Finding Customers, Rolling Funds 💸

👋 Welcome!

Good morning from London! Let’s jump right in. First Round is now offering founders introductions to their network of startup builders and Fortune 1000 operators for customer discovery and early feedback. They rightly point out that “the most compelling and contrarian insights” come from conversations with potential users and customers. Lenny Rachitsky calls this: “The democratization and unbundling of the startup creation process”. Read the full thread to learn more.

First Round @firstround

1/ Introducing Discovery Assist: a new way for early-stage founders to get in front of potential customers, faster. We’ll make the intros, you focus on the conversations. Request invite below:

discoveryassist.firstround.comFirst Round Capital - Discovery AssistA new way for early-stage founders to accelerate customer discovery by getting in front of potential customers, faster.

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🚀 Maker News

Founder Learnings

Kieran from nocodelife shares his insights from his AMA with Rohan, a founder who’s built multiple million-dollar businesses in only a few years. These include cancelling your social life for one year, closing down any project that hasn’t made money after 60 days and spending 90% of your time on marketing. My very favourite though is “The Tripple Play” (see below). Read the full thread.

Kieran | nocodelife @nocodelife

🤟 The Triple Play Once you’ve built a successful repeatable business (even a small one), make a second business teaching other people how to do the same. Then make a third business selling them software to make their entrepreneurship path easier. Everybody wins.

Complimentary Paid Newsletters

Useful insight from this Indie Hackers Growth Bite on paid newsletters. Josh Spector, the writer of the weekly newsletter For The Interested, originally offered his readers a paid tier that delivered an expanded version of his newsletter. This didn’t catch with his readers though. Instead, he found success by offering a complimentary paid newsletter. For this strategy to succeed “make sure both newsletters have well-defined roles and that they complement each other nicely.” Read the full thread.

Indie Hackers @IndieHackers

Tip: Paid newsletters are all the rage these days, but your readers are busy and they may not be interested in paying for more of the same. To get paid subscribers, offer a complementary (but distinct) paid newsletter instead of a paid tier. Thread 👇

Rolling Funds

Dickie Bush shares his learnings about AngelList's Rolling Funds. Basically a rolling fund is “SaaS-like venture fund subscription,” that can be marketed in public, raise capital at any time and offer flexible fees. Not only will this help democratise access to launching a micro-VC fund, but it will also give startups more access to capital. A recent example of such a fund is the makerpad.fund which was launched by Ben Tossell. Read the full thread to learn more.

Dickie Bush 📊 @dickiebush

Rolling Funds - Everything You Need to Know [THREAD] After listening to everything on the topic from the likes of: • @naval • @shl • @avlok • @APompliano • @ShaanVP • @HarryStebbings • @Alex_Danco Here's what I learned about @AngelList's Rolling Funds in 10 tweets👇🏼

Finding Customers

Robin Vander Heyden, the founder of ManyRequests, shares a useful free ebook on how to find customers using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. In addition to explaining the benefits of the navigator, the book shares tips on how to optimise your profile and value proposition, how to research prospects, outreach as well as other helpful tools and resources. View the ebook.

Robin Vander Heyden @Vinrob

Just released our monthly ebook: How to find customers with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can get it here (no opt in, just a Google Doc!): docs.google.com/document/d/1Y8…

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💭 Afterthought

To finish the week a short but valuable tweet by Glenn Fischer. What might sound crazy today, might be all the rage tomorrow! Take care and see you next week.

Glenn Fisher @allgoodcopy

Always write up your crazy ideas, they often end up better than the sensible ones.

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