Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 2.27 minutes.

A warm welcome to 41x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

After writing the founders.menu newsletter consistently for 35 weeks to what are almost 750 subscribers now, I sadly saw minimal revenue growth in the platform for the digital library after adding over 1129 items of the most valuable content [tools, reads, streams] and handmade templates on the web. I still find it odd that free signups have grown fairly well, but paying members who also return regularly are very few, making an 8-month commitment worth revisiting. After careful reflection (alongside reading Quit by Annie Duke), I concluded it’s time to let go of pursuing founders.menu, despite wishing for more reasons to continue pushing. The numbers sadly tell a different story.

Despite it never being too early to quit, I think the best time to quit is when you notice you are viewing the waste of time as much greater in the future than in the past… This might sound oversimplified, but a waste of time, energy or resources shouldn’t be viewed in retrospect, but rather forward-looking. Meaning: it’s wise to focus your efforts towards where your highest expected value lives, to mitigate excess waste. Once you align yourself with that expected value quitting something will naturally follow and ask two things of you: 1. Acknowledge you have failed & 2. Accept you have wasted time, effort or money – both of these are true for me when I look at founders.menu.

What now? The founders.menu library (all tools, streams, reads and templates) will merge with early.tools over the next week. That said, all paying founders.menu members will be grandfathered in early.tools with full access to the whole library (+ free editorial submissions) early next week. If you are not yet on the newsletter, subscribe here (you are not automatically added). ↓

Discover pre-launch startups

Be first in line to try new products you'll love from day one with early.tools as your partner.

www.early.tools

And what about founders.menu? The brand will also evolve (at some point). I love the name, framing and concept. But more as an exclusive club for founders to meet at curated invite-only dinners in real life. I will launch applications maybe this year, so this subscriber base will keep sticking around without any editorial promises just yet (no need to unsubscribe).

Thanks to all founders.menu users who got as excited as I was from day one of this project. Not all things are meant to last, this project being one of them.

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you on the net. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 4.44 minutes.

A warm welcome to 33x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

If you want to get your startup in front of other founders and entrepreneurs, then Slack and Discord are 2x platforms you do not want to miss out on. The best way to go about this is to share a simple introduction, a one-line pitch and finally: ask for the feedback you are looking for. That way you will avoid being perceived as spammy. Here are 15x communities you can join and share what you are working on for free right now…

Main course » founders.menu update

Today, the founders.menu newsletter passed 700 subscribers with weekly Sunday newsletter consistently releasing 34x this year. During this time, the platform reached 1129 ingredients in total. You can find so many gems for your founder’s journey, carefully curated and categorised to level up your next founder decision with valuable content [tools, reads, streams] and handmade templates. After tomorrow, the early bird price of $2.99/m will be discontinued and a $9.99/m plan will take its place. If you would like to unlock the whole database, becoming a member is still possible for just $2.99/m today. ↓

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• What is product / market fit? → Simply put: Product/market fit is a term that defines a very specific milestone in a company’s lifecycle. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Non-coercive marketing: a manifesto → How to trust prospects to make empowered decisions for themselves without an ounce of emotional coercion or manipulation.

• No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees → How Gumroad runs one of the most unconventional company structures successfully. – MEMBERS ONLY

• How to be a great panelist → Cut the intros, disagree with your fellow panelists, and force 2-3 of your interesting viewpoints into the conversation.

• Founders need to be ruthless when chasing deals → Steve Blank’s advice on how to develop rigour into your sales and deal-making when building a startup. – MEMBERS ONLY

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  What 3-5 TIDOs can I define for next week to ensure my tasks carry the necessary weight for me to follow through?

TIDO

A personal task manager that helps drive your macro momentum week by week

tido.today

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

Kpaxs is one of those newsletters that shares ways to get smarter, by sharing big ideas, mental models and principles of wise thinking curated from insightful books. Kpaxs recently shared an excerpt from the book Smooth Scaling: Twenty Rituals to Build a Friction-Free Organization by Rob Bier. It’s an absolute classic, with this piece serving as a gentle reminder, asking us the simple question: how productive is the daily dialogue in our company’s organisation? Whether you are a startup or an established business, conversations, as Rob points out, determine how long a company will stick around. And that is not just the conversations with your customers, but also the quality of your internal meetings, which should be measured in terms of productivity, which need two things to qualify as such:

1. Does everyone involved feel like they did a great job?

2. Does everyone involved think the outcome couldn’t be achieved faster?

This might sound simple, but they determine the productivity in your organisation, which in turn drives your KPI efficiency at large.

Suggested next steps → try implementing these two questions with a simple Slack bot to determine whether the previous meeting was productive. The answers should be standardised on a scale or a binary yes/no. The longer you gather this kind of data, the more productive your org will become.

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 6.18 minutes.

A warm welcome to 36x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: BUILD CUSTOM LEAD MAGNETS
It’s not a secret that lots of free tools like PNG Converters, MP4 Compressors and so many more similar items are great ways to drive traffic for your website if you can sequence off of high-impact keywords that are tangential to your business. PALLYY does a great job at this if you look closely. But how can you? Here are some simple steps for you to build a lead magnet that could potentially generate growing search engine-based traffic:

1. Find keywords with high traffic and low keyword difficulty.

2. Build that lead magnet as a free tool to solve exactly 1 problem the prospect is looking to solve immediately.

3. Ensure the free tool is linked to your main product on the same domain with this schema: yourproduct.com/tools/yourtool.

4. Link to the free tool from your website footer to ensure internal backlinks are growing to distribute link juice on your website.

5. Go to Search Console and request indexing, then refine the copy and technical page structure based on search results.

If you do not have the technical capacity to build something like this, you can always use no-code tools like make.com with your tech stack to work well. Once you prove this works as an MVP, you could hire a developer on Fiverr or UpWork to build it out natively and move on to build the next lead magnet.

Main course » founders.menu update

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• Cold email improvement tips & tricks → What Nick Sharma suggests you can do to improve your cold email writing capability. – MEMBERS

• Always the stairs, never the elevator → Instead of saying that WON'T work, ask 'how could this work for me?' Happiness (and dollars) will follow.

• The story of AWS & lessons to learn from it → AWS was founded out of Amazon’s frustration with its own tech situation. These are some solid lessons. – MEMBERS

• How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) → The all-time classic thread by Naval Ravinkant packed with wisdom and timeless insights.

• The principles of powerful business writing → Four business writing principles Sahil Bloom suggests to start using to transform your messaging. – MEMBERS

⦿ Streams – 5x update highlights

• The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness → In the word of David Ogilvy: being very good is no good, you have to be very, very, very, very, very good. – MEMBERS

• How to outthink your competition → Using sports analytics, here are reasons why successful companies often hesitate to change until it's too late.

• Get laser-focused in 2024 → Shaan Puri shares his framework for ruthless focus in 5 steps to crush your goals in 2024.

• How to structure and manage the best product reviews → Learn from Kayvon Beykpour, one of the most prominent product leaders of the last decade and master product reviews for good. – MEMBERS

• Jesse Itzler's business playbook → How Jesse turned $118 into massive businesses including Marquis Jet and ZICO coconut water.

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  What can you do to become a better gatekeeper in your business next week? Does inward or outward-looking need more work?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

Fabio is a UK-based Principal Designer who has worked with over 100 companies, including Riot, Bumble, RedBull, Qantas, BMW, Porsche and more, resulting in over 15 years of accumulated experience. And as design rarely comes with words, designers need to hone their copywriting skills quickly. To do that, one is wise to tap into the knowledge of the greats by revisiting the Father of Advertising David Mackenzie Ogilvy regularly. I would even say “Writing is thinking at work”, so expressing any idea well is just making thoughts come to life on paper in the most sense-made way possible. Luckily, this is something we can all learn, so here are my 3 favourites and what you can do to apply these suggestions to your writing right away:

1. Never use jargon words. → say things the way they are. If you have to use abbreviations like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), explain the fully written abbreviation words in parentheses. Technical talk and jargon do not make you look smarter, even if the reader understands exactly what you are saying. Rather it will make you seem like you are hiding behind complexity, rather than crafting simplicity..

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally. → aim to get the way your inner voice sounds in your head down on paper without trying to sound like anything someone else wrote that you liked. This does not mean you can’t practice certain styles to evolve. But the magic in writing lies buried in the way you speak. Get that on paper and refine it.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs. → the importance of cadence cannot be understated. Make sure you avoid run-on sentences and build a melody of sorts into the way your sentences flow into each other to keep the reader engaged. There is little more painful than reading a book where one paragraph has a single sentence, as ideas only get lost without punctuation.

If you are interested in reading more to write better, check out Writing That Works, The Storybrand, and Sales Pitch by April Dunford. Feel free to reply to this email if any one of these books is something you like to read together – I am reading a new book every 2 weeks, so we could sync up. :)

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See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 6.25 minutes.

