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

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

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. ↓

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

• Brilliant Labs launched Frame: AI-powered glasses that are completely open source. What I like most about their approach to AI wearables is that everyone can hack, build, and modify their glasses into their dream configuration. Their launch video is something truly special. Bobak Tavangar is the Founder and CEO who just launched the glasses to pre-order for $349.

• Maybe relaunched after years of going into a new product direction they called DetangleAI (a product to make sense of legal AI) and are open-sourcing their financial app for good. Josh Pigford wrote a deep-dive about it and mentioned the $1.5m in new funding and plans to monetize via B2C subscriptions + a B2B API.

• Bluesky just opened its doors to the public. Founded by Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey, this new social network is built on top of AT Protocol (open source & decentralized) and already gained 1 million fresh signups in a single day after opening access on February 6th – a channel to watch in 2024 in my opinion. Oh and if you are into the technical underpinnings of the social network, read this.

• Notion has been on an acquisition spree lately. After acquiring Cron and relaunching it as Notion Calendar it now also acquired Skiff, a privacy-focused tool stack founded by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg that aimed to help people collaborate and communicate with confidence and privacy. Perhaps a mail client and/or encrypted file storage will join the capability of the Notion product suite? It’s important to note that the product will shut down after six months and user accounts won’t be converted to a Notion account.

• Galileo AI, a UI generation platform for easy and fast design ideation released its public beta & seed round led by Khosla Ventures. The level of output the product can achieve is already incredible. This highlight reel shows what you can already get done. You can even convert wireframes to UI with easy image uploads. What is Galileo’s vision? To supercharge the creative process of designers and builders, making design easy, fast, and magical. Seems a little too easy right? ;)

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.