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founders.menu 008: how to apply inversion, 4x new templates & CTA styles

Learn how to avoid mistakes to succeed, sort the database by newly added templates and dive into innovative startup highlights.

Author

Julian Paul
February 25, 2024

Servus & happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 4.8 minutes.

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

I want to simplify this brand/newsletter a little. Founders Feast makes little sense if the brand is already called founders.menu. The newsletter will now just be called founders.menu, making everything more unified…

Quick question before we dive into this week’s edition: who might you know that would love to receive this newsletter every week? ↱

Let’s get into this week’s founders.menu.

Starter » a mental model

Founders Inversion ↓

I stumbled on this model first via Charlie Munger, borrowed a lot of this thinking from methematicians, who “look at any problem backward and turn the situation upside down to find the solution”. It is helpful to avoid failures and stupidity, therefore increasing your chances of success.

Founders Inversion works from two approaches:
1. Positive origin → if you got an idea that excites you, what does the opposite look like? Or: what version of the idea do you not want?
2. Negative origin → if you come across a problem that makes you feel stuck and obsess about the worst-case scenarios, ask yourself: what can I do right now to avoid those bad outcomes?

The trick to apply this is to simply flip any problem you come across and see how it could look like from the exact opposite angle. When you do this enough times, you will find the golden insight that will propell you into the right direction. The insight you need to find is almost always in the opposite direction of where you are looking…

Ponder this →  what do you want to avoid? What action would you take to achieve the opposite outcome in your business?

Main course » founders.menu update

Introducing 2x updates to the founders.menu platform. The addition of the ❖ Templates category. This means it is now possible to filter the database not only by the relevant stage of certain items, but also by the type (currently only ϟ Tools & ❖ Templates), but soon much more like Reads, Listens, and Streams… Most of these templates will be paid, but either free for Full Members or if they are pricy, Members will receive a special discount. Currently, this is set to -50% for Members. You can find and apply their discount via your account – feel free to log in and check it out.

If you aren’t a member just yet, why not become one today…

What’s next? Indicate whether an item (especially a template is paid or not) and smoothen the checkout process for templates to auto-apply discounts.

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

  • Salar al Khafaji, Founder of monumental.co just raised $25 million to automate on-site construction with robotics and software. This comes at a time, where a housing supply shortage will otherwise outpace demand if there aren’t any solutions being developed to speed up construction processes. Since successfully laying a 15-metre wall in 2023, the project has secured deals with multiple top 25 general contractors already. You can read the full scoop here.

  • Co-Founder & CEO Michael Bonacina just got featured on TechCrunch with virtualstagingai.app, a startup that bootstrapped to $1 million in ARR over the past 10 months. What’s crazy, they already have 4,500 paying users after noticing the opportunity of realtor staging, as “58% percent of buyers' agents cited that home staging affected most buyers' view of the home most of the time”. Meaning: this is a competitive advantage for realtors.

  • Brent Underwood bought a $1.4 million ghost town and is now doing everything to restore it to its former glory. He used to run a successful bed & breakfast in Austin Texas, but decided it was time for a new challenge, renovating the town and mining silver to forge into jewelry, whilst filming his entire process on YouTube for 3.5 years already – a different kind of inspiring Founders story…

  • Steve Huffman, the current CEO and one of the Co-Founders of Reddit just filed a Form-S1 for the company to go public. One of the Co-Founders Alexis Ohanian (split with the company in 2020) however was not mentioned in the SEC sales pitch addressing the company’s history. What’s unique about this IPO is how power users are offered preferential IPO shares (same level as institutional investors & only if you are based in the US). The result? The Reddit community is split, some even considering PUT options to bet on an unsuccessful IPO – do you think this is a good or bad decision?

  • Michael Lim shares his thoughts around a video by Sam Altman & Alexis Ohanian who share their thoughts on how we're not far from AI-enabling a one-person billion-dollar company. Meaning: we are not far away from a ten-person billion-dollar company. You’ll essentially need three things: An attractive character = your brand, a new opportunity = what you want to achieve & a new vehicle = how you will achieve it… Then spend most of your time on your brand.

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

There are many ways to write CTA (Call To Action) copy for your website. I personally prefer the simple ones with the least copy so visual clutter is generally reduced, but psychologically there is simply much more potential as Harry Dry outlines 4 unexpected ways to write them. And believe me, he knows what he is talking about after building marketingexamples.com. Which CTA method do you prefer most?

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you around. ☻n

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