🎉 Hey Failories! It's Nico here.

This week I bring you interviews with a successful and a failed startup founder, an analysis on ScaleFactor's failure and various curated resources for entrepreneurs.

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content 📚

💰 Growing a SEO productized service to $12K/mo. After many years of writing content as a freelancer, Julian decided to scale his freelance business and productized his services.

He launched Embarque in a lean way and through a mix of community engagement and word of mouth, he got his first startup clients. Nowadays, the business is making $12k/mo. Read Embarque's story to learn how to grow a productized service.​

👻 The story of ScaleFactor, the failed SME bookkeeping startup. This tech startup claimed to automate SME bookkeeping and payroll thanks to an AI they were developing in-house. They managed to raise +$100M and get some customers.

Then, according to their founders, COVID happened and they had to shut down. In this article, you'll find out the real reasons for ScaleFactor's failure.​

This article was part of our Premium Newsletter, which you can access by referring 3 people to Failory. Next email is sent next Wednesday. Here's your link: https://sparklp.co/257297dc​

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🔴 Create an effective product team for your startup. Why should your team continuously address risk and not just duties and roles? Andrew, Partner and CEO at Headway, will unpack the process of structuring effective product teams, avoiding common pitfalls and the risk of wasting resources. Reserve Your Spot→

💀 Going from $335K ARR to failure. This is the case study of Freshconnect, an online B2B marketplace for fresh agricultural produce, co-founded by Tarun Gupta.

In a matter of two years, this startup launched its MVP, acquired its first customers, grew revenue to $335K/year, struggled to raise funding, and was forced to shut down. Eventually, they got acqui-hired by a competitor. Here's Freshconnect's failure story.​

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what I'm reading 👀

​How TikTok algorithm figures you out​. WSJ created thousands of TikTok accounts with different interests, to figure out what metric does TikTok's algorithm optimizes for and how it figures out so well what the user enjoys consuming.

​Silicon Valley in the cloud​. Silicon Valley has been repeatedly tried to be cloned in other parts of the world (most recently, in Miami). Erik believes the next Silicon Valley will be in the cloud.

​AMA by Tally's co-founder. Marie has built a SaaS for creating forms. It's almost completely free and people love that, which is why they have built a strong acquisition channel through WOM. They're currently making $30k/y.

​MicroAcquire to the moon. I've been following Andrew Gazdecki's incredible growth journey with MicroAcquire on Twitter. He has raised $6.3M in the past few weeks and is building a huge team, while building everything in public. He is a must-follow!

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Hope you enjoyed this week's interviews and links.

Let me know if there's anything I can help you with.

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