A warm welcome to 24x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: QUICKLY IDENTIFY PROSPECT EMAILS
We’ve all been there. Lengthy searches for the right kind of prospects to reach out to on LinkedIn, but even after reaching out, it becomes clear very quickly that a direct reach-out on LinkedIn is probably not enough because most people don’t check LinkedIn often enough or simply won’t reply to a “connection request”. Reaching out via Email on mass, however, tilts the prospect’s willingness to reply in your favour. I’ve seen this personally as have many other people also – this is how you can quickly identify prospect emails:

1. Go to Clay, create an account and install the Chrome extension.

2. Go to LinkedIn and perform a specific search for the ideal prospect profile you want to reach first and foremost.

3. Now run the Clay Chrome extension and see what profiles have emails that you could use.

4. Next, go through a couple of pages until you have spent the first 10 credits on your account and make sure to open each LinkedIn profile, so you can use ChatGPT to personalise a reachout message that is highly specific for their profile and expectations.

5. Now, reach out to them individually. Do the thing that doesn’t scale first and you will learn the most to find the best way that scales next. Keep the emails super simple, tying the prospect personalisation into a single-sentence “what you do“ pitch alongside why their current status quo would make you two a good fit to work together. Everything after this is follow-ups and more reach-outs through trial and error.

There are of course other Chrome extensions to help you do the same like Hunter.io, useartemis.co, snov.io, GetProspect and many more, but Clay honestly has the most generous free plan – just pick one and try this out!

Main course » founders.menu update

䷀ Reads – 10x update highlights

• How to start building programmatic SEO → This is a skeleton framework you can use to rank on Google for a group of long-tail keywords related to 1 main keyword.

• A guide to leveraging SEO 2.0 → This is how SEO 2.0 helps websites get thousands of new visitors per month. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Everything you wish you knew about hiring → Advice for early-stage companies that might be scaling from a handful of individuals to their first growth phase as a team (~10-20 individuals).

• The Ivy Lee method → The daily routine experts recommend for peak productivity. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Why differentiation is so difficult → How to make your product better on some value proposition that is important to your prospects vs others in the market.

• Are you hunting antelope or field mice? → How to better structure your to-do list towards peak productivity by prioritising hunting antelope and avoiding filed mice. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Elon Musk's, Steve Jobs', Albert Einstein's Secret Sauce → More than innate talents, first-principles thinking, having a theory of change, or systemic factors, it’s their deep belief that they can have a meaningful impact that makes all the difference.

• Why 37signals chooses profit → Why run a profitable company in an industry that so often eschews profits for potential. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Love the mission or love the game → Find out whether you are a Type I or Type II entrepreneur.

• Zero-sum vs. Positive-sum products → One isn’t inherently better than the other, but it’s valuable to know which you’re building. – MEMBERS ONLY

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  where are you about to make a business decision based on an already-made conclusion? How could the ladder help you tackle underlying assumptions to reach a more informed decision?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

Greg Isenberg runs latecheckout.studio and The Startup Ideas Podcast amongst many other things. He is a prolific entrepreneur who has leveraged online community to grow startup ideas faster than most other entrepreneurs. His recent breakdowns will make you rethink certain ways you could apply AI to boost your startup growth in 2024 – here are my three favourites:

1. Use Gong.io to analyze and improve your pitch calls with potential sellers → you can also use this tool to analyse and optimise the revenue your startup is making.

2. Deploy Mailshake for A/B testing cold email campaigns → you can leverage this for early-stage reach-outs to find out the top strategy.

3. Deploy Adext Al for autonomous optimization of ad spend across platforms → you can automatically optimize audience segments and budget allocations maximizing revenue.

And so much more of course. There are so many creative ways to use AI tools together to get even more productive these days, I know it might not seem very obvious at first (I know it isn’t for me), but if we try to at least ask ourselves how and where AI could make something we need to do faster and better, I am sure we can rely on our brains to do the rest and connect the proper tooling to make that boost in work efficiency happen – give these a try!

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.45 minutes.

A warm welcome to 20x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: FIND VIRAL CONTENT IDEAS
Finding trending content ideas that help you play into the boost of the algorithm on 𝕏 or IG is no easy feat. So here is a list 16x URLs, you can check to get unstuck and publish more often – I use a lot of these for daily inspo:

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• Acme Logos → Professional placeholder logos for your design projects. – MEMBERS

• Logoipsum → 100 free and ready-to-use replacement logos in various styles & compositions for your design.

• Font Pairings → Try font pairings and see how they look in your project. – MEMBERS

• Typewolf → An independent typography resource with the latest trending fonts.

• Typefan → Find perfect typefaces for your next project. – MEMBERS

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• The difficulty ratio → A fundamental principle in SaaS sales is that the size of a deal must be large enough to justify the effort required to close it. – MEMBERS

• What building a pre-seed startup really looks like → How and why you should split time into these 7 buckets and not any others.

• Stubborn visionaries & pigheaded fools → How do you know when to stop, versus when to push through? You don’t, not even in hindsight. But these guiding questions can help. – MEMBERS

• Lean product validation → The best way to keep yourself focused, to minimize costs and to maximize your chance of a successful launch.

• The aesthetic-accessibility paradox → The more accessible an interface is, the less aesthetic appeal it will have and how to fix this problem. – MEMBERS

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  How could you apply the Eisenhower Matrix to your task backlog daily to be even more productive?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

Shahed Khan is one of the co-founders of Loom, which not only became a unicorn but also recently sold to Atlassian for $975M. The app is surely known for its screen recording capability to most people, but this story sheds some interesting light into the early days of a company that used to be called Opentest, rebranded to Loom and almost didn’t get the loom.com because of another startup with deep VC-pocketed VCs that approved a $500k budget for a domain purchase. It’s a shining example that relentless perseverance can sometimes really turn the winds in your favour if you play for the win-win situation to come out on top and put your ego second. Here are three learnings, I am sure you will appreciate from this thread:

1. A .com for your brand identity might still matter to instil authority → If you decide to go for a name, make sure the base .com is not already tied up with another company’s brand identity, then reach out to the owners via a who.is scrape the second you have the funds to foot the bill and acquire the domain.

2. Get creative in negotiations → If the other party drops the ball, keep following up even if you think you might lose the score, then try to find different ways to bring it home, even if that means negotiating with a third party in the mix. If negotiations get tough, keep holding on.

3. Go for the win-win, not the win-lose → There’s no playbook as Shahed shares for any type of acquisition negotiations. Simply find out what the other party desires most and find a way that could align with your interests. It might not be clear at first but have patience, knowing negotiations might take months to conclude.

Ponder this → is the .com for the business idea you are working on available and if so, what would you be willing to pay for it? If not, you might want to rethink your name, brand and positioning → I could help via namerarity.com with these kinds of things. :)

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.5 minutes.

A warm welcome to 27x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

This week marks a milestone I am more than proud of! We just passed 605 newsletter subscribers. 🎉 I appreciate your trust in this growing brand. :)

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: SAVE URLs TO GOOGLE SHEETS IN 2 CLICKS
This week, I am adding an Apple Shortcut template that directly connects to a Google Sheets table database of choice via your share sheet on iOS and your Menubar on Mac OS, so you can quickly bookmark URLs you stumble upon in just 2 clicks – the template costs $15, with which you can set it up unlimited amounts of times. The first time takes just 10 minutes to set up for you to instantly bookmark any link you need right with just two taps on Mac or iOS. :)

Save URLs to Google Sheets (Apple Shortcuts Template)

Stop losing the link to that inspiring website. On iOS or Mac, hit share and save it to a Google Sheets table for easy access.

templates.julianpaul.me/l/google-sheet-apple-shortcuts

I use this to manage the backend of founders.menu as it makes it very easy to organise, tag and update all of the resources on mass. Just having passed over 1000 ingredients makes this a system, I will continually use. Oh & of course founders.menu premium members get -50% off this digital product, so if you want a discount, you know what you need to do. ↓

(NOTE: This will be the last bite-sized Apple Shortcuts action in this newsletter)

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• Phosphor Icons → A flexible icon family for interfaces, diagrams, and presentations. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Tabler Icons → 4926 open-source highly customisable free SVG icons.

• Feather Icons → Simply beautiful open-source icons.

• Mono Icons → A simple, consistent open-source icon set designed to be used in a wide variety of digital products. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Oni Icons → Find icons with the smart search, copy SVG with one click, adjust the colors once, and never worry about it again.

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• How to build an agency that scales, fast → Get the playbook to build multiple $1m - $10m+ agencies. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Google Search Console best practices → A thread for Founders with an overview of the most important Google Search Console functions.

• 21 things to know about getting acquired → Advice from deep inside the Google's M&A team back when they were doing 40+ acquisitions per year. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• 6 steps to build a successful newsletter business (Part 1/2) → Learn form Alex Liebermann and his past 10 years of work on Morning Brew to build a newsletter from scratch.

