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Ben’s List for Entrepreneurs W1 – Selected

Finally. It’s 2021 and we’re ready to build outstanding communities and resilient businesses… or are we REALLY ready for this?

I’m genuinely thrilled about this week’s reading list. It will cheer you up and push you towards building communities, raising funds and exiting your business. Maybe? Let’s hack communities, get the right SaaS tools and the financials to become a unicorn. Ok, you’re phoney.

Or maybe not… There will be trillions of individuals after us. The AI stack that powers self-driving vehicles is already stronger than our collective brain. And if you were wondering… YES, it’s more profitable to build a startup out of Silicon Valley. Fuck Miami dude.

I’m gonna get a nice shot of some vegan-friendly drink and then jump over 7 meters like Fosbury. My Google & Arts music will be a home run and I’ll nail it.

What will your 2021 look like?

Book

Biggest takeaway: belonging matters!

Hacking communities is about belonging anywhere and this pursuit of finding that home is the inner journey to your truest self.

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Hacking Communities
Guiding principles and practical insights to anyone willing to start or grow a community. Bring life to any business, cause or physical space. The book includes experience-based frameworks to community building.
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(Speaking of) Community

1. Mapping the Ecosystem of Community Tools

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2. Building Membership-Based Communities with Greg Isenberg and Justin Murphy

Re: Social Capital >> “We’re living through a period of extraordinary cognitive chaos…an utter collapse of centralized, aggregated sense-making abilities.. that’s the real underlying factor that makes these new movements into more private membership communities more profound” – Justin Murphy

3. Community Takes All: The Power of Social+

A social+ company combines the community and network of a social product with a specific category, form factor, or experience.

  • Link: a16z.com/2020/12/07/social-strikes-back-social-plus/
  • Author: D’Arcy Coolican

Startups

It’s all about thinking big, understanding that status comes from impact, and drinking the Kool-Aid.

One newer model of success we are starting to see is what has been called “The Mullet:” a small presence upfront (in SF or other hubs), and a large remote workforce elsewhere.

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SaaS

This should go without saying but David Sacks is here to remind us that “Team products are stickier than Individual products” with one of the main reasons being that “collaboration provides constant opportunities for reactivation.”

In those cases where it makes sense to build the Individual plan first, try to find the use cases for sharing and collaboration as soon as you can. Teams are the ultimate destination.

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Mobility

Hard to tell if this secret AR view was accidentally misfiled in the code or whether Elon Musk wanted his beta-testers to find it and tell the rest of us? Either way it definitely caught my attention as a heads-up of what’s to come from Tesla and/or other self-driving car makers!

Tesla full self-driving code contains secret “augmented reality view”
While digging through the code of their Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature, this hacker found an augmented reality view of everything the vehicle sees.
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Psychology

According to Richard Fisher “around 100 billion people have lived and died in the past 50,000 years. But they, together with the 7.7 billion people currently alive, are far outweighed by the estimated 6.75 trillion people who will be born over the next 50,000 years, if this century’s birth rate is maintained.”

If we hope to be good ancestors, we need to develop a transcendent ‘legacy mindset’, where we aim to be remembered well by the generations we will never know, by the universal strangers of the future.

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Sports

The Fosbury Flop – or why breaking the norms is the gateway to success!

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cheezburger.com/958890752

Before he springs from the pad like some great rocket lifting off, Dick Fosbury meditates, worries, psyches himself.


Music

Still looking for that perfect present? Why not gift a festive song? Blob Opera is a new machine learning experiment by artist David Li that lets you create your own festive song inspired by Opera on Google Arts & Culture.

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Food in 2021

Cheers to kicking off those adaptogenic, upcycled New Year’s Resolutions of yours in style!

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  • Link: snaxshot.com/2021

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Events 2 days ago

Last week, I spent three days at Bits and Pretzels in Munich — a startup-focused event with a distinctly Bavarian flavor. Think Oktoberfest meets startup conference, complete with dirndls, lederhosen, and more beer than you might expect. As someone building an AI-powered event platform, I went in with a specific mission: Observe how startups actually market themselves at events. Here’s what I discovered: GoodBytz: The power of good demos What they did: Robotics startup GoodBytz set up a booth where its robots prepared kaiserschmarrn (a traditional German dessert) all day long. Why it worked: Nothing beats seeing a product in action. While other booths had brochures and demos, GoodBytz’s robots were actually cooking. The smell, the movement and the end result stirred together an experience that people will remember and talk about. The lesson: If you have a physical product, show it in action. The old writing adage generalizes well: Show, don’t tell.  Let people see, hear and touch the product. WeRoad: The bathroom hack What they did: Posted “Missing Investor” flyers in bathroom stalls with QR codes pointing to their website. Why it worked: Pure genius. Every startup at the event was looking for investors, but the “Missing Investor” headline, while a bit on the nose, proved irresistible. Plus, bathroom stalls are one of the few places where people have 30 seconds to actually read something. The lesson: Think about where your target audience’s attention will remain undivided. Sometimes, the most effective marketing leverages the most unexpected places. Emqopter: Visual impact matters What they did: Designed a bright orange booth that displayed their drone prominently. Why it worked: In a sea of grey, white, beige and brown, Emqopter’s bright orange booth was impossible to overlook. The drone was real, too, and proved a real conversation starter. The lesson: Your booth is competing with hundreds of others. Make it visually distinctive and ensure your product is the hero. Quests: Community building using the product What they did: Created a busy, branded booth with accessories (toy car, traffic cones, a bulletin board) and used their anti-loneliness app to build communities among founders at the event. Why it worked: Quests used their product to solve a real problem right at the event, and the busy booth design generated energy and curiosity. The lesson: Use your product to solve a problem at the event — if it’s possible, of course. Demonstrate your value in real time. Dyno: Event-themed marketing What they did: Distributed branded electrolyte packs with the tagline “Your hangover ends. Your pension lasts – with Dyno.” Why it worked: Dyno aligned its messaging perfectly with the Oktoberfest theme. Every attendee was thinking about beer and hangovers, so Dyno’s goodies were quite relevant. The tagline was clever, memorable, and directly addressed a pain point most people at the event might have to deal with later. The lesson: Tailor your marketing to the event’s theme and culture. The more you tie your messaging and product to the context, the more memorable you become. So, what did I learn? Event marketing is about more than just showing up and setting up a booth; you have to understand your audience and create experiences that people will remember. Here’s what really struck me: most startups and even big companies don’t know how to leverage events properly. They book the booth, show up and hope for the best; maybe they bring some branded pens and a pop-up banner. Then they’ll go back home and wonder why they spent €5,000 in exchange for 50 business cards that never convert. The startups that stood out at Bits and Pretzels understand something fundamental: event ROI isn’t about booth size or location; it’s about strategy, creativity and planning. None of the startups above improvised on-site, or planned something the night before the event in their hotel rooms. They laid everything out 4-6 weeks before the event. A solid pre-event strategy is what separates successful event marketing from expensive booth rental.  But what matters most for early-stage startups is that you don’t need a massive budget to stand out. WeRoad’s bathroom stall hack probably cost €50 to print the flyers. A standard booth package at Bits and Pretzels would go for €3,000 to €5,500. The ROI difference is staggering when you compare the cost per meaningful conversation. That’s the difference between simply spending money and investing smartly. Building Sesamers has taught me that helping startups find the right events is only half the equation. The other half is helping them understand how to maximize ROI once they’re there. Good props aren’t a marketing expense; they’re opportunities to meet customers, investors and partners, and strike up engaging conversations.

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New Materials 1 week ago

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