Hey — It's Nico.
90% of startups fail. Every Thursday, I'll help you avoid it.
Here's what I got today:
This is brought to you by Masterworks, the fine-art investing platform.
How to launch a product with 0 followers (Link).
How Miro grew to $475M/year (Link).
Opportunities in the intersection of AI and PropTech (Link).
How to acquire 10, 10, and 1,000 customers (Link).
15 steps to know if your startup is VC-suitable (Link).
Brought to you by Masterworks
Mm-hmm, sure. So, what’s the catch?
We know it may sound too good to be true. But thousands of investors are already smiling all the way to the bank. All thanks to the fine-art investing platform Masterworks.
These results aren’t cherry-picking. This is the whole bushel. Masterworks has built a track record of 16 exits, realizing +10.4%, +27.3%, and +35.0% net returns, even while financial markets plummeted.
Offerings can sell out in just minutes, but as a trusted partner, Failory readers are invited to skip the waitlist with this exclusive link.
In September 2021, Tony Dinh left his $8,800/mo full-time job to begin working on his own projects.
Over the following two years he:
This week he published an article going through this journey. It’s a good source of inspiration for anyone working FT but interested in starting a personal project.
The first business hit Tony had was DevUtils, a macOS app that bundled frequently used developer tools into one interface.
Due to the nature of the product, DevUtils went viral on Hacker News, generating a spike in purchases on its $9-lifetime license.
Looking for ways to keep sales coming, he landed on Twitter, where he started building an audience sharing the stuff he’d build.
This is how he came up with a new business: Black Magic, a collection of small tools for Twitter, like analytics and a CRM.
After one year of launching it, Black Magic was at $13K MRR. Growth came mostly from Product Hunt and Twitter.
As if running two businesses wasn’t too time-consuming, in May 2022 Tony launched a third one: Xnapper, a screenshot app. Nowadays, it generates $6K/mo.
In February 2023, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Weeks later, Twitter API went from being free to $42K/month.
With Black Magic at $14K MRR, Tony was forced to either shut down or sell. He did the latter, for $128K.
Around that same time, OpenAI announced the ChatGPT API. Tony, who was annoyed with ChatGPT’s web interface, decided to build a better UI, called TypingMind.
In 7 days, he sold $22K of license revenue. Nowadays, the app generates $30K/month.
The collapse of one business ended up leading Tony to building a more successful one.
Matt Hodges recently took on the mission of re-designing Equals’ homepage to convey its unique value and improve its conversion rates.
In this article, he shares the 5 elements a homepage must have:
1) The Hero: You have 8 seconds to clearly communicate what you’re selling and convey why people should care.
2) The Trailer: Make users want more through a video demo (usually seen only by 30% of people) and auto-play videos covering the core jobs to be done.
3) The Leading Roles: Back up the points made in the hero and trailer. Find the distinct benefits of your product and address some known FUDs.
4) The Reviews: Establish credibility in the buyer journey. Display logos and testimonials of notable companies that used your product.
5) The CTA: Get people to convert.
Tip: Read only the headlines and make sure they’re enough to understand your product.
You’re the founder of a tech startup that has just secured a $40k seed round.
You’re 120 days away from pitching your startup on demo day.
You have to build a product people love and acquire as many users as possible.
But don’t run out of cash or you’ll shut down!
💡 Struggling to validate your startup idea? I've created a course on how to use pre-sales to validate it.
📈 Struggling to achieve PMF? I've written an eBook about the exact strategies used by Slack, Intercom, and Airbnb to achieve it.
💰 Struggling to raise funding? I've curated lists of 2,100 accelerators and incubators and 1,000 VC firms.
📊 Looking to get in front of +40k startup founders? Sponsor Failory's newsletter.
📞 Looking for help with your startup? Book a one-hour-long consultancy call with me.
That's all of this week.
Cheers,
Nico
* Past performance is not indicative of future returns, Investing involves risk. See disclosures masterworks.com/cd.
