The story of nothing
Boom-time vs gloom-time startups | $1b side project | Failures and retrospectives | Secret products in Beta + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
With last month’s definitive collection of content to date, it’s meant I’ve been hoarding a huge list of content from the past two months, so this is a meaty issue to get stuck into. But take your time, don’t scoff through it too quick, take your time and savour the content.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last editions top link: Facebook’s Little Red Book
🔗 Hyperlinks
The story of nothing
Personally, I gravitate towards software startups, it’s what I know and it’s what I’m most comfortable creating. The malleability of software seems far easier compared to hardware. The thought of iterating with hardware on the fly, not simply being able to improve the product once it’s launched, figuring out supply chains, the capital needed and the specialisms required seem extremely daunting and risky.
Despite these challenges, a twenty-year-old with some prior experience working for tech hardware companies decided he would have a shot at building a new smartphone in perhaps one of the most crowded, well-funded competitive spaces alongside the likes of Apple, Samsung and Huawei to name a few.
In this interview, Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator speaks with the founder of Nothing, Carl Pei. In just two years, Nothing has launched two smartphone generations and two generations of wireless earbuds with 600m in revenue.
But it wasn’t an easy ride. Having struggled to find a contract manufacturer to build a smartphone they decided to pivot and first create a uniquely designed pair of wireless earbuds as a means to build trust and also hone the process.
However, after having 5k units recalled due to a manufacturing issue they had to quickly step in and move their team to China, rent an apartment next to the factory and work on the floor with the team to resolve the issue. Fast forward, they resolved the issue and managed to sell 600k units to save the business.
🤡 Fun fact: Teenage engineering founder Jesper Kouthoofd is a partner in Nothing - which would explain the incredible design aesthetic of the brand.
📓 Articles
Boom-time startups vs gloom-time startups
As predictable as Mariah Carey popping up every Christmas, VCs love to write contrarian uplifting posts about ‘opportunity’ when a recession is (apparently) looming.
In this post, Andrew Chen (partner at Andreessen Horowitz) set out his opinion that starting a company during a recession can be a good thing and why.
Andrew argues that during boom-time competition is fierce (hiring, funding, product), everything costs more and growth expectations are through the roof. Then there are the gloom-time benefits and the constraints which can work for specific founders and teams during this time.
Andrew mentions that boom-time startups and gloom-time startups typically operate with different strategies and therefore tend to align with the strengths of the founder(s) and their teams. So if you are on the fence ask yourself, is this a good time to start a company? Or is it better to stick to a safe job? starting a company in a bubbly vs recessionary period are completely different strategies that suit different personality types. Check out the post to understand which economic environment you are best suited to.
Product failures and retrospectives
I love a founder retrospective. Despite the agonising pain of having to admit the product or business plan just isn’t working, these founders find the time to compile their learnings and share them online for others to learn from their mistakes. Yet, in my experience, we tend to devour the few success stories in the hope of learning from these successes yet skip the perhaps even more valuable learnings from failures.
All progress, not only technological progress, is built on learning from past failures and mistakes.
In this segment, I’ve found 3 very recent founder retrospectives to share.
In this post, Founder of Product Hunt, Ryan Hoover provides a well-overdue postmortem of YourStack, a product to help people discover and buy products recommended by people they know and trust. Discover why YourStack failed.
Next up, we have a writeup from the founder of Sale & Muddy - Ron Bhattacharyay who details various experiments they ran trying to find product market fit for a multiplayer browser. Ron breaks down each experiment and retrospectively considers what worked and what didn’t and perhaps what he would have done differently in hindsight in a fantastically detailed post hosted on a Notion doc.
Lastly, we have an open letter from Farza Majeed founder of BuildSpace. You might recall i featured BuildSpace late last year and mentioned this would be my dream company to run and own. Teaching people, working with creative-driven people every day, learning from others and watching them thrive. However, BuildSpace is no more. The business didn’t run out of money, in fact, they had $2m left in the bank. There wasn’t any OpenAI-type drama internally. There weren’t any big competitors running them out of town. So on the face of it, they are hunky dory. Founder, Farza recently announced the end of BuildSpace and wrote this personal letter as to why. It’s a reality check that sometimes despite everything working in your favour - if the passions gone don’t continue on. Check out Farza’s Open Letter.
