Founder Weekly (Issue 462 - November 25 2020)

Founder Weekly - Issue 462

November 25, 2020

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 462 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

Can your company be a Billion-dollar business? When we look inside the early days of companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart & Square, what are the patterns that may shed light on how great Founders beat incredible odds? In this episode of NFX podcast Elad Gil joins NFX partner James Currier to unearth what makes certain Founders and teams exponentially better. 

Advice for first-time founders looking to hire executives, get more out of advisors, and manage burnout.

Frameworks for understanding marketplaces.

A talk Jessica Livingston gave at Y Combinator's Future Founders Conference for women. 

How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to.

Marketing, Sales and PR

A guide for marketing teams on how customer data platforms can optimize return on ad spend, improve conversion rates, and boost advertising efficiency.

Not sure what to include in your B2B marketing reports? 28 marketing experts reveal the most essential things to add in a B2B marketing report.

From funnel to the flywheel, is there one best trick to scaling your product in SaaS?

To move away from testing irrelevant ideas to more strategic experiments, you need to gain real insights and data about your users. Use experimentation to test the business’s most highly guarded areas, such as price, proposition, and even the product itself. If you want to grow way beyond the local maximum, the only way to do that is through testing the strategic parts of your business. 

Money and Finance

One important tactical decision when fundraising is determining the size of “the ask”. Sizing the ask incorrectly is one of the things I see founders get wrong most often, and it ends up having a meaningful impact to the fundraising process overall. Telling an investor how much money you are looking to raise seems like a simple and benign question, but it’s actually pretty complicated. A couple thoughts.

Accepting seed capital from a Mega Fund is more often than not the right thing to do! Just make sure to talk through all of the dynamics explained in this post and keep alignment top of mind as you make your selection.

Startups of the Week

Flowdash is a no-code visual builder that helps you create business processes and workflows for your team in minutes.

Phood harnesses computer vision and artificial intelligence to stop food waste before it starts. By attacking waste at the source, Phood directly impacts the supply chain to help businesses cut costs, reduce labor and maximize profitability. 

Hellosaurus is an interactive video platform for kids media where kids can play instead of just watch.

HelpHub is the only knowledge base, powered by GPT-3, that generates original content for you instantly with AI.

Tips, Tools and Services

A great list of tips to save time and money on your entrepreneurial journey.

What is DesignOps? A detailed guide on what design operations can do for your startup's design team, process, and workflows.

Make Gmail more effective than ever with these out-of-the-way advanced settings and adjustments.

Our brains are hardwired to sabotage our productivity. Can we do anything about it? 

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