Sustainable, Diversify, Automate 🤖
👋 Welcome!
Tim O’Reilly bootstrapped his own company, O’Reilly Media, 42 years ago! He is a partner at early-stage venture firm OATV and Indie.vc and recently sat down with Connie Loizos from TechCrunch to discuss the state of venture capital. He believes that VCs in their current state are starting to do more harm than good. They want to create financial instruments for the wealthy, looking for high-growth companies with exit potential and huge returns. Two funds ago, Tim and his partner Bryce decided to look for businesses that wanted to generate sustainable cash flow and profits. They went outside the Silicon Valley bubble looking for a different kind of investment in different places and were met with a giant talent pool. They also introduced a new SAFE note, that allowed founders to buyout the VC at a pre-determined price. This tackled the notion of the founder being on the treadmill for the VC. In conclusion, he believes that “a huge amount of VC capital doesn’t return” and “it’s part of the structural inequality in our society, where we’re building businesses that are optimized for their financial return rather than their return to society.” Read the full interview.
😺 Product Hunt Update
June 28, 2020
🥇 Taken To: A free, super-simple way to build a page online.
🥈 Foam: Personal knowledge management and sharing on VSCode & GitHub.
🥉 CozyRoom: Free peer-to-peer spatial audio environments.
June 27, 2020
🥇 The Conversion Kit: Make getting exceptional results part of your process.
🥈 AR Copy Paste: Copy and Paste reality with AR + ML.
🥉 MyDietGenius: Get a diet that suits you best.
June 26, 2020
🥇 Meat Nutrition: Smart meal plan generator and food tracker.
🥈 Optidash: The world's first AI-powered image optimization API.
🥉 Liveapp: Broadcast live like a pro, wherever you are.
🚀 Maker News
Freelancer Diversification
An insightful thread by Ben Issenmann on how freelancers can thrive by diversifying how they offer their expertise. The “Hyper Freelancing” model is made up of three activities: Consulting, Education and Building products. This is how it works:
When working as a freelance consultant, you'll spot recurring pains.
You can then share that gained knowledge in courses.
With a growing community and further insights, you can then build a product.
Ben explains that this model may seem excessive today, but it will be obvious in the future. And it will be hard to put into practice with the danger of being unfocused. Learn more from a list of people that fit this model and read the full thread.
Source: www.supercreative.design
Product Virality
Gordon Frayne shares a great post on Indie hackers on how to incorporate virality into your product or service. This includes creating incentives, appealing to the users' vanity, embedding, social sharing and signatures. Learn more.
SaaS sold in 5 Months
Last week, Andy Cloke sold his 5-month old SaaS business Influence Grid for a five-figure sum. He shares with us why he sold it and the lessons he has learnt from the project. These include investing in SEO early, ignoring copycats and picking an industry you’re interested in. Learn more.
Name Your SaaS
Don’t know how to name your SaaS company? Baremetrics shares some useful slides on how to complete this often brain-wrenching process in 30 seconds. Read the thread. If you want some more ideas on how to create memorable domains names, you can also refer back to Marc Köhlbrugge’s thread from last year. Read here.
Analytics & Ranking
Paul Jarvis, the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, shares a post he wrote back in May, on whether removing Google Analytics will hurt your SEO ranking. No need to worry, Google itself confirmed that “just to be clear: there’s no penalty for using or not using GA with regards to search.” This means you can move to other privacy-first providers such as Simple Analytics or Fathom. Learn more.
🖥️ NoCode & Automate
Automation Workshop
Michael Gill is back with his next project. He’s offering a workshop that will help you build valuable NoCode automations, giving you more time to scale your business. The course will teach you how to combine multiple apps and services together to create complete end-to-end workflows, saving you many hours of work. The course can be purchased now and is live on July 26th. Pre-order pricing starts at $99. This will then increase to $149. Michael explains more below. Learn more.
NoCode for Pubs
Cloudmansys shares a post on how the NoCode app builder Glide could help independent pubs in the UK. When they re-open next week they will need to implement new social distancing rules. These can range from registering customer details to no ordering at the bar. As indie pubs will not be supplied with the ready to use tech like large chains, they can quickly and inexpensively build something using Glide. Learn more.
Airtable Button Field
Airtable has another product update. They are introducing a new field type: button field. With a click of a button, this will allow you to schedule a calendar event, send an email, create a custom invoice, generate a report, find stock images, or open a prefilled Airtable form. Learn more.
💰 Funding
Inequity in Venture Capital
On June 30, Axios is hosting a live virtual event on the impact of Black Americans' underrepresentation in venture capital. They will discuss the enormous economic consequence stemming from this and how leaders are committing to making lasting, systemic change. Speakers: @sarahkunst, @cleocapital, @chudson, @PrecursorVC, @thevaluesvc, @BessemerVP. You can register here.
💭 Afterthought
The 80/20 rule maintains that, for many events, roughly 80% of the outcomes (outputs) come from 20% of the causes (inputs). That’s pretty much what James Clear is emphasizing in his statement below. There is a simple solution (20% input) to get to a 90% outcome. The remaining 10% will require much larger input and is usually not worth it. Save that time for something that is more important. Take care and see you tomorrow!
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