Welcome to the latest updates from Founding in Public. Last month was slow for newsletter updates because I underestimated the logistics of nomading. My main advice would be to have a minimum stay of 7 days per location for anyone considering travelling and working remotely. Anything less than that, and your time gets sucked into planning and actual travelling.
Things I Have Done
I.
Scoping a proof of concept
Since the last post, we have established close relationships with a small cohort of full-time creators. The goal of these relationships is to experiment and co-explore solutions to their biggest problems.
We are scoping a proof of concept for generating qualified leads for free and paid subscribers. I created a scrubbed version of a deck we used to scope one of the POCs with a creator here.
We are accepting one more place onto this cohort, so if you are a full-time creator or know of one focused on audience growth, hit me up.
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II.
Launched Sweet Kakes - A public list of problems that creators face
After a few weeks, it became clear how underserved the creator economy is. Given the challenges, I created Sweet Kakes to share them with other builders.
Sweet Kakes is a form of a public roadmap, but rather than collecting feature requests; it is collecting desired outcomes. It was also built in two hours using Airtable and Softr.
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III.
Establishing a community of people building for creators
We launched our Wildfire Discord to create a space where we can spend time with creators; however, what happened by accident was that we attracted designers/engineers and data people who are also building for this audience.
The community is currently focusing on how we can help each other to support creators. In the last session, we had founders who are ex YC, Google, Dropbox, and Harvard Alum talk about new ways that creators can generate revenue. If you don’t want to watch an hour of brainstorming, you can find the final outputs from the session here.
Crazy 8’s brainstorming - New Revenue Streams for Creators
If you are actively exploring or engaged in improving the creator economy, this community is for you.
Learnings
I.
Life is short; take your time with ‘Type 1’ decisions
Moving fast is essential in the startup world, but deciding what you want to move fast on doesn't get discussed enough.
Hopefully, you will spend at least 5-10 years working on your startup. So make sure you take the time to pick something that excites you. The best framework I have found for how much time you spend on something is Bezos Type 1 and Type 2 decisions.
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II.
Invest in building credibility
One of the most important things you can do in the early stages is to spend time with your target users; however, getting them to give you their time is a different question.
My experience to date is that the more credibility you have in the space, the more likely you will be able to get someone’s time. The most recent example I have is this Newsletter. I had found creators have been way more responsive when I shared that I was also going through the same process as them.
A Question For You
Would you be interested in seeing guest posts in this newsletter? If yes, what types of stories would you like to hear about?
Misc
This section essentially abuses the structure I tried to commit to above.
What I am interested in exploring in CE
Growth challenges
Analytics
Co-ownership
My exploration backlog
On-hold for now
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 resources
Wizen Guides - highly recommend checking these out. A very solid list of guides for everything founders face when starting something new
Community building
FiP #4 - 🍦Crowdsourcing Problems, 🔥 Wildfire Jam Session and 🧪Proof of Concepts