Founder Weekly (Issue 353 - September 5 2018)

Founder Weekly - Issue 353Â Â

September 05, 2018

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 353 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Learn how to wireframe and create realistic interactive prototypes in just 2 hours, all without using code.

General

Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, shares his thoughts on how you can succeed with a startup.

A new breed of entrepreneurs is creating huge consumer brands — like MVMT and Tuft & Needle — without venture capital, and laughing all the way to the bank.

Its primacy as a technology hub is on the wane. That is cause for concern.

A few years ago a ton of “Uber for x” startups got funded, but very few of them – maybe none? – worked out. It sounds good but ultimately most failed on the supply side. Let’s explore why.

Books

Marketing, Sales and PR

16 Mini-Lessons for Startup Founders.

A story on how I acquired my first 10 paid cutomers for my side project. I share all my learnings and challenges that I've learned along the way.

What happens when the bottoms up, organic growth usually associated with consumer companies starts to go…. enterprise? Part of our continuing podcast series on growth, this episode explores the increasing trend of enterprise growth shifting to be more “bottoms up” — with a16z general partners Martin Casado and Andrew Chen, and DocSend CEO and co-founder Russ Heddleston, in conversation with Hanne Tidnam.

Casey Winters makes the case for driving growth through a content loop, comparing it with other models and walking through how he successfully applied this approach to scale GrubHub and Pinterest in their early days. He outlines what worked and what didn’t, unveiling the 5-step process he followed and sharing three more advanced strategies for the early-stage startup looking to build a plan for steep and sustainable growth.

How you can recruit your customers to build your brand.

Money and Finance

Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy out our main venture capital (VC) investors. Here is the full journey of how we decided on this path for the company, including all the details and numbers involved in carrying out a stock buyback.

Founders and executives of new companies, particularly those seeking to raise capital, will inevitably be confronted with the prospect of building a financial model. The goal of this guide is to give you an idea of what a financial model is, why you might want one, and how to go about building one. 

We analysed thousands of founders and investors to understand the importance of experience in entrepreneurship.

Startups of the Week

Start Dropshipping Best US/EU Products. Find fast shipping products from verified suppliers, add them to your store with one-click and process orders automatically. 

Copy or create any voice, to use right as you speak! 

Tenant Engagement, Automated. Jack automatically engages your tenants in real time using AI, 24/7. Delight your tenants, your team, and your bottom line with Jack.

TalkyJobs aims to help companies in hiring candidates faster and more efficiently. With a Vision to use Artificial Intelligence to source and interview candidates so that HR teams can look at a wider number of candidates while keeping the interview cycles short.

Tips, Tools and Services

In the world of digital design, we have a lot of different tools that make the process of prototyping really simple. But still pen and paper remain the most useful tools for UX designers. Paper prototyping can be extremely helpful during the early-stage conceptualizing — when a team needs to explore a variety of different concepts and choose the one that will be used. The paper prototype allows quickly visualize and test various ideas. This article is a quick guide to paper prototyping & testing for digital interfaces.

Once you've found an engineer you want to hire, the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. This post offers advice for increasing the percentage of the offers you make that are accepted.

Visual design is about creating and making the general aesthetics of a product consistent. To create the aesthetic style of a website or app, we work with fundamental elements of visual design, arranging them according to principles of design. These elements and principles together form the building blocks of visual design, and a firm understanding of them is crucial in creating a visual design of any product. Here, we’ll introduce you to the elements of visual design: line, shape, negative/white space, volume, value, colour and texture.    

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