Founder Weekly (Issue 432 - April 22 2020)

Founder Weekly - Issue 432

April 22, 2020

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 432 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.

A video crash course on building, launching, and growing your first SaaS company. It covers a wide range of topics in only a few hours of content from some of the most knowledgeable speakers in SaaS like Jason Cohen, Steli Efti, Patrick McKenzie, and Rob Walling. Topics include: idea validation, positioning, sales and growth, customer success, customer support, metrics and churn, and founder mental health.

Nationwide, we’ve built cities we can’t afford. Kansas City is among them, able to budget just 10 percent of recommended street maintenance in 2019 and hitting a similar financial wall on sewers and water lines. Dennis Strait, managing principal of the Kansas City studio of Gould Evans, an architecture and planning firm, lays out the problems and solutions in the first of two Making a Great City installments in March.

Apps and platforms that let people play with fashion are seeing interest pique from consumers stuck at home.

Marketing, Sales and PR

In March 2020, the world of SaaS started to decline as a whole for the first time ever. Today, everyone’s strategy is shifting to revenue retention. Here’s the top five strategies you should be considering to implement in the coming weeks.

Here are 26 things we can do now to help get ready for the rebound. The recovery is coming. Let's reset and refocus on the marketing foundations.

New to TikTok? This jam-packed guide lays out how you can build an audience and go viral on TikTok.

Learn how to reduce your Facebook retargeting spend with this how to guide

Money and Finance

What’s next for start-ups, scale-ups and the investors who support them? We analysed thousands of datapoints from prior recessions, spoke with dozens of leading investors and distilled market dynamics we see – to explain developments and deliver a roadmap for navigating what’s to come.

Should shelter-in-place orders be eased up by the third quarter, it could take two years or more to get back to pre-crisis funding levels.

The CFO role is more strategic than ever. Yet despite an influx of data on which to base decisions, the tools at the CFO’s disposal have not kept pace.

In this post, we take a look at how the outbreak is impacting first fundings to startups in three major tech hubs: Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. We define first fundings as the first round of external financing a company receives. There may be more than one investor in that round. 

Startups of the Week

Meepo is a special technology developed to exactly replicate entire meals in a 1-inch cube.

Simple, modern wine investing. Vinovest is an online platform for fine wine as an asset class. We tap into our network of top wineries and trusted fine wine merchants for transparent pricing and global liquidity so that you save time and gain peace of mind.

Healthy teeth shouldn't be a privilege. We're using AI image processing to make dental check-ups free, fast, and more accessible for everyone.

Tips, Tools and Services

A Tactical Guide for Individual Contributors and Managers.

In the midst of a pandemic, we had to cancel our in-person company retreat. Here's what we did to quickly transition to having a remote retreat instead.

How to handle video, whiteboards, voting, facilitation, interviews, and pretty much everything else in a remote Design Sprint.

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