founders.menu 035 » shutting down

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 2.27 minutes.

A warm welcome to 41x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

After writing the founders.menu newsletter consistently for 35 weeks to what are almost 750 subscribers now, I sadly saw minimal revenue growth in the platform for the digital library after adding over 1129 items of the most valuable content [tools, reads, streams] and handmade templates on the web. I still find it odd that free signups have grown fairly well, but paying members who also return regularly are very few, making an 8-month commitment worth revisiting. After careful reflection (alongside reading Quit by Annie Duke), I concluded it’s time to let go of pursuing founders.menu, despite wishing for more reasons to continue pushing. The numbers sadly tell a different story.

Despite it never being too early to quit, I think the best time to quit is when you notice you are viewing the waste of time as much greater in the future than in the past… This might sound oversimplified, but a waste of time, energy or resources shouldn’t be viewed in retrospect, but rather forward-looking. Meaning: it’s wise to focus your efforts towards where your highest expected value lives, to mitigate excess waste. Once you align yourself with that expected value quitting something will naturally follow and ask two things of you: 1. Acknowledge you have failed & 2. Accept you have wasted time, effort or money – both of these are true for me when I look at founders.menu.

What now? The founders.menu library (all tools, streams, reads and templates) will merge with early.tools over the next week. That said, all paying founders.menu members will be grandfathered in early.tools with full access to the whole library (+ free editorial submissions) early next week. If you are not yet on the newsletter, subscribe here (you are not automatically added). ↓

And what about founders.menu? The brand will also evolve (at some point). I love the name, framing and concept. But more as an exclusive club for founders to meet at curated invite-only dinners in real life. I will launch applications maybe this year, so this subscriber base will keep sticking around without any editorial promises just yet (no need to unsubscribe).

Thanks to all founders.menu users who got as excited as I was from day one of this project. Not all things are meant to last, this project being one of them.

DM & reply-to-email is open.

See you on the net. ☻