Launching founders.menu
January 7, 2024 • Startup • Decision ⌇ Connect ↗
This one is a long-time coming. ☻ I have been building bootstrap.supply for the past years, but as I was goal setting for 2024 the brand and direction just didn’t feel in line with where I noticed founders are still underserved. So I ideated a long time to arrive at a fresh direction for what I want to build into the most value-driven founders community the internet has seen. But first, let’s set the stage…
In short, bootstrap.supply is rebranding into an evolved venture with all users from previous downloads and purchases — hence bootstrap.supply will get sunset in 2024. I am calling this next step: founders.menu, a new kind of platform, where founders will find all they need to take action. Why this new direction, Julian? Well, I’ve been building products for a long time now and always had this dream of running a vibrant community of like-minded founders. But I’ve never quite had the right angle or momentum to do so… In 2019, I thought getting funding from VC & angels was the holy grail. In 2020 I caught onto the bootstrapping movement and even launched bootstrap.supply, an OS (will be continued) for independent founders to bootstrap their dream business. But as I continued to build products like belong.haus I noticed it’s not about the way you build a business. It’s THAT you are building a business that matters. Whether you are bootstrapping, Indiehacking, VC-funded, or simply building beautiful tools for the fun of it. We all see problems and conjure up solutions in an ever-evolving product-market-fit battle. We are and always will be founders.
As I came to this realization, many questions started to form… where is your go-to place to get unstuck? Where do you go to keep your momentum high? Where do you get inspired to try things differently? But I couldn’t find an answer. So I brainstormed concepts for days and finally founders.menu struck me like a bolt of lightning. You see, depending on where you are in your founder journey, you will have phase-specific problems to solve. Just like a menu has aperitifs (idea → concept), starters courses (concept → MVP), main courses (MVP → Business), deserts (business → scale), and sides/beverages (boosts) to cater to our varying needs, founders.menu will offer the same as a feast of resources for every stage of your founder journey.
Because the one thing that defines any founder’s ability to succeed is their speed and quality of taking action — this is informed by three pillars:
- Regime → intentional systems to build momentum.
- Relations → people who offer you divergent viewpoints.
- Resources → stuff that can nudge you to try new methods.
It’s already difficult enough to build a successful business, so why pigeonhole yourself into niche online communities that “build the same way” as you?
We’re all founders. We all need to take faster & more precise actions.
That’s what founders.menu is all about.
The new founders.menu platform
To kick off 2024, I took my first piece of action. A new landing page, with a members area that’s already open for signups. As a thank you for being on this list, I will make all member signups free until the next newsletter goes out on January 14th next week. Members will have full access to a growing list of Tools, Reads, Listens, Streams and so much more to come…
What’s ‘The Feast’ newsletter?
Now to the purpose of ‘The Feast’ newsletter. Every Sunday I will send founders.menu subscribers as a letter with a select number of ingredients, so you can stay up-to-date with founders.menu and get a good overview of the past week’s founder highlights from across the internet. Here is the structure I have in mind. ↓
- Starter → a business hack or mental model.
- Main course → founders.menu update & new ways to take action.
- Desert → founder highlights from the past week.
- Side → TBD — more soon!
This is not a definite structure, so expect to see experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. If you have ideas, feel free to reply to this email. ☻
» Subscribe to ‘The Feast’ today «
2024 goals
There are three things I want to publicly commit to this year. ↓
- Attain 10K founders.menu subscribers (currently at 504).
- Unify ALL bootstrap.supply products under founders.menu.
- Build out and monetize a fully functional founders.menu platform.
I will be sharing #buildinpublic progress weekly on ‘The Feast’ and of course more spontaneous details on my x.com/itsjulianpaul profile.
By being on ‘The Feast’ email newsletter, you are along for the ride.
Thank you so much for reading this far. If you want to connect, let’s use x.com/itsjulianpaul — I talk about product, marketing & design.
See you around.
Connect
Let’s meet on whatever platform serves your desired outcome best. My digital identity holds all platform intentions. Prefer email? Try contact@julianpaul.me.
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