🎁 Bonus content: While we are in the headspace of learning from failures, check out Museum of Failure a collection of over 200 failed products and services from around the world. he museum aims to stimulate discussions about failure and inspire us to take meaningful risks.
$1 Billion Side Project
Replit has been on a tear recently, most notably since they launched their impressive AI Agent feature set allowing you to create and deploy applications - i.e. It configures your development environment, installs dependencies, and executes code. However, despite Replit’s recent popularity, it was founded in 2016. Recently, I heard a brief story about its founder Amjad Masad and his unconventional journey from a college side project, 3 rejections from YC, struggling raise capital and almost giving up to a billion-dollar AI startup.
Replit’s story is a reminder that not just every company, but every founder’s path, looks a little different.
The genius of the idea is fascinating. Having found the experience of working across different computers at college whilst trying to code extremely tedious, Amjad decided he would try and build perhaps the first cloud base coding platform - with the premise that coding should be as simple as opening up a new tab in a browser. Seems simple now, but wait to you understand the constant challenges Amjad had to overcome.
🎁 Bonus content: If you prefer to listen to the podcast check this out.
📱 Products
Napkin | Get visuals from your text
Recently I’ve been gearing up for several presentations and often struggle to articulate what I’m trying to convey in a simple diagram. Additionally, my Figma skills can only take me so far. Fortunately, I recently discovered this handy tool - Napkin. It takes your text and turns it into a variety of visuals. Simply paste your text into the editor, highlight and create a visual. Each visual generated can be customised, allowing you to adjust content and style to maximize their impact, including icons, illustrations, colour, connectors and fonts. Lastly, you can export them as .png, .pdf or .svg formats.
Cap | Open-sourced free alternative to Loom
I was a big fan of Loom so it pains me to suggest another alternative, but recently I had to uninstall Loom due to its excessive pop-ups with their desktop app. Additionally, it’s now a godforsaken Atlassian product. Cap is an open-sourced alternative to Loom with a generous free plan and powerful video editor built-in.
Flow | Think it, Speak it, Send it
Ever since watching the movie ‘Her’ I’ve been waiting for the romantic idea of being able to sit back away from my keyboard and mouse and simply dictate to my computer. While the ability to detach myself from my mouse has yet to become possible, it seems like the keyboard might be. Flow promises the ability to simply speak instead of type. It supports pretty much most of the applications I use day-to-day such as Slack, Google Docs and all browser-based apps with an extremely high level of accuracy. Having tested it within their playground I’m seriously impressed. However, I can’t see myself using this in an open office environment - just yet. Additionally, it’s not real-time dictation - instead, there is a delay in the processing which often makes you question if it’s picking up your audio but I suspect this will improve with future iterations.
Check out their homemade viral video introducing Flow which managed to get 1.6m views on X. How much did it cost? ZERO! Founder Tanay Kothari and his brother created it over the weekend in their office with a ring light and iPhone camera. Reminds me of the viral Dollar Shave Club video.
Beta Directory | Discover the latest tech products
This month’s latest early access beta products brought to you by Beta Directory are:
Micro: a CRM that doesn't feel like homework, an email client that knows what matters.
Helium: Improve your paywall at the speed of thought.
Mainframe: changing the world's relationship with computers.
🐽 Other links to consume
🔮 Flashback
Studying history to learn the future
In 1983, Steve Jobs famously flipped the bird to IBM outside their NYC HQ. The famous image of Jobs surfaced in 2011, when it was posted online by Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Macintosh development team. He recalled: 'In December 1983, a few weeks before the Mac launch, we made a quick trip to New York City to meet with Newsweek, who was considering doing a cover story on the Mac. The photo was taken spontaneously as we walked around Manhattan by Jean Pigozzi, a wild French jet setter who was hanging out with us at the time.'
Bidding on the leather bomber jacket he was wearing that day concluded earlier this year for $23k - nowhere near the $75k expected price.
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Until next the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