Startup exits suck... (Founder's Compass)
Hello there and welcome to Founder's Compass, a good way to get oriented around the labyrinthian world of startups.
Tool of the week: Webflow + Memberstack
You’ve probably heard of Webflow by now. One of the top picks for no-code development, webflow has it’s limits. It was designed more as a landing page tool than something to build actual products. Memberstack saw Webflow lacking and said: “Alright, bet.” So they built an addon to create accounts, register payments, assign roles and many more. Basically, you can now build any SAAS prototype with Webflow and some code.
Video of the week: Startup exits suck
There’s multiple ways to exit your startup, not just through an acquisition. None of them are as glamorous as the news you usually read about in The Verge or TechCrunch. Here’s the truth:
Video of the week (part 2): Even faster fashion
You’re being spoiled this week :) Two awesome videos to learn about startups.
Here’s an alternative to Temu, Bershka and the usual fast fashion trends: See a design you like online, place the order, and a shop 15km away from you start producing the garment on demand based on your body structure. Sounds SF?
One company is doing just that:
Top 5 stories of the week
“A startup’s job is to spot a thing from the future, then pull it into the present as quickly as possible. Noticing things from the future is an act of intuition. It takes a somatic sensitivity to the present, and a willingness to trust your gut.”
“There will be way more software engineers in the future than the present. The job will just be very different: more English, less boilerplate coding. Engineers will adjust, like they did for the transition from assembly to Python.”
“HTTP/3 abandons TCP in favor of a channel-aware UDP-based protocol called QUIC. First off, QUIC requires far fewer round trips to set up an encrypted connection. Instead of 3 needed for TLS+HTTP/2, QUIC just has one.”
“Now, Silicon Valley is getting in the mix. Iseman has been an inventor, startup founder and director of hardware at the startup incubator Y Combinator. He believes he and other bold and business-minded entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned to solve a crisis that academia and government intervention have utterly failed to address.
“This is about acting in an emergency,” he told me. “Nobody asked me whether I wanted to have runaway climate change. And, you know, we shouldn’t have to ask permission to try to fix it.””
“The earliest prototypes were pretty large, about 10 by 15 cm, Casciola says. They were big enough to easily hook up to test equipment, yet small enough to strap on to a willing test subject.”
3 jobs at cool startups from our network
inStreamly is helping companies run marketing campaigns during streams. They’re also hiring a Marketing Manager and a Junior Creative.
Code the future at EMA Unlimited. They’re looking for a Software Engineer to build AI employees.
Bandana is hiring an Operations Intern for the Fall. They’re a gig platform for hourly workers based in NY.
Funding & programs for startups
Two awesome programs to sign-up for this week:
This is the first time YC is doing a Fall batch, and the timing couldn’t be better. With a Fall Batch, you line up your startup work with the usual working time of the other organizations and accelerate even faster.
With a very specific vertical, ultra.vc is one of the better programs available in Europe. Apart from claiming $70k of initial and up to $100k as a follow-on, you get access to a well-selected list of angels and VCs investing specifically in early stages.
Some updates
Let’s update you regarding what’s going on at Creative Motion & ReaktorX:
“Roast My Startup” is happening today! We’re SOLD OUT completely (and a bit over-capacity).
Startup idea of the week: Easy Paywalling
Problem: Startup need to experiment fast, usually with no-code tools or basic websites. Implementing payments with Stripe is not as easy as it used to be, especially for marketing teams that don’t know how to code and need to test funnels fast. The real test of any product is “are people willing to pay for this?”
Target: Marketing, growth teams, startups at pre-seed and seed stage.
Solution: A paywall that’s easy to drag-and-drop into no-code platforms and existing websites. You could set basic things like pricing, benefits and trials, but the rest should be standardized to make implementation as easy as possible. Basically drop a link/one line into your existing codebase exactly where you want to add a paywall and block content.
In addition to that, at a later stage, this tool could evolve into analyzing the best position for a paywall on a landing page, and serve users with a trial based on the conversion stage.
Benefits:
Can use Stripe in the background, is easy to test and implement quickly.
There’s a startup boom going on, and you can also diversify later on: think about blogs, cooking websites, anyone that generates content and wants to paywall it.
Win on comissions: business model is obvious, take a comission of the subscription made through the paywall.
Challenges:
Easy to copy by any senior engineer. Speed is key here.
Might be too niche: People who start startup might have a tech dev on-board already who can easily integrate Stripe.
Scalability is high, but this is just one feature… There’s a whole product to be built after this start. Someone with a great vision should be on-board to build this into a proper company.
What would you do differently?
That's it for this week's edition. Stick close for the next one.