• 6 steps to build a successful newsletter business (Part 2/2) → Learn form Alex Liebermann and his past 10 years of work on Morning Brew to build a newsletter from scratch.

⦿ Streams – 4x update highlights

• The algebra of happiness → What's the equation for a well-lived life? Scott Galloway weighs in with perspective.

• The path to serving 25million customers every month → How Commandbar went from a platform for teachers to review student codes to helping product, marketing, and customer teams unleash their users. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• The knowledge gap that makes great products feel simple → How to serve users where their knowledge about your product is and master onboarding to reach the knowedge they should have.

• How to fix a broken health and wellness industry with a B2B business model → How Vishal Anim made world-class services and technologies more accessible and affordable for self-employed health professionals. – MEMBERS-ONLY

⟐ Templates – 1x update highlight

• Save URLs to Google Sheets (Apple Shortcuts Template) → Stop losing the link to that inspiring website. On iOS or Mac, hit share and save it to a Google Sheets table for easy access. – MEMBERS DEAL

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  Where is your confidence regarding a problem and solution you are tackling right now? Prioritise wisely…

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

Hunter Hammonds is building a network of profitable bootstrapped businesses. He currently runs OffMenu & Landed. Recently, he took some time to share a guide for building successful agencies at scale, quickly. In it, Hunter focuses on finding the right market opportunities, overcoming challenges in scaling, and using network connections for growth, with strong leadership. Here are some key ideas that resonated with me:

1. Find the Right Market → Look for markets with gaps between low and high-quality services in both pricing & offering.

2. Focus on Hard-to-Scale Niche → Choose services that are tough for others to copy by finding a moat to stand out.

3. Use Connections → Work with influential people or brands to leverage network effects you do not yet own.

Read the full thread via the link below (it’s now also on founders.menu) ↓

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.62 minutes.

A warm welcome to 17x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: SAVE URLs TO NOTION IN 2 CLICKS
This week, I am adding an Apple Shortcut template that directly connects to a Notion database of choice via your share sheet on iOS and your Menubar on Mac OS, so you can quickly bookmark URLs you stumble upon in just 2 clicks – the template costs $19, with which you can set it up unlimited amounts of times. The first time takes just 10 minutes to set up for you to instantly bookmark any link you need right with just two taps on Mac or iOS. :)

Save URLs to Notion (Apple Shortcuts Template)

Stop losing the link to that inspiring website. On iOS or Mac, hit share and save it to a Notion database for easy access.

templates.julianpaul.me/l/notion-apple-shortcuts

I use this a lot for publications, studios, agencies, companies or people who inspire me as I stumble upon them daily (I call these influences – you will also get that Notion template after purchase). Instead of forgetting all about them or yet again reaching that 500 tabs on iOS Safari, I just add it to a Notion database, so I can reference any influence at any point in time.

Oh & of course founders.menu premium members get -50% off this digital product, so if you want a discount, you know what you need to do. ↓

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• Color Claim → A collection of unique color combinations for your design projects. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Image Hues → Natural, fresh color palettes from random beautiful images.

• ColorSpace → Find and generate matching color palettes. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Coolors → The super-fast color schemes generator.

• Colorgize → Build your color palette with a simple color management tool.

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• Positioning vs narrative design → Positioning and narrative design are not competing, but do different things in different stages and circumstances.

• How positioning strategy works → A positioning strategy is a strategic marketing plan designed to identify your business's place in the market and determine the best way to position it to attract more customers. – MEMBERS ONLY

• What is positioning? → A positioning strategy is a set of actions and processes that are designed to improve the image and visibility of a brand, company, or product.

• Two ways to differentiate your brand → How to leverage two routes to making your offering stand out: core branding and context branding. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Indispensable growth frameworks for leaders → How to master building growth models, developing experimentation models and building customer acquisition channels as a growth leader.

⦿ Streams – 4x update highlights

• Understanding the business of books → How Mark Manson is a three-time #1 NY Times bestselling author and entrepreneur who went from nomad party boy to millionaire bestselling author.

• The untold lifestory of Sam Parr → How Sam Parr went from humble beginnings with a hotdog stand and moving on to building thriving businesses. – MEMBERS ONLY

• How to structure your company for maximum independence → Jason Fried shares his unique perspectives on building and running a hugely successful software company while staying true to his values.

• How to go beast mode as a founder → 24 minutes of raw motivation to be your angry love letter to kick off your week. – MEMBERS ONLY

⟐ Templates – 1x update highlight

• Save URLs to Notion (Apple Shortcuts Template) → Stop losing the link to that inspiring website. On iOS or Mac, hit share and save it to an Airtable database for easy access. – MEMBERS DEAL

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  Where could you apply the productive thinking model to better solve a problem in your business next week?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

Dickie Bush has helped 10,000+ start writing at Ship30for30.com during the Pandemic and has grown to be one of the strongest voices in writing online. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to writing. These are 19 tips he has gathered over the past years, so you can boost your writing quality 10x. These are my favorite 3 takeaways, I am sure you will also appreciate:

1. Open your essay with the 1/3/1 cadence → start with a single strong sentence to grab the reader's attention. Then, follow that with three or more supporting sentences elaborating on the point. Finally, close the section with a single sentence reinforcing the main idea.

2. Increase engagement by increasing ROR → rate of revelation is how quickly you give away value. The faster, the better.

3. Delete THAT and delete adverbs from your writing.

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.7 minutes.

A warm welcome to 13x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: SAVE URLs TO AIRTABLE IN 2 CLICKS
I’m super excited to announce shortcut.supply (landing page WIP), a quick MVP I built yesterday. In short: it’s an Apple Shortcut, that directly connects to your share sheet on iOS and your Menubar on Mac OS, so you can quickly bookmark URLs you stumble upon in just 2 clicks. Right now, the first shortcut.supply info product is Airtable-only, but I already have Notion and Excel versions set up, so these will ship ASAP if people end up liking this. :)

I personally use this on average 5 times per day, so here is why you need a shortcut.supply products and how the product after you spend just 10min of setup (you don’t need to have any technical skill – I explain everything after purchase) – here is the pain, the dream and the fix…

[1] Imagine this... You're scrolling IG, 𝕏 or TikTok. You stumble upon a link you like, open it in Safari, but forget all about it just 5 minutes later. Soon, you hit that 500 mobile Safari tab limit, full of links you have no idea what to do with.

[2] There is a better way to bookmark URLs quickly – With the tap on the iOS share button, you can access a shortcut that takes the URL you are looking at and safely stores it for you in a specific Airtable database, so you can further curate however you want.

[3] How can you make this dream come true? After purchasing this digital product, you will get simple setup instructions (~10min to complete), a sample Airtable database and the Apple Shortcut template, which will guide you through a simple setup process, step by step.

Oh btw → founders.menu premium members get -50% off this digital product, so if you want a discount, you know what you need to do. ↓

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• Spark Joy → 2000+ ways to add design flair, user delight, and whimsy to your product.

• Pattern Collect → A curated gallery of patterns by awesome designers & illustrators. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Mobbin → Design inspiration from over 300,000 screens and 1,000 iOS, Android & Web apps.

• Nicely Done → Find design inspiration from real apps, in seconds.

• SVG Gobbler → Browser extension for finding, optimizing, organizing, editing, and exporting SVGs like never before. – MEMBERS ONLY

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• The best usecase for the maturity SEO analysis → How to use a qualitative analysis tool that helps to evaluate the maturity of your own or your client's business. – MEMBERS ONLY

• How to sell a business for under $1M → Ways to leverage a new cohort of acquisition marketplaces are helping founders sell their side hustles.

• Product metrics, growth metrics, and added value metrics → Learn about the importance of product metrics, growth metrics, and added value metrics in product management for efficient user problem-solving. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Content-led SEO → A comprehensive guide to modern SEO strategy from technical SEO to user engagement, learn how to create premium content for search success.

• SaaS metrics that matter → The best key performance indicators (KPIs) that Craft uses as a benchmark to decide on future investments. – MEMBERS ONLY

⟐ Templates – 1x update highlight

• Save URLs to Airtable (Apple Shortcuts Template) → Stop losing the link to that inspiring website. On iOS or Mac, hit share and save it to an Airtable database for easy access.

What else happened on founders.menu? 3x new blog articles were added to increase SEO visibility, alongside item detail pages leading to over 1,100 pages indexed on search – I am super excited to see the impact of this :)

What’s next? I am trying to figure out if I should focus on building out an AI summariser “on demand” for each item on the menu or add instant updates/news from the best founders, funds and publications. If you have a preference, feel free to let me know in reply to this email. :)

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  Where could you re-visualise tasks that seem to have big surround to have little surround next week? Flip the script!

