Founders Feast 002

Uncover the four levels of luck and the importance of action in the #buildinpublic journey through founders.menu platform updates.

Author

Julian Paul
January 14, 2024

Servus & happy Sunday. ☼

Read-time this week → 5.24 minutes.

One of the most difficult things with the #buildinpublic movement is just how much effort is involved in being heads down building and sharing your progress simultaneously. On the one hand, it should be effortless because you just write about what you just did. But on the other hand, not every day is as productive as you hoped it to be. And in the often messy processes, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

It’s fine if things aren’t going exactly according to plan or you make more mistakes than usual. What matters most is that you keep adding layers to the momentum of your founder’s journey – no matter the speed.

But now into the promised structure of this weekly newsletter. As already shared last week, The Feast will bring you a diverse menu filled with tasty founder items from Starter to Main Course, Sides, and Desert. So allow me to take you through this first official one. As always: if you have any feedback or suggestions, simply reply to this email – my inbox is open.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

Starter → a mental model

Luck surface area ↓

When you're excited about something, it naturally attracts others to you. And the more people you share your passion with, the wider your luck surface area becomes. This is true for all personal & professional in life.

I read about this for the first time on one of Marc Andreesens old blog posts and these 4 levels of luck really stuck with me:

[1] Blind luck → circumstances that are not in your control. These are the means given to you from birth (body, mind & soul).

[2] Bold initiative → you are acting and by doing so interacting with the world around you. Hence increasing your chances of success.

[3] Prepared chance → the more you experience, the more you will be able to notice the gravitas of an opportunity laid in front of you.

[4] Reputational luck → the more you succeed, the more you’ll be known. Meaning: you will be top of mind when others think of someone to recommend – this is when luck finds you.

As you can notice: action is at the core of it all.

You can read the full article here.

Ponder this →  What can you do to move up in your level of luck?

Do more of that… And if you are as intrigued as I am, a suggested further read → A Skill Called Luck by Jakob Greenfeld. This fun little 64-page e-book will dive into how to increase your luck surface area.

Main course → founders.menu update

It’s a little embarrassing to say, but I started curating founders.menu resources 7+ years ago. And not in Google Sheets, Airtable or any database similar product. No, I used Bear Notes and just added names and links of resources as I found them. Over time this turned into an unstructured and difficult-to-search mess, in need of much clarity. So I spent a good portion of December transferring all the resources I curated from Bear Notes into a structured database. The result? 1186 handpicked tools – a lot more than I expected. So optimizing for “time to value” is taking longer than anticipated.

Since last week, I decided to scrap the original curation of the 118 items in the Startup category and begin with Analytics tools. The reason? I need to ensure the quality of every single item. Meaning I am cross-checking titles, descriptions, links, and categorizations for every item that gets added. A tedious, but necessary task so this product can shine in its own right.

So founders.menu currently has 60 items in its live curation. That is just about 5% of what the entire directory (just tools) will end up holding. Insane.

Now to some product updates ↓

  • The navbar moved from the side to the top. Feedback reached my inbox this was preferred and I agree. The menu items are also now visible on mobile, so you can sign up/in to save items on the go.

  • Every item in the curation now also has a stage from 5 available: [0] Idea → Concept, [1] Concept → MVP, [2] MVP → Business, [3] Business → Funded, [4] Funded → Sold. This is the indicator as to what stage of your founder’s journey a resource is most relevant for.

  • The tagging system is now fixed to show only what a tool is categorized in. This was a visual bug I needed that’s now resolved.

  • And of course tons of tiny visual touchups... Here is what a fully tagged item looks like. What do you think?

Since the curation is only at 5% (honestly way less), I have decided to keep member signups open until further notice – feel free to grab yours now. ↓

What’s next? Curate up to 100 resources and keep adding small additional functionality weekly (sort, filter, search, etc.:.). There is so much to come!

Desert → past week’s startup highlights

This week I noticed we are at an interesting spot, where reflections on 2023 and goals or even predictions for 2024 are in the works. Nevertheless, these 5 highlights stuck out to me in W02 this year. ↓

  • Jesse Lyu launched rabbit r1, one of the first hardware personal AI assistants that hit a nerve by selling over 30,000 units in just 3 days – that’s over $6 million in revenue right after a 25-minute keynote. Jesse also shares his thoughts on why he decided to build hardware, not just a software app – reactive threads like these give us a glimpse into the minds of founders.

  • a16z wrote Big Idea in Tech 2024, a massive deep dive into what might lie ahead in the startup space for the coming year. What’s interesting: AI was mentioned 180x. Sure, it’s been a big trend, but I didn’t expect a PE firm of this caliber to bet so big on a trend. There are plenty of other innovations happening at the same time…

  • Justin Schueller (Founder of smalltribe.studio) wrote Unlimited Design Subscription Service — A (failed) Experiment, which dives into how his studio tried the trendy productized service business model. Outcome: as fancy as business models might sound, they aren’t always the best fit for how you work as a team.

  • Erik Torenberg wrote The Most Interesting Ideas of 2023 – if you want a couple of solid reads to save for later, dive in.

  • Sam Altman wrote What I wish someone had told me just before Christmas 2023. I think it's a worthy read with tons of wisdom and contrarian founder insights.

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

I spend a lot of time finding high-quality social signals (as you might be able to tell), so I also want to make a habit of leaving you with a small treat. Kinda like those sweets restaurants bring you once you complete your menu…

What I like about this thread is how it dives into the concept of “eating your own dog food” as a founder. How can you sell and succeed with your startup if you aren’t even using your product yourself? I think you need to be obsessed with what you are building, so you can excite prospects and win.

And that’s that. Don’t overthink your next steps too much.

Just pick a direction and take action. Now.

You will figure it out along the way.

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you around. ☻

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