish this week.
What's inside the playbook
- A first-30-days customer loop: five customer calls, two learning posts, and one demo, with the exact questions to ask on each call.
- A five-post follow-up sequence for the weeks right after the announcement, so the attention turns into conversations instead of congratulations.
- A six-month arc — orient, demonstrate, prove, own — with the specific outputs each phase should produce.
- An evidence ladder that takes you from opinions to screenshots to customer numbers, in the order buyers will believe them.
- A 45-minute weekly system for founders who are shipping full time and cannot write every day.
- A scorecard built on replies, calls booked, and pipeline, not on impressions.
Why the months after the announcement matter more
The announcement proves someone believed in you. It does not prove your product works. Buyers who found you during that week will decide over the following months whether to take you seriously, and what they see in that window is whatever you publish.
Most founders go quiet exactly then, because there is nothing dramatic to say. The playbook solves that by making ordinary work publishable: a customer call that changed your mind, a feature you cut, a number that surprised you.
How to use it
- Read it once end to end — it takes about twenty minutes.
- Pick the phase you are actually in. If you announced last week, start with the 30-day loop. If you announced three months ago, start with the evidence ladder.
- Block the weekly 45 minutes in your calendar before you close the PDF. Everything else in the playbook depends on that block existing.
- Run it for one quarter before judging it. The compounding is the point.
Who this is for
YC founders in the months after Demo Day, and any early-stage B2B founder coming off a funding announcement, a launch, or a Product Hunt day. It assumes you are technical, busy, and allergic to advice that does not come with a next action.
[Questions people ask]
Do I need to give my email to download it?
No. The playbook is ungated — the download link is on this page and opens the PDF directly.
Is this only for YC companies?
It is written around the YC announcement moment, but the structure works for any early-stage B2B company coming out of a public launch or funding announcement.
How much time does the system take each week?
45 minutes, split into one writing block and one short review. That is the constraint the whole playbook is designed around.
What if I hate writing?
The playbook is built on talking first: the prompts come from customer calls, so you are editing something you already said rather than starting from a blank page. If you would rather hand the writing off entirely, that is what we do at Invisible Keyboard.
[Our product · Invisible Whitepaper]
Want a white paper like this?
Invisible Whitepaper turns what your team already knows into a research-grade report — structured, designed, and ready to hand to buyers. Same system we used for the report above.
- Your data and expertise, turned into a defensible point of view.
- Written, edited, and designed end to end — you review, we ship.
- Built to be quoted: gated downloads, posts, and follow-up content included.