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

Bryan Altman (former founder of Chainvine) shared a powerful AI hack to efficiently find potential customers and schedule calls using tools like Clay, OpenAI, and Pbuster. By identifying relevant ProductHunt launches, extracting LinkedIn URLs, crafting personalized messages, and sending connection requests, you can achieve high response rates for cold outreach. The process requires initial time investment but offers valuable skills for future business growth, so consider trying this out sooner rather than later. I condensed the 5 steps for you to leverage this process Bryan came up with below:

1. Find a relevant Product Hunt launch.

2. Get creator info with Clay.

3. Use Claygent to find LinkedIn URL.

4. Craft personalized messages with OpenAI.

5. Send connection requests with official pbuster.

I will test this over the next weeks and report back to you to see if the results are as strong as the 20-33% Bryan shared here.

Where could you apply this cold outreach strategy? 👀

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.97 minutes.

A warm welcome to 9x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

I’ve got one ask this week → if you are interested in the founders.menu Discord community, reply YES + share if you would like it to be 1. Exclusive or 2. Open for anyone to join and I will share an early invite.

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: SMALLIFY ABSTRACT GOALS
So you’ve got your vision. Does it often feel daunting and out of reach? I’ve been there, we’ve all been there. A healthy antidote is to break down that vision into small goals that eventually lead to that goal of building a unicorn, founding your own company or whatever it is – reframe your mind like this. ↓

• Want to make millions? → Make $1000 first.

• Want to lead 20 people? → Manage yourself first.

• Want hockey stick growth? → Get 10 customers first.

• Want to attract investors? → Generate steady revenue first.

• Want to scale globally? → Dominate your local market first.

• Want to build a strong brand? → Earn 100 positive reviews first.

• Want to automate processes? → Optimize 10 manual tasks first.

To get even more specific: you might have a yearly goal, which could translate into quarterly goals – one of these goals could look as follows. ↓

Each of the items below reaching $5K MRR is the key result that we are looking to achieve as a smaller goal leading up to that bigger quarterly goal (almost like OKRs yes). So if you go through this process of "reverse engineering” your goals, you will quickly get a lot more security to build up the tangible momentum to reach those goals in the next week, month and years to come. And that’s exactly why you should smallify your goals: to design your efforts in a way that you feel that momentum continually building. It’ll take time, but trust it will come once you set your mind to this process – try it!

» Act to achieve the smallest thing first. «

(I am building a Notion-based Project OS that has this logic built in. If you would like to have it, reply to this email and I will get you early access)

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• Pixel Surplus → High-quality font and design bundles.

• NiceVeryNice → Template design for web developers & designers. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Is.graphics → Free and premium tools for graphic designers.

• Craftwork → Find and download the best high-quality 3D and vector illustrations, fonts, designs and mockups.

• UI8 → UI Design Resources, UI Kits, Wireframes, Icons and More. – MEMBERS-ONLY

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• Strategies to pre-sell your SaaS → A detailed breakdown of how to pre-sell your SaaS to ensure you are on the right path to product-market fit.

• The content strategy maturity model → A useful way for choosing the right approach to content marketing via 3 phases: experiment, systematize, and differentiate. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Unship to improve product metrics → How to successfully sunset features internally at an organisation or externally to customers.

• Big project syndrome → Uncover the flaws of big projects & top-down ideas in modern organizations. Learn to prioritize outcomes, seize opportunities, & start small for success. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Dozens of ideas to boost startup growth → Discover clever growth tactics for your product with examples of successful Turbo Boosts that accelerate business growth temporarily.

⦿ Streams – 5x update highlights

• The origin of good ideas → How crediting your ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments does not align with how history tells its story.

• Three product positioning strategies → The best SaaS product positioning strategies in three principles to implement in order to find product-market fit. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Value propositions customers will actually buy → A series of frameworks to articulate and validate your value prop to ensure that it’s highly compelling to customers.

• Learn from 30 years of sales experience → The complete A-Z guide on selling to help you take action on your ideas to find business success.

• SaaS business model success drivers → A guide to measuring and improving what matters with key metrics and their impact on the overall SaaS business model. – MEMBERS-ONLY

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  where could you apply the Minto Pyramid to generate clearer communications that immediately resonate?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

I am sure you know Peter Levels, the most prolific internet business bootstrapper we have seen over the past 10 years. A couple of years back, he published this transparent graphic with all the projects he attempted and mostly failed at with a success rate of just around ∼5%. It’s a stark reminder that the success we see our role models having online 1. didn’t just happen overnight & 2. is much more procedural than what they might lead you to believe based on condensed storytelling or personal brand building.

Ask yourself today → have the constraints you set yourself taught you more than how much you value the time you spent building that thing? The answer is probably no (also for me). So this is a healthy reminder: “What gets measured, gets done.” – if you fear setting failure criteria or committing beyond the norm, any % success rate will likely never bless your endeavours.

In Peter’s words: So…ship more.

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.24 minutes.

A warm welcome to 13x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: APPLE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
The first time I set this up, I couldn’t believe something so seamless was integrated across all my Apple devices. Keyboard shortcuts can at least double your everyday digital workflow. Especially by those recurring things you type out every time, like phone numbers, email addresses, calendar scheduling links… you name it. The best way is to set up what you want to use with repeat characters like @@ or ## or ++ or /URL and replace the text with exactly what you need, so you can be very clear in what you want to recall.

An iterative usecase I am adding today is recurring text snippets. What I often repeatedly go looking for is the founders.menu one-sentence pitch. For this, I set up /pitchfm, so that it resolves into “The #1 startup library for any-stage founders to find the best tools, reads, streams & handmade templates.“ I’ve also done exactly the same for early.tools – it’s just something I often have to pitch, so this makes precise delivery a lot easier.

I highly recommend you try the same and continue to iterate after you see it appear. There’s a big difference between writing a pitch out mindlessly and reading it for the first time by recalling it from a keyboard shortcut. You will approach things with a fresh perspective and refine your pitches this way.

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Main course » founders.menu update

2x new blog articles

On a side note: I’ve been SEOing founders.menu and achieved a 100% perfect SEO score over the past week… it was a lot of work, so I am excited to see what SERP impact this will have. Here are also 2x new articles:

• The 10 FOUNDERS Commandments → Principles to master bootstrapping your way from idea to business. Carefully researched and curated with (re)sources for deeper study.

• Why Bootstrap Your Next Startup? → Put validation, profit, and traction first. Forget about raising any funds. You'll learn that bootstrapping as long as possible is the best starting point.

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• Mockuuups Studio → The fastest way for designers and marketers to drag & drop visuals into 4400+ device mockups. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Smart Mockups → Create stunning Create stunning product mockups easily and online. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Frrames Mockups → Perfectly crafted responsive windows mockups for your ideal presentation.

• Mockup Maison → Explore 1800+ high-quality PSD and video mockups across various categories.

• 099 Supply → Discover digital tools for creatives. An ongoing series of product mockups for Photoshop and components for Framer. – MEMBERS ONLY

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• 4 pricing principles to apply today → More things to consider than "start with something that isn’t $0 and you’ll learn plenty". – MEMBERS ONLY

• 1000 true fans → A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These are some methods on how to acquire the mindset to get them.

• How to overcome decision anxiety → Decision anxiety causes fear of making the wrong choice and later suffering the consequences. This is how you might overcome it. – MEMBERS ONLY

• How to make big decisions → Learn about the “existential cycle,” which really has four stages: doing, contemplating, preparing, and experimenting.

• Question bank → Over 350 ready-to-go questions for your research projects. – MEMBERS ONLY

⦿ Streams – 5x update highlights

• How to build a multi-million dollar brain & gut health company → How failure and years of suffering through mental health issues, lead to Europe's leading gut and brain health company.

• How to build a multi-million dollar newsletter → Proven strategies, tips, and real-life examples to help you leverage your newsletter for business growth and sales. – MEMBERS ONLY

• The algebra of wealth → How to combine focus, stoicism, time and diversification to answer one question: how do you get rich?

• Calibrating with your predestined purpose → Robert Greene on finding one's unique purpose and path in life, the concept of different types of intelligence, and the role of emotional engagement in accelerated learning. – MEMBERS ONLY

• How to start a speech → What are the first words of a speech? What should be the first sentence of a speech? How can you engage an audience from the first moment? There are 3 ways to start a speech.

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  what would, should or could you be doing right now?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

John Rush was probably the fastest-growing Indiehacker on 𝕏 in 2023. He currently runs unicornplatform.com and consistently dishes out value on 𝕏, this being one of the more interesting posts as of late. Now, it’s clear that you might not need a startup idea, but what you do need are fresh ways to grow it. So take inspiration from the right-most column and try a new growth hack next week. I will give Community Building for founders.menu a shot and will launch a Discord server, considering the outcome of this recent poll.

What growth method will you try, this next week? 👀

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 7.8 minutes.

