🎉 Hey Failories! It's Nico here.

Two new interviews today (1 failed startup, 1 successful one) and various interesting resources for entrepreneurs (including playbooks, case studies, and articles).

​

interviews & news 📢

💀 Burning $55k by confusing market validation with market hype. This is the story of Wes Wagner, who founded Pactero, a platform that simplified managing ISAs (income sharing agreements).

Village Global invested $150k in the business, the tool was mentioned in various podcasts and there was hype around the product. But some months in, only $180 was generated and Wes decided to move on. Here's the story.​

🛠 Making $10k/mo building the all-in-one tool for freelancers. Naman, one of the co-founders of this tool, came to Failory to share how they built the tool and how they've grown it to 100k users, mainly through SEO and advertisement. Here's their growth journey.​

 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

🔴 Tired of onboarding new designers? Get a dedicated team. Don’t let the hassle of finding the right designers slow your marketing down. Get Kimp and get a dedicated design team for your graphics, videos, or both! And pay just a flat monthly fee. Skip the proposals, interviews, and hidden fees. Start with a free 7-day trial! Plus 30% off your first month →

🎉 Failory's premium newsletter is going out this week. On it, we'll be analyzing ScaleFactor's story, an accounting software that raised over $100M and then blamed COVID for their failure and shut down.

Besides that, we'll also be giving away two goldmines for bootstrapped startup founders: Zero to Sold, from Arvid Kahl, and MAKE, from Pieter Levels.

Remember you can join the premium newsletter and giveaway by referring 3 and 15 friends to Failory's newsletter respectively. You can find your referral link at the bottom of the email.

​

what I'm reading 👀

​This huge playbook on how can consumer startups acquire customers through performance marketing, virality and content.

​The Generalist's case study on Product Hunt's story, brand, business model and future.

​Sahil Lavingia's article on how does he run Gumroad with "no meetings, deadlines or full-time employees".

The 11 lessons Dharmesh Shah got from investing over $3M in +80 startups.

​This short write-up on many-winner markets, as opposed to winner-take-all ones.

--

That's all for this week. I hope you enjoyed it.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Nico

--

Refer 3 friends to Failory's newsletter and you'll get access to our premium monthly emails, in which we deeply analyze one startup failure.

Refer 8 and I'll give you a free copy of our Product-Market Fit eBook.

Refer 15 and you'll get access to our monthly giveaways of startup resources.

Right now you have 0 referrals.

You can share the newsletter on Twitter, LinkedIn or via Email.

Or copy and paste your referral link yourself: https://subscribe.page/s/failory?rh_ref=257297dc​