FiP #3 - 📊 Free Creator Report, 🔥 Wildfire Launch and 🏠 Hacker Housing around the world

You may have noticed that I changed up when I scheduled this newsletter and the type of content being shared. In the future, the plan is to send the following per month and on no particular day or time:

• Two Founding in Public updates (this style)

• One to two case studies/guides

Now on to the content. It has been a mixed couple of weeks since we last spoke. After catching Covid the other week, the momentum I built had quickly dissipated. I got a lot done, but everything felt like it took twice as long.

There is the stage before you find a ‘hair on fire problem’ or ‘a market that pulls the product out of the startup. This stage involves relentless pushing, generally because you don’t have anything for people to pull from you yet. So being in an area that excites you and maintaining the momentum you build becomes critical to increasing your chances of success.
I am happy to say that as I dive deeper into the creator space, I am becoming increasingly excited about the opportunities. The next step is about finding a starting point that casts the widest net for opportunities to land.

Things I Have Done

I.

Curated research on the Creator Economy (CE)

To understand the CE in more detail, I curated the findings from the top writers and researchers in this space. You can find a summary of those findings here in this Figma board (feel free to add comments).

Adding a summary of the summary below

• CE market size is estimated to be between 50-400M

• CE is at risk of following the same route as the gig economy (inequality, oversupply and burnout)

• Creators are more concerned with creating highly engaged communities around their niche than building large audiences.

CE Figma Board

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II.

🔥 Launched Wildfire.so and Wildfire Discord

What are we trying to do with Wildfire: We are exploring how we can create the leverage that creators need to go full-time without getting burnt out in the process. The initial focus is on growth and monetization. This has surfaced as one of the most significant pain points; however, an open mind will be kept for other pain points during this exploration stage.

Wildfire.so

• What is it?: It is a landing page to validate if writers want to reduce the time it takes to cross-promote their content across social media platforms.

• Why would a writer want to do that? One of the top recommended strategies for growth is to cross-promote your content across various social channels. Although it is effective, it is an incredibly time-consuming process. You are essentially creating custom summaries of a single piece of content per social platform.

Wildfire Discord

• About the discord: We believe that by increasing the leverage that creators have at their disposal, we can exponentially increase the overall market size of the creator economy.

• Who should join? If you are actively exploring or engaged in improving the creator economy, this server is for you.

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III.

Hacker Housing

Building a startup can be amazing, but it can also be lonely and challenging. 

So a few other founders and I have gotten together to set up hacker houses worldwide. We just did our first house in Lagos, Portugal, where we hosted the founders from Helios, Zero Vector and Wildfire. Brussels, Gran Canaria, Stockholm and Palo Alto are next on the cards. We are still working on the structure for how others can join us, so watch this space.

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Learnings

I.

Beware of the sunk cost fallacy.

I spent a week formating that CE Figma board, yes, a week of just formating that very basic looking board I shared above. I made it my number one priority which meant I did nothing else until it was complete. However, I didn’t want to do it, so I procrastinated (a lot). In hindsight, I should have time-boxed it and moved on regardless of how much time had already been invested.

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II.

Motivation through activation

After a week of recovering from Covid and a week of deep procrastination, it was time to move again. I started by creating an achievable goal and then reaching out to people. One tactic that helps with ‘activation’ is scheduling dependencies, e.g. arranging calls with others, committing to delivering something for someone else by date etc.

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A Question For You

What signals do you listen to when deciding to stop or continue working on an idea?

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Misc

This section essentially abuses the structure I tried to commit to above.

What I am currently researching

• Growth challenges in the creator economy

My exploration backlog

• Better analytics and feedback tooling for creators

• Creator DAOs

Searching for

• Active creators trying to grow their reach

• Creators that are about to make their first hire (Contact us before you pull the trigger)

• Tech co-founders who are interested in exploring any of the above

Cool links and tools

More tools for finding users

• https://f5bot.com (Conversation alerts)

• https://syften.com/ (Conversation alerts)

• https://thehiveindex.com/ (Community finder)

Capiche - Tool that does seriously useful deep-dives on products -

Data visualization - Most popular paid subscription websites

BannerBear - Automate social media visuals

Side Hustle Stack - Tools for building side hustles

n8n - Zapier, but you can sell your Zaps as SaaS products

7 Powers - I highly recommend reading 7 Powers but below is an excellent summary of the book.

7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer

Ken Norton - An old but excellent talk by Ken Norton about how to think about product development

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