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Founders Feast 005: early.tools launch, first sponsor & 111 personal tools added

Learn how early.tools complements founders.menu, double click on our first sponsor and dive into the 3x lean startup growth engines.

Author

Julian Paul
February 04, 2024

Servus & happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 5.39 minutes.

Greetings from the Austrian Alps. 🇦🇹 This week I had the pleasure to pop on my skis and hit the slopes for a small winter vacation. Nevertheless, I was able to work on fresh updates. The most notable one being early.tools, a product I launched in November 2023 and worked on every single day from Mon-Fri. It’s been a joy to see it take off with plenty of interest and first sponsor. ✨

How does early.tools fit into founders.menu?
Good question. Founders.menu will remain the one source for highly vetted resources to help you get unstuck in your founder’s journey. Early.tools on the other hand are products that are too early to list, but inspiring to get into.

Let’s get into today’s newsletter starting with Sides. ↓

Sides » this week on early.tools

I am more than excited to share the sides section I have been teasing for weeks now. And for good reason because it just landed its first sponsor: LaunchList, a product where you can get more signups for your early-stage product with pre-launch gamified viral waitlists. The best part? This partnership is offering 20% off all plans with the code EARLYTOOLS.

Early.tools is a new kind of platform where you can discover waitlist, alpha & beta releases of products you'll love. Whilst it accepts submissions, the catalog will remain highly curated, so the quality of listed products remains high and you have a reason to come back more frequently. If you want to dive right into past week’s tools, visit the tweet below. ↓

Starter » mental models to take action

3x startup engines of growth ↓

As a followup to last week’s Lean Startup book takeaways and the build-measure-learn framework, these lean engines of growth are based on quantifiable feedback loops that will lead you to product-market-fit. ↓
➀ Sticky engine of growth → your product will grow if the rate of new customer acquisition exceeds the churn rate. Find growth by focusing on engaging existing customers, hence improving customer retention.
➁ Viral engine of growth → normal users spread the product automatically (not intentional evangelisation). The feedback loop here is the viral coefficient, which determines how many /10 customers refer a friend to use your product (the higher, the faster the spread).
➂ Paid engine of growth → to drive growth, either increase the revenue from each customer or lower the cost of acquiring a new customer. The feedback loop is the CAC:LTV ratio (ideally at least 1:3). The lifetime value is found by deducting variable costs accrued by the customers lifetime, whereafter the remaining revenue can then be reinvested into paid growth.

It is recommended you focus on one at a time to avoid complexity.

Here’s to Eric Ries for yet another model!

Ponder this →  which engine of growth should your startup use?

And don’t forget: new customers are sourced from past customers via… word of mouth, as a side effect of product usage, through funded advertising, or repeat purchase/use of your product.

Discovering where sourcing new customers from is more effective, will help you decide what engine of growth you should run on.

Main course » founders.menu update

As I was on vacation this week, I was only able to focus on adding 111 items to the Personal tool category of founders.menu. There are so many great products in there, I am sure you will find something you will love immediately. Here are just a couple of interesting pieces I added today…

Today, the curation hit 36% (418/1163 tools in total) – FREE member signups are open until next week, then pricing will begin to charge you monthly. ↓

What’s next? Curate 100+ more resources and keep adding small additional functionality weekly (sort, filter, search, etc.:.). Sort & filter will be next!

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

  • Apple Vision Pro was officially launched to pre-ordering customers this week with the first customer being cheered out of the Apple store doors. An interesting fact? Apple patented the first version of the Vision Pro back in 2007 with Steve Jobs still around. Is this a breakthrough product now that it’s out? I think Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny Capital has solid thoughts after 24hrs with it. Wdyt? (in any case, feel free to check out these 600 Vision Pro apps)

  • Third-party app stores for iOS might be coming due to a new EU regulation. At the surface level, this might seem like a good idea, but it imposes massive security risks to our devices. Hence, Apple imposes a prohibitive €1 million deposit and charges an annual €0.50 per user fee. Do we need this, or is this just malicious compliance?

  • The Browser Company (running arc.net) launched Arc Search and shared their vision for Act II of their first breakthrough product. Their 15-minute keynote highlighting how the web works is iconic – I highly recommend you watch it. The LLM-supported browse-for-you feature is slick, but raises some questions: if AI browses the internet for us, how will business websites survive if they monetize off the attention of users? Arc will cut out the need for clicking links and instead deliver a relevant digest of information you might need.

  • “More than 80% of pitches now involve AI” as recently stated by Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman of Kleiner Perkins. Why does this matter? Well, to put this in perspective, ChatGPT (the fastest-growing product by signups in history) launched on November 30th, 2022 – that is 431 days ago. And startupland is still in the grips of AI.

  • PI.FYI is a fresh scene-y social network that just launched off of the back of Perfectly Imperfect, a newsletter, built by Alex Cushing and Serey Morm. It’s kind of like a recommendation network of people sharing everything they like from films to ways of living.

Closing thoughts

From next week onwards, it’s business as usual with fresh platform features (promised!). Thanks for sticking around and I hope you enjoyed this newsletter as much as I did writing it! I want to leave you with a fun fact: this startup was founded today 20 years ago (insane how fast time flies huh?)…

On February 4th, 2004, “The Facebook” was founded by Mark Zuckerberg along with his college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes at Harvard University.

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you around. ☻

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