Sesame Summit 2026 – application open

Reading List for Entrepreneurs W47 – Selected

I like to call this post a look inside my brain, but it’s almost a week old already…

Apparently, I’m sharing around 5 articles per day with our team and more than 10 articles per day with myself. But I’m trying to recover from this knowledge addiction and turn collection into creation.

Do you do this as well? Saving articles for later reading? What’s your preferred tool? Pocket, Flipboard or Raindrop? I must confess I end up sending tons of articles to myself for later consumption

As is my obsession these days, I’ve come across a number of awesome community and newsletter related resources. And just to keep things a balanced; music, neuroscience, synthetic media, FinTech and event production.

Strategy

Jack Butcher, founder of  VisualizeValue walks out through his thoughts and process of finding people you can help, and building products that help them.

Ideas -> People -> Product.

Business

What does it mean to be a creator? How do you define it?

“As the world discovered that more American kids wanted to become YouTubers than astronauts and that Kylie Jenner became the world’s youngest billionaire, the term “creator” entered a pivotal moment.”

The Definition of a Creator
As “Creators” became the word to define a whole new generation of internet explorers, I asked myself what a creator really is. And I came up with a definition.
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Community

The National Geographic of the Digital Age

Now on their tenth year in existence, Atlas Obscura has become the National Geographic of the digital age. But how did they get there? Get Together has a look at the community surrounding the platform, and how it came to be.

“The National Geographic of the digital age”
A deep dive into the history of Atlas Obscura and the community fueling it.
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Lean Community Launch Framework

Community isn’t just another word for audience. It’s a special space you create for your most engaged members to gather and interact.

How to Launch an Online Community — Lean Community Launch Framework
This is your Community, Daily.
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  • Link: yenfm.substack.com/p/how-to-launch-an-online-community
  • Author: John Saddington
  • Source: Substack

Community is dead, long live community!

Community is a trend. Community is not a trend.
Community is about people and conversations
Community fatigue is a real thing
Subscriptions are great for the business
Communities subscriptions actually get complicated
Community is dead, long live community?

Community is dead, long live community!
Some current thoughts on the state of building communities and businesses
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Marketing

The SaaS SEO MBA

Ever wish you have a definitive list of all things SEO for SaaS? Well, now you do.

Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It’s the all-in-one workspace for you and your team
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Media

Samsung Next | The ethics and commercial potential of synthetic media

Samsung NEXT Ventures Europe’s Nick Nigam weighs in on the rapid growth of synthetic media.

“The number of people working to develop convincing fakes outnumbers those working to detect them by a factor of 100 to 1.” – Hany Fareed, computer science professor, University of California Berkeley School of Information

The ethics and commercial potential of synthetic media
Breadcrumbs list
  • Link: samsungnext.com/blog/the-ethics-of-synthetic-media
  • Author: Nick Nigam
  • Source: Samsung Next

FinTech

Educating Electeds – AVC

A strong example of what can happen when politics get in the way of progress. Particularly for those that elected officials are meant to be looking out for.

Educating Electeds

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Event Production

Lessons Learned From My First Experience of Pre-recorded Talk

Wahib Haq, EU Lead Partner Engineering at Huawei systematically breaks down his experience with his pre-recorded talk and provides practical examples of what to do and what not to do.

Important Lessons Learned From My First Experience of Pre-recorded Talk
Sharing learnings from my frist experience of Pre-recording multiple talks for Huawei’s largest conference “HDC.2020” and could be useful for developers, devrel folks or anyone who gets an opportunity.
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Music

Has your workflow changed in any way due to quarantine?

You’re not alone. Check out Channel Tres’ thoughts on taking your time, creating from a healthy place, the best kind of collaborations, and why sometimes the journey is more exciting than the goal itself.

On being yourself
Singer and producer Channel Tres on taking your time, creating from a healthy place, the best kind of collaborations, and why sometimes the journey is more exciting than the goal itself.
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Neuroscience

Altered states of consciousness: the elusiveness of the mind

“Maybe instead of considering a default state and a myriad of altered states, we need to contemplate the possibility that all these states of consciousness are all equally important modes of perception.”

Altered states of consciousness: the elusiveness of the mind

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Tools

The Hemingway App for SEO

With typewipe. your write relevant content that ranks with the power of A.I.

Think your SEO skills are good? Check them against typewipe before hitting publish.

Free SEO Writing Assistant – typewipe.
With typewipe. your write relevant content that ranks with the power of A.I.

Newsletter OS – Master the art of creating & running a newsletter

I’m always on the lookout for tools to help things grow bigger, faster, and stronger. This one looks quite promising.

Newsletter OS
Everything you need to curate, write and grow your newsletter in a Notion dashboard
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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 3 days ago

Lios Group, the Irish startup behind SoundBounce, was a winner of JEC Composites Startup Booster 2018, and has been making significant strides since taking home the award.

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New Materials 1 week ago

Tree Composites aims to accelerate the energy transition with innovative composite joints.

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