Founder Weekly (Issue 455 - October 7 2020)

Founder Weekly - Issue 455

October 07, 2020

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 455 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

Great Founders are starting to find their product-promise-market fit first. And it doesn’t require a single line of code.

Canny recently hit a major milestone: one million dollars in annual recurring revenue. Here's how they built a $1m ARR SaaS startup from the ground up.

There’s no one-size-fits-all playbook to follow for building great consumer subscription businesses, several factors are important in separating the great ones from the merely good. Here is a list of ten factors to prioritize when evaluating these companies as investments, and when building consumer subscription businesses as a leader.

It is difficult to start a fintech company. But it's even more difficult to scale and offer multiple products. This post discusses the dynamics and frameworks for product expansion in fintech.

A successful framework distills the complex, and in that synthesis, gets to a timeless insight. Here’s a running list of frameworks Sarah Tavel has written on a range of topics.

Creating a successful company can hinge on whether or not you build a product that people want. However, as an early team, you probably haven’t brought on a full time PM yet. This guide will help you figure out how to navigate building a product people will love prior to hiring a full time PM, and figuring out when the right time to bring someone on is.

A Report on artificial intelligence research, talent, politics, industry, startups, and China. 

.

Twitter’s plans for work from home indefinitely have prompted a wave of copycats. But its transformation has been two years in the making — and the rest of America can learn some lessons.

Marketing, Sales and PR

A growth framework for consumer founders, plus case studies on how Thumbtack, Airbnb and Booking.com acquired customers early on.

In the early days of selling software (and transitioning into SaaS), per user pricing was pretty standard. But over time, companies started to realize that charging per user doesn’t always make sense for SaaS, and it could even limit your growth. Some people even look at per user pricing as one of the worst pricing models you can use. So, is per user pricing really as bad as some think? Or is it a missed opportunity for growth? Read on to find out.

Frameworks to Build Sales Relationships.

Many SaaS companies offer a trial but struggle with trial conversions. Here’s how to generate more revenue and get more trial users to buy.

Money and Finance

Not all Notes are created equally—know the difference between Fully Diluted Basis vs. Issued and Outstanding. Not all shares are created equally—know the liquidation preference stack. There are 3 main ways to convert notes. Post-Money Safes can be highly dilutive to the founders.

In this post, Jess Li shares the lessons from her time in VC.

Startups of the Week

Writer is an AI writing assistant that helps everyone at your company write well. Craft clear, consistent and on-brand content everywhere.

Remotion is a video workspace designed for a faster, more connected way of working remotely.

Lendtable gives cash advances to help individuals get their employer 401(k) match.

Abstract provides powerful APIs to help you enrich any user experience or automate any workflow. 

Tips, Tools and Services

A nifty stock option calculator that simulates scenarios so that you can better understand how adopting different strategies will impact your returns. 

A guide for early-stage startups who have raised enough money to hire their initial team, (e.g. a $1-3M round). It’s meant for founders and founding teams with little to no knowledge about hiring.

A step by step process to fix the root causes of most event analytics mistakes.

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 for programmers.