Building Bridges

"In some areas of life, value is unlocked by starting. Even a five-minute workout or a short walk can reset your mood and benefit your body.

In other areas, value is unlocked by finishing. It does you no good to build a bridge halfway across the river. You need to complete the project to realize the value.

Do you need to start or finish? Are you building a body or building a bridge?"

– James Clear, from his brilliant 3-2-1 Newsletter

Welcome back to the Founder Roundup! Hope your weekend was fantastic. We had the pleasure of featuring three great founders last week. Check out their profiles below.

A big welcome to our new subscribers. If you haven't introduced yourself yet, respond to this email. I'd love to get to know you.

Weekly Wisdom

Startup School

"You're too early." It's the three words pre-seed and seed companies dread. This article breaks down what it really means– and what you can do about it. Brought to you by our friends at The Scientific Startup. 

P.S. The Scientific Startup is hosting a 10 Week Digital Accelerator giving early-stage founders the science-backed tools they need to design and launch a company. Not only will the program ensure your company is on the right path, there is a total of $10k in grant funding available for the top three winners of their pitch competition.

The Accelerator is normally $750. List Luke from SFD as your referral to get $250 off. You can apply here.

Backseat Startup

In episode 7 of the Backseat Startup Podcast, we had Brennan Woodruff, COO of generative AI startup, GoCharlie on the show. We broke down the red flags and green flags of Co-Founder relationships.

Give the recording a watch above or subscribe through the button below.

Founder Roundup

Noor Gupta, Author of the Touristy Newsletter

Do you ever wish reading the news wasn’t such a chore? Noor Gupta created Touristy to provide readers with an educational yet entertaining newsletter covering topics like business, tech, and consumer trends.

With a passion for writing and skills developed from her Digital Media & Communications education, Noor started a travel blog in her last year of undergrad. Unfortunately, that blog didn’t gain much traction.

In 2020, when the world was under COVID lockdowns, Noor saw an opportunity to pivot her writing to more business-focused news and change her format from a blog to an email-newsletter.

That’s when Touristy was born. Since then, Touristy has garnered over 60,000+ subscribers organically. 🤯

With quick-fire news, helpful images and graphics, and a hearty dose of millennial sarcasm, Noor has found a writing style that is finding success.

Subscribe to the Touristy Newsletter here.

Christopher Joyce, Founder of Gusher

Build your company. Skip the funding. Christopher Joyce founded Gusher to allow anyone to launch their startup with performance-based equity.

While starting up his own businesses, Christopher saw way too many entrepreneurs being turned down for reasons other than their ideas: Where they lived, what they looked like, etc.

He believes that we shouldn’t hand over so much power to VCs. Instead, we should let the market decide which ideas are winners. 

The founder creates the pitch, defines the team roles and their equity awards. Next, talented people apply to the equity-based roles and the founder selects the best. Finally, when all goals have been met, the founder awards the equity and launches the startup.

No investors necessary.

Head over to their website to learn more.

Willow Li, Founder of AyiConnect

Finding a suitable caregiver for your needs can be difficult, especially when you have specific language and cultural needs. Willow Li and the AyiConnect team are looking to streamline the process for multilingual families.

As an immigrant living in the US with two children, Willow wanted to find a caregiver who could speak in her native language, Mandarin Chinese. Only after a year of searching online and offline did she find someone suitable for the job.

This wasn’t good enough for her, so she made her own service. AyiConnect is a multilingual care app that makes it easy to find individual caregivers in child care and senior care.

Similar to a job board, families post job postings, and caregivers apply to work with the families. Once there is a match, the caregiver can work with the family and get paid through a secure payment system.

With nearly 20K members, they are ready to grow by servicing new languages and new service areas.

Head over to their website to learn more.

In Partnership with beehiiv

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SFDeals

Have you checked out our community discounts yet? We have deals on 80+ tools startup founders use everyday. Our goal is to help our community save $1 million over the next year. Starting a business is tough enough. We're trying to make it cheaper.

If you have any trouble accessing the deals, PLEASE let me know. Happy to hop on a call and walk you through the process. We'd also love any feedback on the experience. We want the marketplace to be as frictionless as possible.

Community Corner

Who are we and what do we do? Read about our mission and check out our marketing portfolio here.

Calling all students: We have launched a campus ambassador program to connect the next generation of founders and investors. Members can take advantage of a community of entrepreneurial students across the globe, attend weekly meetings where we vet early stage companies, and a host of other programming. If you or someone you know would be interested in joining, apply here.

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