🍽 3 Ways to Cook Up Tasty Startup Ideas

Joel Hansen

Sep 17, 2021 • 5 min read

Morning Builders,

NFTs are still hot, Mailchimp sold for $12B and Tim dropped 7 new apple products. And that was only Tuesday. It's a good thing we write these newsletters Thursdays at midnight or we'd have to scratch our entire gameplan when some big shot decides to buy or invent something. 💰

Hungry for a good newsletter? Today's a feast:

Cold emailing Ben Chesnut and why Mailchimp's exit was legit
3 ways to spice it up and secure investor interest
Featured startup ideas you should vote on

Top up your coffee and let's dive in:👇

📬 12 Billion Dollar Pay Day:

$12B is what Intuit paid to acquire Ben Chesnut and Dan Kurzius's startup idea. The craziest part? Mailchimp is 100% founder-owned. So if you're good at math, you'll know this is one of the largest bootstraps exits in history. We sent Ben a cold email to congratulate him. Still haven't heard back. 😢

Know Ben Chesnut? Help us send a Kernal invite here ��

🥕 3 Ingredients for Tasty Startup Ideas

Wondering what makes startup ideas juicy? Data to back 'em up. Remember, you wanna make the investors that got in early rave about your idea to their friends. How do you do that?👂 Build good ol' data-backed FOMO people can bet their lives on.

Instead of tweeting it's a good idea, show your cards. Prove how you'll win. Here are 3 hacks to show how ripe your startup idea is: 🍅

1) Qualify the Search Volume: Places like Google Trends and Hustle Trends share monthly search volumes that reveal where the best opportunities are waiting. Instead of guessing, pounce on the highest-ranked keywords. Check out the google search volume for Halloween 20 days before Oct 31st. 🎃

2) Do Your Research: Weekly digests like Trends.vc and tools like IdeaValidator.io can help you map out your data before you waste 100 hours building a product nobody wants. Qualify your product build before you waste your life on it. Fun fact: both these websites were built by Kernalers, Dru Riley and Saba Karim. Got a question? Hit 'em up. 👋🏼

Kernal Example: Max and Emily caused a buzz adding clear market research to their latest investing startup idea. They even included a Docsend pitch deck for people to see their plans.

3) Human Proof: Landing pages with email sign-ups, social media tools to count hashtags and survey forms that track consumer questions go very far with investors. Why? It shows you've done the grunt work. You know your people. The tip is to make the info you collet externally facing so you can lure investors with your product-ready audience. Alexis Grant crushed this with her recent MVP: