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  • Founders Feast 006: founders.menu goes paid with likes & members-only content.

Founders Feast 006: founders.menu goes paid with likes & members-only content.

On bootstrapping versus fundraising, notable product releases from a lot of open sourced startups and reflections on solopreneurship.

Author

Julian Paul
February 11, 2024

Servus & happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 4.4 minutes.

A warm welcome to 9x new subscribers who got a BOOTSTRAP OS/Ideapad product or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter. ☻

Servus from a relaxing daybed at the Silent Spa close to Vienna, Austria today. I’ve probably spent more than 15+ hours tediously building out 3 new features and integrating payments into the founders.menu platform this week, so there is lots to share. But before we get into it, don’t forget to treat yourself to a relaxing experience every now and then to sustain balanced momentum. 🧘 

Starter » a mental model

Bootstrapping vs. Fundraising. ↓

With any business building endeavour, there are roughly 2 approaches: build with or build without funding. Both have their merits. Either will say more about you as an entrepreneur than what you end up building. This is because it comes down to what you prioritise:
1. Retained ownership → building at your own pace.
2. Diluted ownership → growing at all costs.

Zooming in even closer, there are 4 styles of founding. ↓
1. Bootstrapping → continuous profit-first business building without the need for external capital injection [Low stakeholder management].
2. Acceleration & Incubation → pre-idea/pre-team/pre-product capital injection & guidance in exchange for equity. [Medium stakeholder mangement].
3. Angel funding → any-stage capital injections & network access from high-networth individuals in exchange for equity. [Medium stakeholder management].
4. VC funding → stage-specific capital injections in exchange for equity with the expectation of a +10x in 5 years or less [High stakeholder management].

by Julian Paul

Personally, I am most impressed with bootstrappers & indiehackers, as these individuals accomplished the most difficult way of building a business: without outside funds. But again. All of this is a stylistic choice – 100% up to you.

Ponder this →  do you want to build at your own pace or build a hypergrowth company at an imposed pace?

Main course » founders.menu update

This week’s product iteration brings a ton of new features to the platform. Apart from the 3 described below, the biggest change is that Stripe payments are now integrated. If you signed up since January 2024, your account will be a premium account until Q3 2024 as a thank you for being an early adopter. You will benefit from an increasingly growing curation of tools, reads, listens, and streams. Let’s check out and try out these changes via founders.menu. ↓

[1] Filter by stage is now possible for all items

For a total of 5 stages, you can now instantly filter the entire database to find items that are highly relevant to the stage of your current founder’s journey. Is this helpful?

[2] Liking to save items is now live for accounts

Find your favorites on your account - the count is visible globally.

[3] Members-only content is now actively locked

This affects 40% of the database.

As already mentioned, free member signups are now closed. Now, you can become a member with a paid plan starting at €3/month from today. After the first 10 paid subscriptions, the monthly plan will increase to 4€ for the next 20, then 5€ for the next 30, and so on… Are you ready to take action? ↓

What’s next? Curate 111+ people ingredients and keep adding small additional functionalities weekly (sort, filter, search, etc.:.). There’s lots more to come!

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

Sides » this week on early.tools

Exciting week overall with an especially cool AI hardware launch. If you are also ready to get the first version of your landing up and running, why not try our sponsor LaunchList using code: EARLYTOOLS for -20% off? 👀

Closing thoughts

Aleksandr Volodarsky, the founder of lemon.io just shared a great list of one-person businesses he loves. Solopreneurship has been on the rise lately as it has never been easier to build a product with a repeatable business model without much human resource overhead. I personally really love that this is even feasible in 2024. So the question I want to leave you with today? What scalable one-person business could you run? Do you even need VC money?

DM & reply-to-email is open. ☻

See you around.

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