A warm welcome to the new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: BACKLINK BUILDING
I’ve got a simple question for you today: how many websites is your startup currently listed on? If the answer is less than 3, then do yourself a favour and get to work with the 7 top sites you can list on via 𝕏. Tip: get started with these from top to bottom. The desired outcome of this bite-sized action is to build backlinks that generally benefit your startup in three ways:

1. Improved Search Engine Rankings → Backlink building significantly improves your website's rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines like Google view backlinks as indicators of your website's authority and relevance, which can lead to higher rankings for relevant search terms.

2. Increased Website Traffic → Quality backlinks drive more traffic to your website. When other reputable websites link to your content, their visitors may click on the backlinks to explore your site, leading to a website visitor increase overall.

3. Enhanced Brand Awareness → Backlink building from authoritative websites can help boost your startup's brand awareness online. By earning backlinks from popular sites with high traffic, you can reach a broader audience and attract new customers who may not have discovered your startup otherwise.

Backlink building is essential for your startup as it can ultimately help you stand out in the competitive digital landscape. The best part? It shouldn’t take you longer than 50 minutes to submit your startup to all of these websites. ↓

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Side note: I am working on a database of sites that you can submit to depending on the stage of your startup. There are already 56 sites in there. If you would like early access or want to make sure certain sites are listed, simply reply to this email and I will get that sorted for you. :)

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• Startup Gifs → There is a GIF for every situation of your startup journey. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Spline → 3D Design tool in the browser with real-time collaboration.

• Vectory → An online platform for creating and managing interactive 3D and AR designs that inspire, educate and solve problems. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Morflax → Generate 3D device mockup in a quick and engaging way. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Jitter for Figma → A fast, simple, and collaborative motion design tool on the web.

䷀ Reads – 7x update highlights

• How the Almanack of Naval Ravinkant got made → Eric Jorgenson writes about how The Almanack of Naval Ravikant came together almost entirely on Twitter.

• How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users → A deep-dive into how every major consumer app acquired their earliest users, including lessons from Tinder, Uber, Superhuman, TikTok, Product Hunt, Netflix, and more. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• What content-driven growth is & how to apply it → Advice from HubSpot, Ahrefs, Intercom, Slidebean, and Webflow amongst many great examples leveraging content-driven growth.

• How to grow a newsletter from 0 to 1000 subscribers and beyond → A case study in how a now (88K newsletter) grew their newsletter, showing all strategies that worked and what didn't work.

• 53 ideas to get your first customers → Find novel ways to attract your first 10, 100, or even 1000 customers with the best growth tactics no one (or few) have explored before. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Rational optimism is the way out → Pessimism is self-fulfilling, so take the stance that all evils are due to lack of knowledge.

• Making something social destroys the truth of it → Social groups need consensus to survive and consensus is all about compromise, not truth-seeking – there might be an antidote. – MEMBERS-ONLY

⦿ Streams – 5x update highlights

• Building multi-million dollar newsletters → Learn from Matt McGarry's proven strategies, tips, and real-life examples to help you leverage your newsletter for business growth and sales. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• How to grow a newsletter business from scratch → Learn about the 4 stages of newsletter growth that got Hayden Bowles to 2,000+ new subscribers per day. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Ira Glass on Storytelling → Ira Glass from This American Life shares deep experiential insights about storytelling and how to apply it to any creative endeavour.

• Choosing projects, creating value, and finding purpose → Sam Altman expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. Specifically: choosing projects, creating value, and finding purpose. – MEMBERS-ONLY

• How to get anyone’s attention with cold email → Alex Banayan shares how to leverage the third door theory with insights from his latest book and many more tips.

What’s next? Launch Guides filled with the 25 mental models from this newsletter and FOUNDERS Submissions as a template to get your startup listed in the right places.

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  what defines the 5x forces of your competitive analysis and how can those learnings lead to a deeper MOAT for your startup?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

This week is a bit of a different one. I never wanted to share anything remotely political in this newsletter, but having been a long-time fan of Scott Galloway, this is one of his best talks yet. Very few skilled public speakers can pack so much depth and analogy into every sentence as Scott. And what’s even better is that every statement is underpinned with hard data. If you don’t have time to watch the 18min Video, here is a quick summary (this talk is not only relevant for the US but also EU, as this trend is quite global):

TL;DR
Scott Galloway, an NYU professor, addresses the intergenerational wealth transfer from the young to the old in America. He argues that societal structures, such as education and housing policies, have been manipulated to favour the wealthy and older generations, leaving younger Americans with fewer opportunities and increased financial burdens. In this TED Talk, Galloway calls for a reevaluation of these systems, suggesting policies like increased funding for public education, a progressive tax structure, and social reforms to correct the imbalance and restore prosperity to the younger generation.

TALK STRUCTURE

FINAL Q
How in line do Scott’s ideas feel with your current viewpoint of the world? Is there still an opportunity to turn things around towards a more healthy generational contract that “works again”?

Feel free to reply to this email – let’s chat. :)

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.3 minutes.

A warm welcome to new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

A lead magnet will help you do two things when building your business: 1. Grow a prospect list & 2. Continuously be able to qualify leads to sell or cross-sell to. For founders.menu, I have 8x lead magnets that are free downloadable Notion templates – here is the full scope of the live templates. ↓

What’s great is that I have these listed on Gumroad marketplace and Notion template marketplaces, where people looking for specific single-page templates can get help with a highly specific template. The best part? You can guide prospects from one template to the next and offer them a free trial or discount as a special thank you for getting that template (I do this in each one). Offering these on your website (like I do in the template content type or even more prominently) is a surefire way to build a growing lead list.

A lead magnet then is nothing more than a quick and dirty infoproduct. So what type of lead magnet could you build? Try these formats. ↓

1. Google Slides/Excel/Doc template

2. PDF Checklists/Guide/CheatShees

3. Figma Plugins/Templates

4. X-Day Email course

5. Code boilerplates

6. Free consultations

7. Notion templates

8. Whitepapers

9. Free trials

10. Webinar

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it gets you started with the first step of building a lead magnet as I’ve just shared on 𝕏 this week. Gatekeeping any downloadable behind a Gumroad page will also help you build authority as prospects can leave reviews, signalling to others your lead magnet is the right choice. Once you get that email address from a customer, you can set this automation with the newsletter publishing software of your choice. ↓

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Main course » founders.menu update

Today, the first version of item detail pages launched. This is particularly helpful for Streams, so you can stay on the platform and dive into more founders.menu ingredients that are highly relevant to the same stage of the business you are building right now. This is also a huge step since this means 856+ pages will be indexable on Google for founders.menu as of today. With optimisation just around the corner, this is just the start of a very discoverable platform. Many updates in this direction are still to come.

What’s next? expand the detail pages with more context and launch Guides with the many shared “Mental models” from this newsletter.

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  if you naturally tend to avoid losses, what can that teach you about blindspots you might be missing for your next decision?

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox? Every Monday I share more context around each product, share special deals and tell you more about who just went from early → launched. You can subscribe via newsletter.early.tools – here are this week’s early.tools. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

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Dan Go (AKA @FitFounder) has built a business and a living around coaching entrepreneurs to maximise their potential by aligning mind & body with the toolkit of health. His brand is geared towards helping high performers level up even more. This thread not only blew up but is packed to the brim with advice others usually pay thousands for. These are my favourites – what are yours?

1. Food is the most widely abused drug. Exercise is the most underutilized antidepressant → to feel your absolute best, focus deliberately on eating mindfully & working out daily.

2. Sleep is the best legal performance-enhancing drug on the planet. You also sleep for 1/3 of your life → learn how to sleep well (e.g. get a Whoop or track your sleep with Rise).

3. Your brain is a piece of software. You update it by reading books, crushing challenges, meditation, learning skills & your network. Your body is a piece of hardware. You update it through lifting, cardio, nutrition & stretching. → stop doom-scrolling and start feeding your soft/hardware with more value, not trash.

On a final note, Dan often repeats the topic of choosing your close circle/friends wisely: “If you want better results find better friends. This doesn't mean to get rid of close ones. It does mean to level up the people you hang around.“ I am pondering this a lot these days, so I would like to leave you with this final question to start analysing your friendships after you meet someone over the next few days → did that GIVE or TAKE energy from me? … I’d say it’s only healthy to spend more time with friends in the former category.

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.3 minutes.

A warm welcome to the new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

This week, I want to take you to the core purpose of this newsletter and nudge you a little reminder to open founders.menu the next time you are a little unsure about an action you need to take or a decision you need to make. Then, follow the steps in the X post I’ve outlined. Depending on the startup stage you are at, the type of content you desire and the search attributes you type, you can get very granular with filtering the database – you won’t regret it. ↓

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The ultimate hack I can recommend is to pin founders.menu to the top of Arc, making it easy to click for immediate access to the ingredients in this growing database – I do this multiple times a day and it’s super helpful. :)

Main course » founders.menu update

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• ICED Theory to grow an infrequent product → The strategies & mapping tool for managing the degree of infrequency a user experiences.

