Philanthropy, Hardcore, Virtual, Drop-Out
Top o’ the morning to ya!
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Thursday is here, although for most of us these days there probably isn’t much difference between a Monday and a Saturday anymore. Hope you all enjoyed my first work in progress yesterday. Today, I have structured the newsletter a little further into the following sections:
Newsbites
Maker Stories
Ideas, Trends
Build, Launch, Monetise
Events, Podcasts
I won’t cover each category every day, but it’s the areas I want to focus on going forward. Will iterate further as I go along, so let me know what you think…
🌐 Newsbites
On Tuesday evening, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square, donated $1 billion of his wealth to fight COVID-19. It’s not only an impressive sum but also approx. 28% of his total wealth, pretty substantial. Moreover, he is going to be completely transparent on all money flows (see Google Doc in the tweet below).
There are also critical voices on the power of philanthropy and the elite. A common response to higher taxes for the super wealthy is that this usually gets lost in the depths of US federal bureaucracy, and is less effective. Anand Giridharadas comments below, read more in his article on Vox.
And below a few comments on the above by angel investor Jason Calacanis and others:
🌐 Maker Stories
Andrey Azminov is a Maker from Ukraine, now living in 🌞 Bali. In March 2018 he quit his day job and began his “Hardcore Year", focused on building products with the goal of achieving $1,000 MRR. In May 2019 he achieved that goal, in March 2020 he reached $10,000 MRR. Congratulations 🚀.
You can learn more about Andrey’s journey in his Medium article. His most successful product is Sheet2Site, a NoCode application where you can create your own website without writing any code using only Google Sheets - pretty cool.
As Jack Dorsey above, Andrey wanted to be completely open and transparent on how his revenue journey progressed. Read more on the Andrey Azimov Open Page, where you can see his revenue develop from March 2018 to March 2020, from $371 to $10,292.
🌐 Ideas, Trends
Productized Startups was founded by Robin Vander Heyden featuring interviews with entrepreneurs who have successfully productized their service, achieving a monthly recurring revenue (MRR). One such success story is from Ronik Patel who purpose-built a white-label WordPress agency to help digital agencies consolidate the hundreds of tasks they perform for their clients on a daily basis. In five months he reached $22,000 MRR. Read more here
Trends is a great site I recently discovered giving you insights into new markets and opportunities. It was created by Dru Riley, a Maker who I believe is from Florida. Have a look at Trends #0006 — No Code as well as Trends #0009 — Virtual Meetups. These, as well as the other Trends, give a great overview of key players, predictions, opportunities, “haters” and links in each market. Well worth signing up to his newsletter to stay in the know.
🌐 Build, Launch, Monetize
I stumbled across Metrical yesterday. Created by Francesco and Virginia, it’s a web analytics tool, that is easy to use (especially compared to Google Analytics) and privacy-first orientated. They are currently beta testing and you can register free with up to 2 websites and 50K visits every month. For more, you are looking at $7/months or $50/year. Will definitely be hooking up my sites to explore…
I mentioned Carrd yesterday, an easy tool to build one-page static websites and more. Components UI is built by Oscar O. Arevalo and provides you with a collection of pre-built components you can use in Carrd. There are 3 packages on offer ranging from $9 to $39. Definitely worth a look.
🌐 Events, Podcasts
📅 Chris Guillebeau, the author of The $100 Startup and The Money Tree is holding an AMA (ask me anything) session on Indie Hackers on 9th April at 1 pm Pacific Time (10 pm British Summer Time), great time for startup idea feedback & research. You can take part here. Additionally, if you don’t know the Indie Hackers website, definitely worth a visit and perusal - you’ll be hearing more from them in my future newsletters.
🔈Harry Stebbings is the founder of The Twenty Minute VC podcast. His story is pretty stunning: He was inspired by the movie The Social Network, was a university drop-out and came up with the idea of interviewing prominent venture capitalists for 20 minutes. His podcasts average 300,000 downloads and he is now a founding partner at the VC Stride. You can read more about him in this older Wired Story and check out his most downloaded podcasts below.
Thank you for reading! Look forward to your comments! See ya tomorrow!
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