This week’s Founder Finds includes:
- A collaboration tool for teams
- 100+ places to launch your product
- A tool for taking great-looking screenshots
- A podcast about scandals and conspiracies
- Increasing marketing spend during recessions
- A challenge of turning $20k into $500k in 1 year
- And more…
🪶 Remember This
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
🤓 Fav Finds
Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members
🚀 Relaunch Like a Pro shared by Joel Pickin
A list of 100+ places to launch, relaunch, and list your product.
📉 Doubling Down on Marketing During Recessions shared by Gabriel Limma
A Twitter thread from Val Katayev on the power of increasing your marketing spend during recessions.
📝 Markup.io shared by Wadnes
A tool to collaborate and share feedback on websites, images, PDFs, and videos.
📘 Read This
Challenge: Turning $20k Into $500k In 1 Year
Scott DeLong sold 6 websites for $10,550,000 and grew ViralNova to 100,000,000 unique monthly visitors in 6 months.
Now he’s on a quest to turn a $20,000 budget into a $500,000 website in 1 year. Scott is building in public with weekly updates.
🌟 Founder of the Week
“Everyone in Trends Pro has been friendly and willing to help! Someone suggested that I do 30 days of standups so that I could join a Mastermind group. I’ve hit that goal and now I have a small group of folks to discuss goals and how we can help each other!”
Stephanie is building The Crowd List, a startup equity investing discovery platform. They have a free weekly newsletter with a curated list of startups that have launched their crowdfunding campaigns. She is also a member of Trends Mastermind #0005.
What’s your most important habit?
Making a daily “To Do” list.
I’ve tried many apps over the years and pen + paper is the best one for me.
What are you reading right now?
Atomic Habits
This is my third attempt at reading this book. For some reason, I can’t make it past the 2nd chapter. It was suggested to me recently to try it in audiobook form… which I think I’m going to have to do if I ever want to make it to the end.
What product or service do you wish existed?
I wish there was an easier way to “shop locally” online. I’d love to buy from my local shops but physically going into a store is not always the best option. I’d still like to support my neighbors’ businesses without always immediately defaulting to Amazon for convenience purposes.
I’ve heard rumblings that Shopify was going to release a “Search ALL of Shopify” feature and that might address part of this issue, especially if that search includes a filter for location (*hint hint* Shopify!).
What product are you obsessively using right now?
Tally – This is my favorite form builder. I was sold on the stripe integration feature. It also talks to my Airtable bases nicely. I recently learned that you can upgrade to see forms that were only partially filled out. Now that is a feature worth paying for!
Airtable – I spend a majority of my time in Airtable. I use it as a database and a content planner. There are endless ways to use this to simplify my business processes!
Reminders – Just the standard iOS app. This app is simple. It has exactly the features I need for the purposes I’m using it for.
What are you bullish on?
AI Writing Tools – Being a great writer is an absolute necessity to sell just about anything. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time, practice, and dedication to become good at writing. I think AI writing tools will speed this process up for a lot of folks and help generate more quality content.
What are you bearish on?
NFTs (don’t come for me!). I love NFTs as a utility (don’t worry I’ve got some JPEGs in my wallet too) but the barrier to entry is still too high for the average person to participate in this piece of the Web 3 world. I am very curious to see the results from Starbucks’ recent NFT rollout. They’ve nailed the market in simplifying tech for their consumer… which includes just about everyone.
What’s your favorite Trends Report?
💰 Equity Crowdfunding
This is an obvious one as it is the whole basis of my business. I find equity crowdfunding so interesting and I want everyone to know that it’s an option for them. I think that anyone who wants to participate in these alternative forms of finance should get to do so. I learned about equity crowdfunding in 2021 and realized how cumbersome it was to go to dozens of funding portals every day to find out which companies were raising funds. I knew that I could make it easier to do this. So I made The Crowd List and more and more folks join each week to learn about those companies!
(Bonus Pick) 🤑 Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses
This is a favorite for a lot of us. It’s inspiring to see that it doesn’t always take 14 software engineers to build something cool and profitable!
🎧 Listen To
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead
I know… this is an interesting quote choice for a podcast about scandals and conspiracies. Conspiracies involve a small group that impacts the lives of millions (or billions) of people. The same applies to companies.
We’re building companies to create positive change. But we can learn from anti-examples.
🔧 Try This
Xnapper is a useful tool for quick, great-looking screenshots from fellow indie hacker Tony Dinh.
🏆 Trends Pro Member Wins
🆕 Marty Finestone became a Trends Pro Member
👥 Amardeep Parmar, Bayu Sutrisno, Marty Finestone and Bernardt J. Vogel unlocked 1:1 Founder Intros by joining daily standups
📰 Martin Slaney launched his newsletter 3PM
✒️ Cameron McGrane and his wife tripled the revenue of their author coaching program
📄 Marc Fletcher launched a Notion template for Bubble app documentation
🎥 Uwe Dreissigacker did a challenge of publishing a video tutorial a day for BlogHandy and InvoiceBerry
🧠 Reed Floren, Chris Vara, Reme Ekoh, Anderson Dadario, Raj B, Elie Steinbock, Byron Wilson and Marc Fletcher unlocked Trends.vc Masterminds by reaching 10-day standup streaks
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