Founders Feast 003: entrepreneurial archetypes, automation insights, and startup highlights.

Servus & happy Sunday. ☼

Time to read this week → 4.64 minutes.

Hope all is well with you and you are pushing onwards and upwards in 2024 like never before. I am beginning to experiment with slight variations for this newsletter, so I will cut this intro short, so you can get your hands on this Sunday’s Feast faster than usual. Let’s get into it, shall we?

Starter → a mental model

If you are in the first half, build something from scratch with something like founders.menu as your daily startup companion. If you are in the second half, consider acquiring a company at acquire.com (in case you have enough liquidity to do so). Another approach for those in the second half might be to learn what it takes to scale & optimize companies in VC, as a Founders Associate or as a Chief of Staff at first.

Ponder this →  What type of entrepreneur does my skillset align with?

Don’t think too much & just pick your type. Then do everything to master it.

Personally – I am a Remixer most of the time.

Main course → founders.menu update

This week was particularly tough, as I was caught up with tons of priorities in my day job, so there was little time to deploy elsewhere, but I digress. I made an interesting learning I’d like to call the “Source of Data Truth”. I am sure you are familiar with the concept of staging and production environments in product development, so I won’t bore you. Working with testing product changes before releasing them publicly made me quickly realize that I need a robust solution to work with rather large amounts of ever-evolving data. So, I had to spend a lot of time this week hooking up Google Sheets (where I curate and clean all the data) and Bubble, the platform I am building founders.menu on. It was a hassle to figure out a 2-way sync with a bunch of API calls and webhooks, but I ultimately got it to work. With Google Sheets as my “Source of Data Truth”, I can now easily migrate new items and even update the same item with whatever changes I need to make. By the click of a button.

The learning → automation makes you work harder, but ultimately smarter if you prioritize it at the right moment in time – that is: right now.

Side note… if you are struggling with a similar issue like this, do let me know in reply to this email – I am happy to help!

#buildinpublic platform update

As you know, I am committed to founders.menu x #buildinpublic. Hence I am transparently showing the Roadmap I currently have in mind. I chose a tool that will also make it easy for any member to provide feedback so the platform can improve into the best version of itself. You can find this public board on the main website or by visiting → public.founders.menu – wdyt?

Oh, and I also added a Privacy Policy as well as Terms & Conditions. You can find these docs in the footer or by becoming a member today.

ϟ Tool curation update

And of course an update regarding the curation size. We are currently at 138 tools that's just 12% of the database... Oh and this list that doesn't even include multimedia yet – tons of reads, listens & streams still to handpick. FREE Member signups are still open until further notice… ↓

What’s next? Next week will see the Build category of tools introduced – this will be a large addition of around 175 more tools. And of course, you might see more functionality (sort, filter, search, etc.:.). There is much to come!

Desert → past week’s startup highlights

• Raphael Schaad officially fused Cron with Notion Calendar. This was to be expected, but it has led to lots of mourning in the design community – especially around the loss of a great Mac OS icon. You can dive into these details on X here. (more on fixes at the end)

• Peter Levels shared his open-sourced investment portfolio, which is making him the most money out of all his products thus far ($129k/m)… check levels.vc and read this tweet for more context.

• John Rush shared an exciting deep-dive into going from idea to paying clients in 85 days. All with indexrusher.com, a new tool he working on – it’s packed with inspiring nudges and worth the read.

• Lenny Rachitsky published a podcast around Good Strategy, Bad Strategy with Richard Rumelt, who wrote the book on how leaders become strategists… My favorite insight: “The most common cause of bad strategy is a weak diagnosis. The second most common is confusing goals with strategy.“ Let that sink in.

• Arvid Kahl published a fun episode around White Glove Onboarding – it’s a great reminder of the “do things that don’t scale” primitive that Paul Graham has rinsed the internet with. In his own words: “It means stepping back from your product and looking at people’s tasks and goals … there might already be a solution in place for their needs, so understand what or who you’re replacing.”

Sides → TBD – more soon!

This section is still in the works. For those of you following me on Twitter: x.com/itsjulianpaul might have a good idea of what this might be.

I can’t wait to fully release what I’ve been working on.

Closing thoughts

Thanks a thousand for being part of this list. My goal is to add more and more value as founders.menu becomes more functional – hang in there with me.

But now to the little snack I shared every week. Someone on X released this fun iteration of the Notion Icon, which emulates the “old” Cron logo. If you are a user like myself, you immediately opened “Notion Calendar”, pressed ⌘K to open the Command Palette then entered defaults write app dockIcon style1 to get the old Cron logo back. Combined with Tobias’ my dock Mac OS dock is looking super tasty again…

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