📚 Back to Startup School

Joel Hansen -

Morning Builders,

Kids are back in school, Elizabeth Holmes is on trial and our pre-seed round is off to a hot start. According to our intern, 53% of you opened our surprise Saturday email. If you missed the boat, the idea we shared last week generated $650K of investor interest and we've got some BTS stories to drop.

Today’s writing lineup:

  • Pre-Seed Update: the last 7 days have been jam-packed
  • Fundraising Advice: how to generate investor interest on Kernal
  • Featured Ideas: that you should check out

Top up the pricey lattes and let's rock n' roll: ☕️

🌱 Pre-Seed Update:

This last week have been remarkable. We've seen our Kernal community step up like never before and we have the numbers to prove it. The TLDR? People want 'em.

💰 Some Stats:

  • 146 of you said you'd like to invest
  • 54 of you said you'd wanna use the service
  • 27 of you said you'd pay for the service
  • 19 of you said you'd help build this
  • In 24 hours we generated an investor interest of $400K
  • 70%+ of the investor interest has been from accredited investors
  • Cheque sizes: The 146 investors that expressed interest were 5 investors over $50k, 11 investors over $10k and 100+ investors signed up to allocate $1-5k or more after seeing a deck.
  • Campaign Distribution: 2 free newsletters to users, 2 tweets from the Kernal Twitter account, and a Hustle Trends Post on FB. Not a cent to FB ads for Zuck.

All of these impressive numbers came from simply sharing a startup idea with our Kernal users in a standard weekly newsletter. That my friends is all thanks to you.

I know we're biased, but our team thought this was bonkers. 😳

💸 Dragon's Den Feature: Activated

ICYMI: every Kernal member now has the ability to measure the total investor interest per startup idea.

So the fundraising feature we launched last week is free to every reader opening up this newsletter. So if we can generate $100K+ of investor interest with a startup idea so can you.

To help you out, we wanted to share 3 quick hacks to try this week on your startup idea:

1) Perfect your one-liner and picture: I know most of you hate the little details but that's what makes Kernal ideas pop. Check-in on your best startup. Refine the title, bio and photo. Clean it up and make it something people would want to invest in.

Example: Mike has a simple and catchy breakdown for his virtual tool idea

2) Rally up some local interest: you heard me. If you've got industry contacts, angel investors or a rich Uncle, loop them into your startup idea and ask if they'd be interested to invest in the idea if you decided to build it. The more small wins you can pick up, the more traction your idea will get across the platform.

Kevin Moran won over a software engineer to invest in his idea

3) Share on Social: you've heard us dish this out before but few of you are running with it. Start dropping your startup ideas in newsletters and Twitter posts. Word will catch, people will get curious and investors will flock. Patrick hit it home with this startup idea:

We think this type of thinking can only help forge more relationships to get you from startup ideation, pre-seed runway, and eventually IPO touchdown.

So have it this weekend. Generate some investor interest in your Kernal ideas this weekend and will feature our favourites that are gaining traction. Wanna email us your idea to get it featured? Hit us up here.

Subscription Electronics Platform for Different Niches (camera/gym equipment/B2B)
Grover is a Berlin-based startup that just raised a further ~$70m to grow its electronics rental business in Europe and expand to the US. The company, which rents out consumer electronics for a set monthly fee, has increased its subscriber base by 50% in the last 6 months from 100k to 150k active …
Kernal
Deal Flow Tracking & Management for VCs & Angels
I’m a portfolio manager for a corporate venture capital firm and I found that there weren’t any perfect solutions off the shelf for managing deal flow amongst my team. So, I’ve been quietly building the absolute perfect solution. (Sorry, I had to redact some sensitive information from the screen…
Kernal
Startup SaaS Bundle
The last decade has been the great unbundling of SaaS, with the average startup now purchasing more than 34 independent SaaS products to run their business. What used to be wrapped up under the umbrella of SAP or Oracle has now been split into hundreds of best-in-class point solutions that startups …
Kernal
A Modern Point of Sale For Restaurants, Bars, Diners, etc.
Salt was developed during the inception of the pandemic in hopes of providing a more affordable Point of Sale (POS) solution that doesn’t charge subscriptions or bind business owners to contracts in an already low-margin industry. After talking with 150+ restaurants in the NY and NJ area, we found …
Kernal
Micro Investing, investing for normal people
A platform where normal people can micro-invest as little as 100$ into pre-seed start ups. **Seeking feedback to adjust details below appropriately. -----------------How it would work: A micro-investor can look through a list of founders, ideas, pre-existing startups and invest 100$ into it. …
Kernal

💚 The Kernal fam

P.S. Got questions or ideas? Reply to this email. We wanna hear 'em.

How did you like this week's newsletter?
😍 Loved it · 😕 Meh · 😠 Hated it