• A better model for valuing startup equity → How to ensure that there is some probability of an IPO and that your stock won’t expire before it happens. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Creating an idea development system → A custom process for going from idea to blog post as a form of idea development.

• The skill learning curve → How to think about learning new skills for, everything from sports to business to cooking to art.

• What makes writing more readable → An examination of translating text to make it as accessible as possible. – MEMBERS ONLY

⦿ Streams – 5x update highlights

• Building a niche $200K MRR agency → Lessons from Ryan Stacey, Founder of Tridas to focus on a niche to find success as an Agency. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Advice from a billion-dollar valuation fitness startup founder → How Will Ahmed built a company at 22 that is now valued at $3.6 BILLION in just 10 years.

• Before the startup → A legendary talk by Paul Graham on how to master the counterintuitive nature of startup founding.

• How to instantly improve your writing → Why you should "always write with an eraser", a simple framework to instantly improve your writing. – MEMBERS ONLY

• How Visualize Value built a $1M brand in 18 months → Jack Butcher & Ross Drakes discuss what it took to create a $1m business, from scratch, in under two years.

What’s next? Curate the design category and release item detail pages.

Desert » hack your founder mindset

Ponder this →  in which quadrant of the Speed vs. Quality of Outcome graph are you with your startup? Now get into the GROWTH ZONE.

Sides » this week on early.tools

Interested in getting early.tools updates directly in your inbox? Then subscribe to the weekly newsletter.early.tools publication that goes out every Monday at midday CET. You will get the latest editorial additions on early.tools and special launched updates – here is this week. ↓

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Fín » food for thought

David Park is the founder & CEO of jenni.ai, which is essentially an AI-powered text editor that helps you write, edit, and cite with confidence, so you can save hours on your next paper. David has experienced tremendous growth over the past 3 years and took a detailed retrospective look at what worked and what didn’t. I’m not usually one for clickbaity posts/articles like this, but it’s packed with value and is worth a long-form blog post on a personal website. Funnily enough, I also recently stumbled on an MFM podcast episode, where Shaan Puri & Sam Parr go into what propelled David’s growth in the early days (spoiler: it has to do with two lucky breaks). You can listen to the full podcast episode here – should this be added to the founders.menu btw? Feel free to let me know in reply to this email. Otherwise, enjoy the experiential wisdom in this super-detailed thread, by David. ↓

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.16 minutes.

A warm welcome to new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » take bite-sized action

Social listening tools like GummySearch.com or Syften.com are becoming more relevant because they allow you to proactively engage with content that either mentions your brand or the niche you are building for. But they are expensive and not always very useful, so I created a free hack for social listening on 𝕏. For namerarity.com for example, I set up search terms like “naming strategy” or “naming agency”, created a folder on Arc and bookmarked tabs for each. I check these once a day in my regular X engagement sessions to maximise online visibility. Social listening doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated… You can do the same by following the instructions below via x.com/search-advanced. The best part about this free hack? It’s pull, not push. You get to choose when you engage.

(I also recommend setting up your main keyword alter at f5bot.com in case you want to see what people are talking about on Reddit…).

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Main course » founders.menu update

⟐ Templates – 1x update highlight

The LinkedIn Sales CRM is a tracker to help you do tailored prospect reach-outs. Yes, automations like LinkedIn Helper or Expandi exist, but you need to learn and customise every reach-out, not just blindly connect without context. Do the thing that doesn’t scale consistently, even if it takes longer… You will learn & grow the most that way. This template will even get you started with 3x highly converting messaging templates for each stage of your LinkedIn Sales funnel. Adapt them and you are ready to go. The database automatically calculates your connect:reply percentage and your average time to get connected or calls scheduled, so you know where to improve your cold reach-out procedure. I’ve used the contained 7-step process to book calls after hundreds of LinkedIn connects – you can do the same. ↓

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• ContentDrip – Create LinkedIn carousels, everyday posts with professional templates, repurposing & more.

• Abyssale – Creative automation platform saves designers 90% of their time and give marketers autonomy to perform.

• Placid – Creative automation toolkit to generate images, videos & PDFs from dynamic templates. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Bannerbear – Auto-generate social media visuals, ecommerce banners and more with API and integrations.

• Invideo – Video creation with ready-made templates that you can quickly customize even if you’ve never done it before. – MEMBERS ONLY

⦿ Streams – 3x update highlights

• To become excellent, be unreasonable – The owner of Eleven Madison Park, explains how hospitality is the number one thing that can help your business truly succeed. – MEMBERS ONLY

• How to apply game theory to business & life – How you play the game of life towards more cooperation vs. defection will determine your level of success.

• Your ideas aren't bad, you just haven't launched yet – Hear Farza Majeed, founder of Buildspace, talk about how your dreams are closer to reality than ever before.

What’s next? Continue curating into the Design Tool category (all Distribution category tools have been added) and ship item detail pages (still WIP).

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  What idea you are working on would benefit from the clarity you could get by going through the “so what?” cycle?

Sides » this week on early.tools

If you’re interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox, I am starting a weekly newsletter.early.tools publication you can subscribe to separately. The X account has grown organically to over 260+ followers since January 2024 alongside 165+ net subscriber growth as well.

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Fín » food for thought

George runs prodmgmt.world, which is probably the most extensive library for product management knowledge on the internet (he’s even considering selling it right now). His X strategy revolves around sharing the wisdom of other great founders and managers, this one being around Jeff Bezos and writing well – here are the 3 unusual things that stuck out to me:

1. Aim to replace weasel words (should bring, would help, arguably the best…) with data or hard facts to solidify a point.

2. Evolve your writing from subjective → objective by limiting your use of adjectives (good, big, small, extremely…) and adverbs (badly, very, well, often, rarely...). The less you use these, the clearer your authority.

3. Is there a takeaway from your writing? You've written a good piece if the customer doesn’t need to ask “so what?”.

If I could sum it up into one single piece of advice: write with precision.

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See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 2.75 minutes.

A warm welcome to new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

I AM SO PUMPED TO INTRODUCE PRE.PAGE in a special edition of this weekly newsletter. A good friend of mine is visiting me from Sweden. We’ve built software together in the past with Eric taking the technical part and myself the marketing, design and copywriting.

Eric and I have built, tested and validated so many products we’ve been obsessing about a kit that could do it all without needing to hack together a stack that would allow us to 1. Design & build a website (Webflow, Framer, Carrd…), 2. Track visitors, especially clicks (Google Analytics, Fathom, Hotjar...), 3. Collect email addresses (Mailchimp, GetWaitlist…) and 4. Iterate our messaging super fast. The best idea validation method we like to use? A fake buy now button to see whether prospects are truly willing to pay.

To our surprise, we did not find any single service that would allow us to do this easily and got way too excited about the looming time to get into the nitty-gritty details of building software again with a shipped pre.page MVP. ↓

We built pre.page as a pre.page (no pun intended!) in 24 hours and have big plans for this tool, which will go so much further than tying together at least the four services I just mentioned. But the first version of the pre.page is essentially what is known in the industry as a smokescreen or fake door test. It will live alongside 3x idea validation methods you can choose. ↓

So what is pre.page exactly? A website builder designed for idea validation with fake buy button landing pages and other validation methods. So you can stop building useless sh*t and build an idea customers can fall in love with before you go all in on it. Want to get a feeling of all this? We even had time to make a quick video to showcase the builder functionality on pre.page.

Our goal with pre.page? Simple. We want to stop fumbling in the dark and not have to glue together different services (and learn their best practices) just to validate an idea (that might not work) – here is a special launch offer. ↓

Starter » take bite-sized action

Will return next week…

Main course » founders.menu update

Nothing new on the platform. founders.menu paid members do get a special -50% discount for a lifetime deal on pre.page. Grab yours today!

What’s next? Finish curating the entire distribution tool section, ship item detail pages next week and write more articles to rank better on search.

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Will return next week…

Sides » this week on early.tools

If you’re interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox, I am starting a weekly newsletter.early.tools publication you can subscribe to separately. The X account has grown organically to over 240+ followers since January 2024 alongside 150+ net subscriber growth as well.

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See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 6.3 minutes.

A warm welcome to 4x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

It’s time to restructure this newsletter. :) Over the past week I reflected and spoke to some early users who wished for more actionable items in this weekly newsletter. Interestingly this coincides with a much-needed refocus of my time to warrant the effort I spend on this weekly newsletter. What better time to do this than issue 020 this week with a new structure:

• Starter » take bite-sized action

• Main course » founders.menu update

• Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

• Sides » this week on early.tools

• Fín » food for thought

If you found the “past week’s startup highlights” useful/something you looked forward to every week, let me know in reply to this email. It was sadly the most time-intensive item on the menu, so I decided to let it go.

One ask → if you have a minute at the end of this newsletter, feel free to reply with your thoughts & suggestions for this structural change to the newsletter.

