☕ Good Morning!
Jennifer Alsever has written a great piece on indie.vc and their different approach to venture capital. Last year the value of VC deals grew to $140 billion. But only 0.6% of the 10,000 companies that receive funding every year ever become unicorns. And now, the pandemic is bringing the economy to its knees and many unicorns with it. The mantra of VCs is no longer growth, but profitability at all costs. Bryce Roberts and indie.vc’s approach is very different. They want to power more sustainable startups and fund more diverse founders. As well as expecting their investments to grow responsibly and make a profit, they believe thousands of businesses launched by women and minorities are ignored by the white male-dominated VC industry. Established VCs see their new model as an investment for “b team” companies. But they are proving them wrong. In the past five years, they have backed 34 companies, half of which are women-led and 20% are Black. And they are also showing to be more sturdy than their peers, with 100% growth in their first year, 300% in the second year, and a mortality rate of only 10% compared to about 44% with traditional VC-backed companies. To make their fund more open, indie.vc has also launched a “scout program”, that has enlisted 200 executives who refer entrepreneurs to the program. Read the full article on Medium.
Source: Unsplash, James Lee
🚀 Maker News
Anthony McGuire, formerly at Facebook and Instagram, is the writer of multiple newsletters including Venn Diagrams. In his latest newsletter, he brilliantly explains the three reasons why he believes influencers and creators are gaining a huge competitive advantage over traditional celebrities. Firstly, in contrast to celebs, platforms such as TikTok allow social media influencers to produce content for huge audiences at low Cost. Next, there is user Behaviour. It needs no explanation, that the use of smartphones and social media apps will only continue to increase with time. Finally, there is Reach. Anthony points out with a few simple examples, how most people underestimate the growing audience size of influencers and creators. He concludes that “in the brave new world of media, marketing, and advertising in a COVID world, the future belongs to these creators, influencers, and trailblazers whose home is social media.” Much of this rationale also applies to the growing number of newsletters and podcasters, that are presently disrupting traditional media. Read the newsletter.
Bootstrapped Grinders
Austin Rief, a co-founder of Morning Brew, believes every startup needs “grinders,” people who are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. As a bootstrapped company, Morning Brew couldn’t afford to hire “A players”, so they looked for talent that the market was undervaluing. These were usually people that had taught themselves something from scratch, were hungry to learn more and willing to go the extra mile. This played a large role in Morning Brew’s early success. Learn more.
Accelerated Opportunities
Many business opportunities have been created or accelerated by COVID and the lockdown. Josh Howarth, a co-founder of Exploding Topics, has researched this change and listed 63 different opportunities. They range from canned wine, derma planing, TikTok editors, Substack newsletters, yoga mats, Japanese cheesecake to air purifying plants. Learn more.
🖥️ NoCode & Automate
Curated Threads
Twitter threads were introduced in 2017 and allowed users to create more engaging content for their followers, such as mini-blog posts or newsletters spread out over 10 tweets. Steven, a NoCode Maker, has now launched threadzzz.com, a bespoke newsletter which will send subscribers a curated list of the top threads based on industry /topic. He was given the idea by KP earlier in the year, but life got in the way of launching it. Now his landing page is live using Webflow, great work! Read more.
Automating Homepage Content
If you want to learn about how to use Webflow and integrations to keep your homepage content fresh and optimize your time spent for other side projects, you should join Webflow and Charli Prangley from ConvertKit for a virtual coffee tomorrow. Charli will also discuss her blog, her YouTube channel, and her tips and hacks on her website. When? This Thursday at 11 am PT or 7 pm UK time. Register here.
Zapier Templates
As Zapier currently prohibiting the sale of shared zap templates, Andrew Davison has decided to give them away for free. He has built Luhhu using Webflow and has listed a number of zaps with instructions and an installation link. Learn more.
💰 Funding
The 1517 Fund has launched “The Invisible College.” If you’re a student who wants to spend the autumn building the next generation of science and tech instead of sitting in a classroom or on Zoom, then this is for you. They are offering $50k investment for idea + R&D stage startups to run experiments that might turn research in science and technology into products and services. Learn more.
💭 Afterthought
To finish, some thoughts on your competition by Lawrence King. Makers may have encountered these during their work and will know all too well how critical it is to beat these habits. But breaking bad habits can be difficult, so if you want to learn more, I recommend the following post on “How to Break a Bad Habit and Replace It With a Good One” by James Clear. Take care of each other and see you tomorrow!
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