Founder Weekly (Issue 434 - May 6 2020)

Founder Weekly - Issue 434

May 06, 2020

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 434 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

Backcasting is the opposite of forecasting. It works best when you want to create something extraordinarily unique and surprising. Something that’s not incrementally better, but exponentially different and unique. As you backcast, you are likely to find that many current assumptions about products and markets won’t be true in the future. Your goal is to find insights about the future that are non-consensus and right. Starting from the future and working backwards is the second key to finding a breakthrough. It’s how you avoid the temptation to fall prey to incremental ideas and playing by other people’s rules. So how do you Backcast?

COVID-19 has underscored the importance of individual contribution — to flatten the curve, to navigate the new normal and to build the future. The need to build infrastructure, institutions, products, processes and ultimately new possibilities for both work and life. Who are the creators, founders, and forgers who will build the new world? 

A tough economy is a great time to build a slow burn company. Slow burn companies may grow slowly, but can amass tremendous value, and sometimes without giving up much external equity.

Visa’s purchase of Plaid for $5.3B, Paypal’s purchase of Honey for $4B and Chime’s recent $500M round are all examples of “fintech’s” renaissance in the last 5 years. But behind all the shiny fintech value generation— there was a secondary revolution happening to the finance role within a business. This space is “fintech” too, but of a different kind. I like to call it Finance-as-a-Service — a subsector of SaaS that is proving to be equally if not more valuable in the long run.

Moments of change can create tremendous opportunities — and risks — for startups.

In Bali, western immigrants are selling products they've never handled, from countries they've never visited, to consumers they've never met.

Speed is a startup's primary advantage — especially in downturns. Iconic startups are learning machines, embedding feedback loops across their teams.

How startups are building the future of video conferencing by carving out their own verticals.

Marketing, Sales and PR

A lot of startups treat pricing as a math problem or, worse, an afterthought. Pricing is as much an art as it is a science, one that relies as much on marketing and psychology as it does on classical economics. This Sequoia Guide covers strategies that can help you figure out the right price for your product—and end up with happier customers and more profit in the process.

Before you email a reporter, prepare *at least* one of these pictures to go along with your press release.

So your key metric went up... but at what cost?

Money and Finance

A financial model allows you to draft financial projections easily, fast, and in a professional manner. A great template will also force you to think through all the aspects of your project and make sure you really get the financial logic behind your business.  This post compares the top 12 templates of financial models for SaaS startups. 

As more and more venture capital-backed startups acknowledge having received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, many have wondered why their VCs didn't bail them out.

Startups of the Week

Sitesauce converts your dynamic websites into static sites, so you can keep your existing workflow while enjoying all the benefits static sites provide.

Symba is the leading remote internship platform connecting companies with the best talent and helping them manage the entire remote internship experience.

Tara AI is a platform designed to help modern software teams manage and deliver across their product development lifecycle.

Empowering individuals to make better business decisions with location analytics for any physical space.

Tips, Tools and Services

A great list by Kevin Kelly.

This guide is everything you need to know about creating, launching and selling a course this year.

Our Other Newsletters

- A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

- A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to NoSQL.