🤫 Truth or Die Startup Edition

Joel Hansen

Feb 3, 2023 • 5 min read

Hey Founders,

Welcome to the Kernal newsletter: we're the hotel that auto-upgrades your room cuz we know you'll need 11/10 wifi to ship new features during your stay

Latest news: Stripe's IPO'ing. Meta stocks growing. IG Co-Founders announced Artifact. Snapchat and Spotify had a brutal Q4. Samsung dropped new smartphones. ChatGPT is calculating mortgage payments. Billy Mcfarland's CONsulting for $1800/hr. TikTok's CEO is prepping a TED Talk for Congress. Valentine's is in 11 days. 🌹

*Don't forget to book that dinner rezo to surprise your life co-founder (aka spouse) or you'll end up like Billy 👇

🤫 3 Truth or Dies for Startup Founders
📈 Hot startup ideas to skim
🐥 Timely tweets

Right now you're reading the newsletter. And there's no shame in that. But you're clicks away from being the Kernal newsltter👇

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🤫 Truth or Die Founder Edition

Founders, we're not gonna lie. This new year, new me energy is 89% bullcrap. And 3rd-time founders know it's true. You can only James Clear your startup so far.

At the end of the day, you have to "do the work":

You gotta validate your MVP
You gotta dial those sales calls
You gotta hire that product manager

It ain't easy. And if it was, ~~less would work at Google~~ everybody would do it.

To keep you going, we wanted to play a little round of Truth or Die to remind you what you need to do to keep scaling and keep your startup from dying. Judges, let's start the clocks...

1. Truth or Die: The best way to find your first users is to sit on your couch and wait for a Twitter thread to go viral? 🤞

Answer: False

Solution: This newsletter from Lenny points out 7 powerful ways you can meet your first users. Steal the hacks below to see how Uber, Snapchat and Instagram got their first 1,000 users.

2. Truth or Die: The best way to find your first couple of customers is going door to door in San Francisco 🚪

Answer: False

Solution: Jake Mcdonald, head of product at Antler, reminds us "35% of startups fail because they launch products with no market need" (yikes 😅).

You wanna validate your customers ASAP. Here's 3 ways he says you can do it for less than $1000 out of your savings account:

a) Host customer interviews (via emails, blog, voice notes etc) to find out if 1) you're solving a real problem and 2) is there a demand for my solution

b) Research the search volumes for your keyword using tools like Moz, ubersuggest, or google adwords. All have free versions.

c) Post your startup idea on Kernal and spin up a landing page with our Yep.so integration to share with your potential customers.

📩 email blake@kern.al if you want help with that

Time for the 3rd and finalllll round of true or die

3. Truth or Die: the best way to retain customers is by singing "Kum ba yah" every time they complain 🎶

Answer: False

Solution: Hubspot, a marketing CRM startup idea that's scaled to be worth $20B wrote a blog on this exact question. Their advice is:

Provide an “aha” experience: give 'em a wow moment
Leverage data from customers who leave: track your best/worst customers and iterate weekly
build a regular social media/newsletter schedule that answers their top questions (check out hootsuite.com)
feature your top customers: check in with them quarterly on how you can make their exp 11/10
*Bonus: join an accountability group: Blake hosted one the other day and it went so well he's already working on the next one. Comment here if you wanna join👇