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founders.menu 011: welcome to the first batch of 25 members

Community invites are officially sent, Seth Godins 2x2 for choices and the early-stage startup funding landscape in March 2024.

Author

Julian Paul
March 17, 2024

Servus & happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 4.63 minutes.

A warm welcome to 21x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

How is everyone doing this cozy Sunday? 🇬🇧 I am writing from the British countryside today, having waved goodbye to yet another year of my chronological life yesterday, although imho birthdays don’t change much. However, celebrations are good reasons to reflect, so I am excited for what this next year has to offer – and with that open community.founders.menu.

So if you want to give a belated birthday present, join the community. ☻

That being said, let’s get into a typical founders.menu newsletter. ↓

Starter » a mental model

2×2 for Choices ↓

Seth Godin argues its helpful to have a portfolio of bets or projects you believe in. These are not always going to be successful, so it helps to plot them on a simple 2×2 grid to be brutally honest about where to invest more time, energy or money – here are some traps to avoid:
[1] All your eggs in a low-chance basket – a risky bet might never pay off.
[2] Doing it because of scarcity – everyone is there, so its most difficult.
[3] Focusing on the easy things – these will not reap the highest reward.

If you are running a portfolio of bets (like I am with founders.menu & early.tools), this quote will give you lots of peace of mind by Seth Godin: “Risky implies that failure will cost a lot. It won’t. You can thrive with this strategy because you have a portfolio, and because you realize that ‘unlikely’ is not the same as ‘not worth trying.’”

What action to take? Build a persistent, generous portfolio, where each of the resulting items benefits by being built on each other. How? A balanced portfolio of diversified bets.

What action to avoid? Focusing too much on projects with small positive outcomes that also have a low chance of success – these won’t pay off.

A word of warning? Spreading yourself too thing is equally bad as pigeonholing yourself down one low chance x big positive outcome.

Ponder this →  What small positive outcome x low chance of success project is currently in your portfolio? Should it be?

Main course » founders.menu update

I’m overexcited to open community.founders.menu. ☻ If you are a premium member, you will have been invited already. If you signed up directly on Skool & made the cut, you will have been accepted as part of the first batch of 25 free members. If you haven’t applied yet, membership applications are still open – I will be accepting new members on a rolling basis from now.

The channels are structured according to 3 fundamentals: Regime, Relations, and Resources – here is a quick reminder of what this means:

  1. Regime → proven methods to inspire how you take action.

  2. Relations → energising people who love taking action together.

  3. Resources → inspiring ingredients to nudge what action to take next.

Action to take → feel free to rewatch the pitch video to remind yourself of the values we want to embody, then proceed to introduce yourself and share any Regime, Relation nudge, or Resource that could inspire others.

Apart from opening the community, you will also find ~40 additional ䷀ Reads to founders.menu, with ~30% locked for premium members. These are gems I’ve collected over the years. You’ll find a lot of them are useful for the MVP → Business stage – let’s discuss them via community.founders.menu. ↓

What’s next? Gamify the community to unlock template downloadable, and make it the #1 reason to return & engage – there is so much to come!

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

[1] Sam Altman is back on the board and will continue to lead Open AI alongside Sue Desmond-Hellmann, the former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former legal executive at Sony; and Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart.

[2] With AI & compute-intense workloads, Peter Marton raised $3 million seed round to build OpenMeter, to better serve enterprises with real-time data.

[3] Jacob Eiting, the CEO & Co-Founder of Revenue Cat published the State of Subscription apps in 2024, outlining a shocking fact: only 3.5% of apps reach a daily up to 10,000 MRR (from a dataset of almost 30K products).

[4] Piotr Kulpinski launched openalternative.co, to provide users with open-source alternatives to popular software. The PH Launch garnered over 10K website clicks & lots of interest.

[5] Bastian Lehmann, the Founder of Postmates is working on TipTop, having first successfully launched TipTop Cash, Bastian is now on the hustle to make TipTop Shop big: a new way to trade devices P2P.

Sides » this week on early.tools

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

Peter Walker, the Head of Insights at Carta published the early-stage startup cheatsheet from which we can see that right now, it’s probably best to pursue angel investments first, so you can leverage their network, get cash, and not get diluted like crazy. If you have another take on the table, let me know!

And that’s that – I am curious: What are you building this week? Anything I can support you with? DM, community & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

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