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founders.menu 012: failed community experiment & next steps

How community.founders.menu failed the cold start problem, a regret minimisation framework to make better decisions and a framework for personalised sales.

Author

Julian Paul
March 24, 2024

Servus & happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 4.31 minutes.

A warm welcome to 3x new subscribers who got a template, an account, or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

This weekly newsletter is a tough one to write. Failure is never easy, but it’s important to accept and adapt to grow as an entrepreneur. Needless to say, the community experiment I spent 2 weeks building, failed. More context in this typical weekly founders.menu newsletter, so let's get into it, shall we?

Starter » a mental model

Jeff Bezos | Regret Minimisation Framework ↓

In Jeff’s own words: “I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.“

This framework will help you make the tough decisions by taking into consideration the person you want to be in the future that is looking back at your life right now. All you need to do is ask the question in a time horizon that matters to you and listen closely to your heart.

Jeff Bezos – full context here

Ponder this →  In 80 years, will I regret NOT doing this?

Main course » founders.menu update

3 weeks ago today, I set out to DM a curated list of 100+ founders that aligned with the purpose and values of the founders.menu community in terms of their approach to building products that are simple with personality. It honestly looked very promising with most founders responding with positive interest, immediately dropping their membership applications on Skool. I planned to get 25x applciations on the platform to then invite them all at the same time, so there would be a strong atomic network of aligned individuals to master the cold start problem. Or so I thought… Things didn’t go as planned despite these efforts and only 3/25 people ended up engaging in some way. Numbers that from my experience don’t set a community up for success. So I pulled the plug and archived the community until further notice. If community members aren't hyped to engage from day one, it won’t change in a month – this is a false start.

My learnings for next time ↓
➀ Don't launch too early or too small
➁ Pick a platform your audience already uses
➂ Create strong incentives to start & continue engaging

That said, I will return to starting a community and see if another approach will work at a later point in time. Until then, my efforts to build founders.menu are better spent focusing on the platform, not an unengaged community. I hope you understand and can’t wait to continue adding value to founders.menu.

What’s next? I have been focusing on designing brand-aligned templates based on Notion this week. There will be at least 7x added to founders.menu over the week – stay tuned for an update in your inboxes soon.

Desert » past week’s startup highlights

[1] Killian Lucas, the Founder of Open Interpreter just launched the Light 01, an AI voice interface for your home computer that can already be pre-ordered for $99. The launch video is 10/10.

[2] Josh Miller, the Founder of the Browser Company / Arc just raised another $50million and launched a miniseries called "We Might Not Make It" to transparently cover the company’s most important year yet.

[3] Sari Azout, Founder of sublime.app recently updated the landing page with variable SaaS pricing for their second brain knowledgebase… With both yearly and lifetime plans available to buy.

[4] Pontus Abrahamsson just launched an open beta version of midday.ai, with an early adopter plan whilst in beta, then $30/m locked in for life. Ready to run your business with better insights?

[5] Ryan Kim, the Founder of chrry.io achieved getting 5000 users for an AI-enabled way to search by images and shop by comparing resulting products.

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

I am not a big fan of cold calling or cold emailing. There is a certain level of disconnect to an inherently human process, but what if you could supercharge selling with the OCS Funnel in a way that Madz outlines in 3 steps:

  1. Overdeliver with so much value they can’t ignore you.

  2. Conversation with the outcome of you being the only choice.

  3. Secure the sale by focusing on building a relationship, not selling.

I like this funnel as it helps you focus on positioning yourself as the expert, where you can truly empathize with your client through active listening and guidance toward a dream state. Of course, the skill to make this work (which Madz doesn’t mention) is prospecting – you need to understand your buyer persona first – will you also apply this high-level framework?

DM, community & reply-to-email is open.

See you next week. ☻

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