Welcome to 'Founders Feast'

Hey there – been a long time.

It’s Julian Paul & I can’t wait to get you up to speed.

I know you might be asking yourself: what’s this? Why am I on this list?

In short, if you ever got a bootstrap.supply product, you are now part of an evolved venture. I am calling this next step: founders.menu, a new kind of platform, where founders will find all they need to take action. Why this new direction, Julian? Well, I’ve been building products for a long time now and always had this dream of running a vibrant community of like-minded entrepreneurs. But I’ve never quite had the right angle or momentum to do so... In 2019, I thought getting funding from VC & angels was the holy grail. In 2020 I caught onto the bootstrapping movement and even launched bootstrap.supply, an OS (will be continued) for independent founders to bootstrap their dream business. But as I continued to build products like belong.haus I noticed it’s not about the way you build a business. It’s THAT you are building a business that matters above all. Whether you are bootstrapping, indiehacking, VC-funded, or simply building beautiful tools for the fun of it. We all see problems and conjure up solutions in an ever-evolving product-market-fit battle. We are and always will be founders.

As I came to this realization, many questions started to form… where is your go-to place to get unstuck? Where do you go to keep your momentum high? Where do you get inspired to try things differently? But I couldn’t find an answer. So I brainstormed concepts for days and finally founders.menu struck me like a bolt of lightning. You see, depending on where you are in your founder journey, you will have phase-specific problems to solve. Just like a menu has aperitifs (idea → concept), starters courses (concept → MVP), main courses (MVP → Business), deserts (business → scale), and sides/beverages (boosts) to cater to our varying needs, founders.menu will offer the same as a feast of resources for every stage of your founder journey.

Because the one thing that defines any founder’s ability to succeed is their speed and quality of taking action – this is informed by three pillars:

1. Regime → intentional systems to build momentum.

2. Relations → people who offer you divergent viewpoints.

3. Resources → stuff that can nudge you to try new methods.

It's already difficult enough to build a successful business, so why pigeonhole yourself into niche online communities that “build the same way” as you?

We’re all founders. We all need to take faster & more precise actions.

That’s what founders.menu is all about.

The new founders.menu platform

To kick off 2024, I took my first piece of action. A new landing page, with a members area that’s already open for signups. As a thank you for being on this list, I will make all member signups free until the next newsletter goes out on January 14th next week. Members will have full access to a growing list of Tools, Reads, Listens, Streams and so much more to come…

What’s ‘The Feast’ newsletter?

Now to the purpose of this newsletter. Every Sunday I will send ‘The Feast’ with a select number of ingredients, so you can stay up-to-date with founders.menu and get a good overview of the past week’s founder highlights from across the internet. Here is the structure I have in mind. ↓

1. Starter → a business hack or mental model.

2. Main course → founders.menu update & new ways to take action.

3. Desert → founder highlights from the past week.

4. Side → TBD – more soon!

This is not a definite structure, so expect to see experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. If you have ideas, feel free to reply to this email. ☻

2024 goals

There are three things I want to publicly commit to this year. ↓

• Attain 10K founders.menu subscribers (currently at 504).

• Unify ALL bootstrap.supply products under founders.menu.

• Build out and monetize a fully functional founders.menu platform.

I will be sharing #buildinpublic progress weekly on ‘The Feast’ and of course more spontaneous details on my x.com/itsjulianpaul profile.

By being part of this list, you are along for the ride.