But without further ado, let’s get into this week’s edition. ↓

Starter » take bite-sized action

Recently I started doing about 20-40 daily LinkedIn cold reachouts for an agency I am trying to build. The connect rate is about 10-11%, with 5x Nos and 4x interested prospects with calls yet to be scheduled. I am quite confident that this strategy will work out with volume (which is honestly the only way to approach sales in 2024), so I summarised it in a quick tweet.

I highly recommend you try this, even though LinkedIn automation services exist… Why? Because you take time to look through every profile to determine whether they’d be a good fit, it forces you to put serious thought into who your ideal customer profile is, instead of building a network of useless connections.

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I even went as far as creating a funnel-type Notion template to track these reachouts and conversions, so I always know who to follow up with. If you would like a template like that, simply reply to this email. :)

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• QRBud – Generate easy & customizable URL QR codes in minutes.

• y.gy – Shorten Links. Make QR Codes. Analyze Traffic. Stop Bots. Do everything by API. – MEMBERS

• Bitly – URL shortener, QR Codes, and Link-in-bio pages to engage your audience and connect them to the right information.

• Share.Clinic – Fix your ugly social media links and create richer links for better results. – MEMBERS

• OSlash – The only AI system you need—to craft delightful user experiences, automate workflows across apps, and transform data into insights.

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• Sales email templates 60%+ open rates – A list of the best email templates used by real HubSpot reps — plus a few bonus templates to get you started. – MEMBERS

• 9 business models that work for solo founders – Understand the business models that are the most effective for a 1-person business.

• Idea machines – Where do tech's ideologies come from, and how do they influence what’s accomplished? – MEMBERS

• Should you charge more? – Why the advice to "charge more" in the indie startup community isn't always the right advice.

• From 2 failed startups to $3,000/month in 4 months – How two co-founders built ScrapingBee, a web scraping API that handles proxy, chrome headless and captchas for users that is making +$3k/month. – MEMBERS

⦿ Streams – 5x update highlights

• How to build and validate your startup idea in 48hrs – How Nico Jeanan made an AI startup in 48 hours and sold it for $65,000 just 3 months later. – MEMBERS

• How to get your first 5 customers – Learn and apply how Alex Hormozi approaches going from 0 to many customers starting with giving away the first 5 for free.

• Waitlist strategy that'll boost your business – Learn why creating a waitlist is the most important thing if you want to build excitement and generate leads for your upcoming product launch.

• How to grow a SaaS to $300K in 12 Months – How Vasco Monteri grew a two-sided B2B services marketplace for a niche-specific service. from $0 to over $300k in just 12 months. – MEMBERS

• What makes a great founder succeed in the long-run – Marc Andreessen advice to Lex Fridman on how to start a company

What’s next? Finish curating the entire distribution tool section, ship item detail pages next week and write more articles to rank better on search.

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  what previous customer conversation could you go back to and apply the Johari window to (re)identify golden nugget insights?

Sides » this week on early.tools

If you’re interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox, I am starting a weekly newsletter.early.tools publication you can subscribe to separately. The X account has grown organically to over 240+ followers since January 2024 alongside 150+ net subscriber growth as well.

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Fín » food for thought

I loved stumbling upon this snippet from David Perell’s podcast interview series. Jason Fried is undoubtedly one of the top entrepreneurs of our time, so his saying this, really hit one simple truth home: entrepreneurship is more art than anything else. It’s an endless discovery of something new that should inspire us to keep playing the game – not to win, but to express ourselves through the products we can make work… Here is Jason’s full quote:

"You have to find the nature of things. That's the thing I've found to be the most useful tool in anything: trying to understand the true nature of an experience, place, or thing and rolling with nature. Any time you go against the true nature of something, you're just battling unnecessarily. So yeah, figure it out. Find the true nature of you, it, or whatever it is and there's going to be more ease. I think you want to get to the place where things feel easy, but we can push ourselves into places that feel hard because we think that it's going to be better if it's harder. Not all the time. Some things you do have to push yourself to learn something brand new. But then, again, let up on the grip a little bit and relax a bit more and I think you'll go further." — @JasonFried

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See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 6.1 minutes.

A warm welcome to 8x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » a mental model

Ponder this →  what obstacles, goals and actions are prospects experiencing with your product? Don’t know? Interview to them.

If you want to read a long-form article, you can also read this article:

How to Ensure Your Startup Builds Relevant Solutions to Real Problems

A proven strategy to acquire customer knowledge by speaking with users to understand their needs and build a product around resulting insights.

founders.menu/blog/ensure-your-startup-builds-relevant-solutions-to-real-problems

Main course » founders.menu update

䷀ Reads – update highlights

1. The 25 most successful shark tank products – After 14 seasons only some of the business ideas have been good enough to earn investments from the show’s Sharks and achieve success.

2. The product-led growth flywheel – Leading with the product (versus sales or marketing) means that the product experience begins earlier. This is how. – MEMBERS

3. See-Do-Feedback Loop– These basic steps form a loop that can allow you to learn any skill or subject.

4. The TEA framework of productivity – How to manage your time, energy, and attention rather than fall privy to complex productivity systems.

5. Your growth strategy should align with your company's strategy – Why you should perfectly aling company strategy with growth strategy and how to actually do it at various different growth phases. – MEMBERS

6. What is a good growth rate? – Benchmarks and insights from the world’s best investors and what they expect at each stage of the business.

7. The 4 steps to becoming indistractable – Overcoming distraction is the struggle of our time. Here’s how to manage your wandering mind.

8. The aggregator business model – Taxis, hotels, groceries, insurance, travel and many other industries now have a dominant aggregator and this is exactly how that works. – MEMBERS

9. How to ensure your startup builds relevant solutions to real problems – A proven strategy to acquire customer knowledge by speaking with users to understand their needs and build a product around resulting insights.

⦿ Streams – update highlights

1. How Softr reached 400k users – How Mariam reached 400,000 users with Softr, a no-code platform that people rave about.

2. How Causal survived near death – How Taimur generated $750k ARR in less than a year, after they did one strategic change. – MEMBERS

3. From $0 to $250k in 3 months with a bot – How the startup incident.io made 250,000$ in less than 3 months - starting with a bot.

4. Stanley Cup CEO Terence Reilly's Marketing Masterclass – The Stanley Cup phenomenon definitely fits the bill and is a masterclass in the power of well timed marketing and brand hype. – MEMBERS

5. Managing tentpole launches at Gumroad – A chat with Josh from Baremetrics about our product development document and how we manage large launches.

6. Things that don't scale w. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel – Learn about the early day software hacks that weren't meant to scale for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitch, and imeem.

7. Rick Rubin shares his secrets for creativity – Rick Rubin reveals how to make great art, become a better collaborator, and discover ideas floating through the universe. – MEMBERS

All templates got a unified design

It took a while, but the 6x free templates are now all in the same design, so the founders.menu brand is recognisable across all channels. :)

Get them all via templates.julianpaul.me

What’s next? Item detail pages for each ingredient. Generating 700+ unique pages for each item is proving more difficult than I anticipated.

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

[1] Oz Golan, the Co-Founder & CEO of NoName Security just announced an acquisition by Akamai for $450million. The acquisition is expected to meet customer demand for API protection as API attacks have shown significant YoY growth.

iPad Pro after Crush Ad LG & Apple Crush Ads

[2] After the controversial launch video of the new iPad Pro this week, what was meant to show the creative capabilities of the product quickly turned into an audience shitstorm. This resulted in Tor Myhren, the Vice President of Marketing at Apple releasing a public apology: “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” It also feels like the vid emulates a 2008 LG ad.

[3] Sonos is reportedly working on shipping the Ace Headphones to introduce new product lines after speaker interest is dwindling. These images were “mistakenly“ leaked by Schuurman last week. Would you buy these over other wireless headphones? The price point is set at €403.58 / $430, which is premium to say the least.

[4] Alex Kendall, the founder & CEO of UK’s Wayve.ai, just announced a $1.05B Series C announcement led by Softbank. His vision that made it all happen? What he calls embodied AI in autonomous driving production vehicles. You can read more here.

[5] Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon just built a meeting summarizer app. Using AWS services like Lambda, Transcribe, and Bedrock Werner and his team are open-sourcing an app to summarize virtual team meetings. It gathers notes from meetings and allows you to stay focused on the conversation itself, as the granular details of the discussion are automatically captured, and even creates a list of to-dos. More here.

Sides » this week on early.tools

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Fín » food for thought

Blake Emal is one of my favourite content writers on the interwebs because he often proves that uncontroversial approaches work best in marketing. This one is a prime example: rather than asking website visitors to read to the bottom, try leading with the value at the top, then provide context after. Copywriting clarity is not about suspense on the internet. In contrast: other content types like long or short-form videos are. In copywriting suspense is like “burying the lead” as Blake shares. Writing copy is more about capturing your reader’s attention fast. Here are some facts about your typical website visitor: “according to Statisticbrain.com, 8 seconds is the average person's attention span and only 28% of words are read on an average”. And that’s not a lot trust me. What supports this even more is that the NN Group found only 16% of website visitors read every word – people don’t read, they scan these days. Why? Scanning is searching. So try BLUF (bottom line up front) the next time you are writing/structuring/building your content.

