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Reading List for Entrepreneurs W45 – Selected

I share many articles with the team, almost on a daily basis. One of the upsides of being a conference organizer is that you’re getting paid to monitor an industry and identify the trends before they make the headlines.

Now, I’m not getting paid to do that anymore, but I’ve kept the practice. The scope has changed, as I’m now reading a lot about paid newsletters or remote work. I.e., Things that can be relevant for anyone running a business.

Books

I just got Jen Schradie’s book to prepare our upcoming Selected Salon. You can apply to get invited to our first member-only event here: lu.ma/salon-1

The Revolution That Wasn’t — Jen Schradie
In this counterintuitive study of digital democracy, Jen Schradie shows how the web has become another weapon in the arsenal of the powerful, and a potent weapon for conservative activists. Rather than leveling the playing field, the internet has tilted it in favor of the Right, where only the most …
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Jen is a sociologist and assistant professor at the Observatoire Sociologique du Changement at SciencesPo in Paris. In her last book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, she dives into how North Carolina’s workers right advocates paved the way to a conservative shift in the 2010’s elections.

While social media is supposed to level the playing field to the benefit of democratic organizations, it’s proving to be more efficient for those already in position of power, with the means and resources to broadcast their message to fragmented audiences.

Strategy

I recently wrote about no-code and the creator tools that we used to build Selected by Sesamers. I found this article to be particularly relevant as it analyzes how a growing number of makers and content creators build media businesses in 2020.

In a nutshell, every single creator is now in a position to establish a movement around her work. These hyperniche communities become more valuable than the content itself and constitutes subcultures that established companies can’t replicate.

Marketing

In this interview with Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and co-founder of Mutiny, and a former Head of Marketing at Gusto, you will learn why speed & prioritization are the ying and yang of marketing.

I’m always an advocate of “done is better than perfect” and I believe that it’s even more the case with marketing. Conveying your story to the right audience is timely. Sometimes it’s a matter of hours for a campaign to become irrelevant to the cultural context.

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Credit: First Round Review

Our good friend Bjørn Lapakko was the lead organizer of Startup Extreme, the annual gathering of the Norwegian startup ecosystem in Voss. In this article, he shares his learnings organizing a hybrid event that usually relies on extreme sports and face to face interactions.

His team created a bunch of innovative formats that triggered engagement beyond the wildest dreams of most virtual events, with over 1000+ hours of videos consumed over the course of two days. The main takeaway is clear: creativity pays off.

Management

We started to experiment with flex hours after 2 months of working from home. It means that we are all on deck from 10am to 3pm. And I can confirm that “burstiness” works very well for a small teams like ours. It involves agreeing on some work routines that allow everyone to respond to messages fast and have short and intense periods of communication.

Business

I got a paid membership to Trends.vc recently. It’s a great resource of knowledge and business insights. You can get the free report delivered in your inbox every Sunday.

In the last report, you will learn more about the rise of micro private equity. Instead of launching new companies or investing your cash into risky businesses, why don’t you just buy them? Profitable organizations can generate more returns and scale faster than startups on average. Old business is sexy again.

Science

A team from Caltech managed to solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using Deep Learning. I’m not an expert but even MC Hammer tweeted about it!

These equations are extremely hard to solve and training a neural network to handle them has many implications, such as a better modeling of climate change.

Tweet of the Week

I couldn’t avoid replying to Naval Ravikant over Twitter. I studied social science, so I’m biased. Social scientists aren’t like astrophysicists, ok. But without their work, how would we understand the society we live in?


That’s all for this week. Please reach out if you’re reading something cool that I should check for next week’s reading list.

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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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