🏋️ Startup Olympians You Should be Following

Happy Friday Fam,

With Olympics being all the buzz, we decided to throw together a podium of our own. Today we're shouting out the hustlers and ideators that are long on startup ideas regardless of how oversubscribed their last raise was. 🏆

Today's outline:

• The Podium: meet the startup legends leading the way
• Startup Zingers: one-liners you'll wanna drop this weekend
• Internet Gems: templates and ideas worth stealing

Pause the podcast, crank up the screen brightness and let's roll. 🌊

Introducing the Startup Idea Podium:

Everyone knows Michael Phelps dominates the pool and Serena Williams owns the tennis court. But I'd bet 1,000 DOGE that if we asked you who the kings and queens of the startup idea community are, you wouldn't know where to turn. 👑

Well friends, if there's anything you've learned reading our newsletter, it's that behind every problem is a solution waitin' to spread its wings. So our team put together a podium to recognize the best early-stage startup legends coming out of Kernal. Prep your chrome tabs, here are some names you'll wanna double click.

🏆 Top Ideator Award: Elaine Zelby

If you've spent more than 5 minutes on Kernal, it's hard to miss Elaine Zelby. She's an idea machine that's built a rep for sharing startup goodness. It's important to note, the Top Ideator Award is a combination of both idea output and idea reactions from the Kernal community. One of Elaine's most popular ideas was Startup Saas Bundle, which stirred up an impressive 67 up-votes from the community.

In the idea, she qualified 32 users, 17 buyers, 17 eager builders and 3 prospective investors. But that's not all, folks. On top of that idea alone, she's almost racked up a Kernal triple-double with 38 ideas, 38 upvotes, and 5 comments on other concepts. Across her range of ideas, she's drummed up 271 up-votes from members. This all-around performance positioned her as the easy choice for our 2021 top ideator crowning. Keep an eye on Elaine. She's one to watch. 👀

Join 478 readers following Elaine to get first dibs on her next idea

🏆 Highest Voted Idea Award: Shaan Puri

A click of Kernal's top idea tab will reveal our highest-voted ideas on the platform. If you keeners have already checked it, you'll know who's been sitting on that throne the last couple of months. Mr. Shaan "Idea Riffing" Puri.

With 114 votes in the bag, he's sitting pretty comfortably. His startup idea above pulled in 31 eager users, 17 future buyers, 16 builders and 9 investors. It's likely his My First Million podcast and controversial Twitter threads will continue to garner attention, so if you're on Bitclout, now's your chance to invest early.

Regardless of where startup fame takes Shaan, we're glad he's chosen to spend some time spinning up Kernal ideas. And time will tell if someone tries to de-crown his idea in the future. Until then, he'll be waiting.

Join 1,135 kernalers following Shaan for his next million dollar idea

🏆 Most Engaged Investor Award: Zain Jaffer

Coming in with 9 up-votes, 2 of his own startup ideas and an impressive 23 helpful comments shared with other Kernal users, Zain steals this year's Most Engaged Investor award. 💰

Let's put things in perspective for a sec. With a track record of exiting Vungle for $780M in 2019, there's a good chance he could be charging $10,000/hr for consulting in his spare time. Instead, he's dishing out helpful advice like the one below to founders in need. That's a Kernal spirit we can get behind.

Join 542 kernalers following Zain for his next startup comment

🏆 Hungry Hustler Award: Clément Bourcart

You hear the word hustle said again and again in startup circles. To us, it stands for being hungry, humble and helpful — and Clément is someone that represents this to the "T".

Between being a Top Writer on Medium, Management Consultant and Investor, we've been blown away by how much time he's invested into sharing, upvoting and commenting on startup ideas that you readers have been putting up.

Get this, he's posted a total of 43 ideas, shared 12 insightful comments and dropped in 52 upvotes to ideas spanning all industries. He's then gone above the call of duty to post them on Twitter, promote Kernal on his startup blog (that goes out to thousands of readers) and has written us detailed emails sharing his user feedback.

Clément, you win our coveted Hungry Hustler Award. Thanks for being a shining star in the startup community. 💚

Follow Clément to stay in the loop on ideas and writing

That's all for this year's startup awards. We hope you learned a few things about our top Kernal members stirring up a ruckus in the startup world. Send them a DM, drop them an email or meet up with them for a zoom.

After all, this newsletter is all about bridging people, ideas, and capital in one place. So if we can spark any of that, let us know and we'll make a toast in your honour. 🥂

Startup Zingers:

👀 Stage Fright? Robinhood made records for the wrong reason yesterday as it massively underperformed its IPO targets and earned its spot as the worst debut among 51 US firms that had raised as much capital as it had.

🏠 Just DAO It: Creator Cabins is a residency program for creators based in Austin, Texas. They just opened applications for their next cohort.

🍄 Betting on Psychedelics: Codie Sanchez is betting long on Psychedelics. Here's her latest breakdown on signals she's watching for.

📰 Facebook's Metaverse Vision: Zuck recently dropped his vision for the company growing its footprint in the metaverse, hinting that it'll be doubling down on its AR/VR initiatives and more.

Internet Gems:

💰 Free Playbook: Marie Martens, Co-founder at Tally.so, hosted an AMA answering everything she learned bootstrapping Tally to $30k ARR in year one.

🍾 Pop the Champagne: Emmanuel Straschnov, the founder of no-code platform Bubble, just raised $100M Series A this week.

⚡️ Founder Find: Why busy builders should outsource things they don't care about and the top categories to pick from.

📝 Hiring Spree: Uniswap Founder, Hayden Adams, is looking for engineering and ops roles to fill. Slide into his Twitter DMs to snag an interview.

📣 100 1-person businesses: any of y'all can start and scale to the moon. Just remember our newsletter link when you make it big.

Tweet of the week:

Fresh Ideas to Vote On:

Got a startup idea you want feedback on? Submit it here.

🏖 *Entering Vacay Mode...

Even the best Olympians take a break. Our staff are unplugging next week to do the same. We'll be gone soaking up some vitamin D with our family so don't wait on us for next Friday's startup news.

Catch you on the flip side, 😎

The Kernal fam

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