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See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 4.52 minutes.

A warm welcome to new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

This week, founders.menu was featured on Uneed and secured the #1 spot of the day. Thank you for the support if you upvoted. Uneed is an up-and-coming ProductHunt alternative that works similarly with a ranking of a week, month and even year… Should I launch on ProductHunt next? 👀

But without further ado, let’s get into this week’s edition.

Starter » a mental model

Ponder this →  where is the next opportunity you can apply the feel, felt, found model to better empathize with your prospects & close that deal?

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – update highlights

• Sales Playbook → A non-conventional approach to selling for all department levels of a mature org. – MEMBERS

• Find my audience → Gather intent-based audience insights to uncover search trends, and unlock new ways to reach them. – MEMBERS

• SparkToro → How to get better ROI from Content, SEO, Social, PR, and Performance Marketing.

• BuzzSumo → See how much interest brands and content generate in the wild.

• Sentione → Brand monitoring, trend analysis and customer analytics tool for marketing teams. – MEMBERS

䷀ Reads – update highlights

• VC mapping → A database of over 2500 investors and venture capital firms in one place.

• Every leader needs a “user manual” → Your coworkers are probably misinterpreting your behavior as insensitive, lazy, or cold. Here’s how to stop the friction before it starts. – MEMBERS

• The net promoter score → We shouldn’t be distracted by an NPS that doesn’t actually measure that.

• The epsilon method → Instead of trying to go from zero to one, we’re going from one to one plus epsilon, where epsilon represents our small change. – MEMBERS

• 5 psychological tactics to write better emails → Unlock the secrets behind powerful emails with consumer psychology expert Phill Agnew. Learn how small changes can yield remarkable results.

What’s next? Continue to build out the product detail pages to strengthen search engine presence and discoverability.

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

[1] Tyler Denk announced a $33M Series B for beehiiv.com, the newsletter platform I am using to write these newsletters. The cool part? They also did a $1M community funding, which was sold out in just 2 hours. You can read up on the full story on Tyler’s beehiiv.

[2] Mike Fey at island.io (a browser for work) announced a $175 million Series D investment at a $3 billion valuation, which makes the browser-based product having raised a total of $487 million. Island might be the enterprise browser that centralises work apps in a secure environment.

[3] Scott Farquhar, the Co-Founder and now ex-CEO of Atlassian stepped down from the leadership on April 25th. This has not stopped the company from shipping its first AI teammate called Rovo, which will act as an assistant to tie together selected SaaS app functionality.

[4] Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance has been sentenced to 4 months in prison due to allowing sanctions violations of more than $898 million, according to US prosecutors. Lesson: circumventing laws won’t work for long.

[5] LinkedIn as a channel might just be something you should be taking more seriously with its recent sessions growth up 12% with record engagement alongside over 1 billion members in over 200 countries worldwide LinkedIn is becoming more and more relevant.

Sides » this week on early.tools

If you’re interested in getting updates for early.tools directly in your inbox, I am starting a weekly newsletter.early.tools publication you can subscribe to separately. The X account has grown organically to over 217+ followers since January 2024 alongside 133 net subscriber growth as well.

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Fín » food for thought

Natia Kurdadze runs spaceleads.pro, a lead gen agency and productised services platform that helps founders grow. I’ve been a long-time reader of her hacks and can only recommend you check them out. Especially this one when it comes to SEO-hacking your way to growing organic traffic to your site. It will give you a solid overview of what you might be missing in your SEO strategy.

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DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 3.5 minutes.

A warm welcome to new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » a mental model

Ponder this →  where are you overindexing on your past? Break that thought pattern and shift your focus forward.

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools update highlights

• Close → Sell more efficiently by unifying your outreach, engagement, and automation into a simple, flexible CRM.

• Copper CRM → The CRM that works for you, so you can spend time on relationships.

• BreakCold → Nurture B2B contacts effortlessly in less than 30 minutes per day using email & socials to close deals faster. – MEMBERS

• Attio → Powerful, flexible and data-driven CRM to build the exact CRM your business needs.

• Sizle → Fast, secure document sharing with live analytics and lead insights. – MEMBERS

䷀ Reads update highlights

• Basics of CAC & LTV for your go-to-market strategy

• Where to find ideas to bootstrap on social media platforms

• 6 reasons to bootstrap your next business

• How to startup? Be innovative by solving real problems

• How to name your next startup?

Newly formatted founders.menu/blog with 5x fresh articles & founders.menu/roadmap integrated

On top of that, I also reformatted the navbar, to add more clarity into what the website’s brand is with a logo, the two main navbar items and a members section have moved to the right on the desktop version of founders.menu.

What’s next? Add item detail pages, so the entire founders.menu has a better opportunity to get discovered via search.

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

[1] Jesse Lyu just launched the Rabbit r1 to the public and did a live unboxing keynote, before first products hit pre-ordering customers next week. The responses have been quite positive in comparison to humane AI pin. From the demo and initial reviews it seems a lot more capable and fast for a gen 1 product in this category.

[2] Jason Rugolo has launched the IYO, an AI wearable audio device that functions more like headphones instead of another handheld device. The only question: would you wear a hands-free audio device as large as this? I think hands-free is the future, so this is a welcomed direction imho.

[3] Govind Balakrishnan launched Rio as a waitlist product under the Curio brand. It’s a personal news assistant that will do the legwork of fact-checking for you. Interested? Check early.tools next week!

[4] Wisani Shilumani just launched heyboardroom.com to help professionals find dates and potential partners that are more on “their level” – will this work? I think only time will tell, but it is promising.

[5] Irvin Zahn just exited Beat with subframe.com, a new way to get production-ready code in no time. Think of Subframe as a drag-and-drop visual editor that eliminates the need for both Figma and Framer, for example.

Sides » this week on early.tools

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Fín » food for thought

We’ve all heard Reid Hoffman, the Founder of LinkedIn say this. But this illustration reminded me of how this feels like when you take into consideration the spin, wind and many other variables on your way down. It’s not supposed to be easy, so keep going and jump off that cliff to figure it out. ✈️

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DM, community & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 3.87 minutes.

A warm welcome to 5x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

Starter » a mental model

Ponder this →  Where is your prospect’s weak point and what can you do to hack around their objections to close more sales?

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools update highlights

With 29 Tools added in the Distribution category, there are plenty of great customer support options alongside lead automation services now discoverable. Here are my top 4x tools added to help with LinkedIn outreach:

• Wiza

• LinkedHelper

• Expandi – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Surfe – MEMBERS-ONLY

䷀ Reads update highlights

This week’s Read addition saw most additions in the [2] MVP → Business stage with a focus on PMF, monetization and operations.

• How to measure PMF

• The pyramid of clarity – MEMBERS-ONLY

• Define your monetization strategy

• The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework

• The first step to building a growth machine – MEMBERS-ONLY

What’s next? The blog is taking much longer than expected as I will incorporate it into a /guides section with more resources like terms and members-only guides yet to come. It should go live next week.

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

[1] Carl Peid released the Ear (a) at nothing.tech, at a much cheaper price point with a first splash in their product lineup. The Ear (2) also made its debut with a re-engineered sound core, for crystal-clear audio. After selling over 100,000 units of the Phone (2a) in 24hrs post-release this year, Nothing is ramping up its global presence with the intent to stay.

[2] Dan Siroker launched The Pendant by Limitless.ai, a personalized AI powered by what you’ve seen, said, or heard with a app, Mac app, Windows app, and a wearable. It already surpassed 10,000 pre-orders a day after its launch & costs just $99.

[3] Vlad Magdalin is expanding the ways Webflow can empower teams to create and optimize incredible web experiences by acquiring Intellimize.com to ensure that Websites & Marketing can sit closer together.

[4] Jaclyn Johnson & Angeline Vuong teamed up to build investwithcherub.com, so ambitious founders, investors and advisors access to the connections and capital typically unavailable outside of traditional VC networks.

[5] Noam Bardin, the Founder of post.news is shutting down the platform within the next few weeks. The Twitter alternative focused connecting on real people, with real news and civil conversations. Why the shutdown? Not enough rapid growth, a requirement for consumer apps.

Sides » this week on early.tools

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Fín » food for thought

Product-Market Fit is the holy grail of any startup journey, so making sense of the different markets and product types can deliver a ton of clarity as you will always be subject to your customer’s awareness of the problem and the novelty of your solution – PMF will always require varying tactics to achieve.

Are you currently solving a HAIR ON FIRE, HARD FACT or FUTURE VISION problem with the startup you are building? 👀 More context here.

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See you next week. ☻