📈 Buy the Dip or Find Product Market Fit?

Suffering trauma from the crypto bloodbath dip? You're not alone. But that doesn't mean we can't lace up our allbirds, setup a new stripe account and get back to building. We're long on startups and we can't let the numbers get us down (even if SNL's latest guest can vaporize $500 billion with a couple key strokes on twitter). Whose ready to build? 🙌🏽

Since our Canadian readers are soaking up a long weekend, we added some extra startup signals and ideas for everyone to jump on:

Movers & Shakers:

🚶🏽New kids on the block: Emma Salinas (Founder of Gen Z Mafia), Brad Jenkins (Angel Investor & CEO of Seed Round Capital), Mark Darling (Gymshark's Head of Mobile Engineering) and Anna Fuller (2X Founder and Ex-Google PM). Let's make 'em feel welcome!

📈 The numbers: We're passing 3,800 users and have 715 startup ideas on deck. Bezos told us if we hit 5k by June he'd give Kernal members free prime for the year (kidding, but if any of ya'll have an "in", hit us up).

Startup Headlines

💸 Freelance economy on the rise: US freelancers earned an estimated $234 billion last year. Just another reason to get your startup ideas up on Kernal. Some stats to drop in your next zoom meeting:

  • Skilled freelancing is here to stay in a post-pandemic world. More than six in ten (63%) skilled independents believe their industry wasn’t impacted or there are more opportunities because of the pandemic. Three-quarters of skilled independents (75%) are more hopeful than fearful about the future of skilled independent work. (Yahoo!Finance)
  • Freelancing offers a viable source of income during a time of high unemployment. Six in ten (59%) skilled independents say their revenue was the same or greater in 2020 than in 2019 before the pandemic. Eight in ten (80%) skilled independents expect to make the same or more in 2021 compared to 2020. (Yahoo!Finance)

⛏ With a pick and axe angle, SignalFire Investor, Josh Constine, posted this startup idea that's been building momentum

Creator pre/post-production talent marketplace
Creators want to make more content than they can record, edit, and publish themselves. Yet it’s difficult to compare portfolios and pricing for video recording, video editing, podcast mastering, promo material graphic design, and more. Someone should build a production talent marketplace designed to…

🎧 Audio bets paying off: Podcasting is growing at record speeds and expected to surpass $2B by 2023 (iab.com) Some Kernalers are ahead of the curve and dropped some ideas last week that'll have you reaching out to chat cap tables.

Want a secret? 🤐 Simply type podcasting on our search bar and you'll be brought straight to the founders leading the category:

📝 Another win for Marc Andreessen's paypal VC firm: Don't let the drop in Clubhouse MAUs fool you. Employee of the month, Andrew Chen, snagged them a rising star. Its name? Maven.

What's the edge? It's led by the co-founder of course giant Udemy ($3B) Gagan Biyani and Seth Godin's altMBA co-founder Wes Kao. They led the latest $20M Series A (along some other Kernal members 👀) to help empower the future of cohort-based courses. Not a bad bet to make.

Courses are a hot topic in Kernal ecosystem. So if any of you can intro us to Marc to tap on that "investor" icon, we'd be happy to get a piece of that deal flow. 😏

Some other course concepts making waves on the platform are:

Yelp for Online Courses, Microcourse by SMS, Short courses for business skills, Masterclass for CEOs: Lessons, Courses, Programs

Kernal Opportunities

📰 HODL, Tiny's Building Again: Kernal member Farhan Mohamed has linked arms with Tiny Capital Founder, Andrew Wilkinson, to build the next newsletter empire. The opportunity? They want to grow to 50 brands and 250 journalists by 2023.

Looking for your next gig? Email Farhan to ping him your kernal ideas and jump aboard the rocket.

💏 Tik Tok for Dating Syndicate: Former Plenty of Fish Executive, Kimberly Kaplan, launched a Gen Z Syndicate for her new startup, Snack. Slide into her Kernal DMs if you wanna make the round in time.

🏆 Canadian Hackathon for Good: Kernal member Scot Sustad recently hosted a Brands for Better startup pitch event in Vancouver with big name brands involved like Salesforce, Hootsuite, & Deloitte. The focus was on sustainability solutions for Vancouver and the winning idea took home $50,000 in Ethereum Gas cash and PR sponsorship to put it into action.

Got a startup, event, or podcast you run the kernal readers should know about? Reply to this email and we'd be game to spread the word in a future issue.

📖 Free Playbook: Alex Garcia dropped a fire tweet storm on 25 Marketing Threads That Will Teach You More Than Any Marketing Class. He leads the social media wizardy behind The Hustle (recently acquired by Hubspot) and knows a thing or two about the marketing world.

⚡️ Weekend Reads

Got a startup zinger (project, blog or pod) we can drop in the next round-up? Hit us up here.

Tweets of the week:


📣 Spread the word:

Have a startup friend looking for ideas to build or invest in? Share a Kernal invite to help us hit 4,000 users.

👇🏼 More Startup Ideas to Pounce On:

Movie Credits for Web Developers
From Scott Belsky: One thing I’m excited about is the power of attribution in the world of digital creativity (web developers, coding etc) It’s pretty amazing we can’t go to any website and see in the code and see exactly who did what for that technology. Context: - In a movie, we see all the credi…
Women Negotiating Each Others’ Salaries
Pretty much every female knowledge worker I know feels uncomfortable negotiating on her own behalf. We all would go to bat for our peers or direct reports in a heartbeat and have no qualms about pushing for them to get what they deserve. When it comes to ourselves, however, we feel and act completel…
Tinder for podcast cross-promotions!
Podcasters: we want to make it easier for you to find the perfect podcast cross-promotion partner who suits you in topic, style, audience size, and dedication. Arranging a cross-promotion can be as daunting as dating! Podding’s mission is to remove the awkward guesswork and help you discover your fe…
MicroAcquire but for no-code projects
Marketplace to buy and sell businesses in the no-code ecosystem. Think MicroAcquire/Flippa/Empire Flippers but only for no-code. Why? - No-code movement is just starting to see wide adoption - No-code removes many barriers to entry to create a tech-enabled business - All no-code dev shops are curr…
Online Podcast Editor
Type Studio transcribes your podcasts into text so you can edit them based on the actual content. Everything runs online in your browser – no download or installation required. Work collaboratively on your podcast and share them via a link.
Headless forms for Jamstack websites
Including forms in a website is currently much more complicated than it should be. Such a basic feature can’t be solved only with frontend code, as it needs some kind of server to work. But it shouldn’t be like this. onSubmit (https://onsubmit.app/) allows frontend developers to receive form submi…

Have a startup idea to share? We'd love to hear it and it could score next week's front page.

Submit your idea here.

See you next week! 👋🏼