🎉 Hey Failories! It's Nico here.

This week I bring you interviews with Syria Airlift Project and MicroConf's founders, a discount on Scouth's services, and four curated resources.

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content 📚

💀 Failing to find a viable business model for an NPO. Mark is the founder of Syria Airlift Project, a moonshot non-profit effort to break starvation sieges in Syria using small drones.

The organization started in 2014 and shut down a year later. The root cause of failure was their lack of a viable business model and their reliance on volunteers and donors (they raised $40k) to fund their operations. Here's the failure story of Mark's NPO.​

️💵 33% discount on Scouth's recruiting services. At Scouth, my 2nd business, we connect startups with Argentinian talent (designers, marketers, customer support, executive assistants, content writers and more).

Only for a limited amount of time, we'll be charging 2 monthly salaries of the candidate hired, instead of 3, as we've been doing in the last 6 months since we started. You can find more details here.​

️🚀️ Building the bootstrapped SaaS founder ecosystem. Rob is the founder of MicroConf, the largest community for bootstrapped founders. They launched in 2011 and have hosted +24 in-person events and are running the online community MicroConf Connect.

In 2019, they started TinySeed, a fund to invest and support SaaS founders. In 2021, TinySeed raised $28M. Here's how to build a thriving community and startup accelerator.​

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🔴 Don’t hurt your startup with poor customer research. Learn the best approach to doing customer research, what questions to ask, and how to find clarity on what to do next with your product. Register For The Live Stream →

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what I'm reading 👀

​Minimally Extractive Meta. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook was re-naming to Meta and shared his plans to create a "metaverse." In this article, Packy McCormick deeply analyzes Meta's strategy, with a focus on decentralization and ownership.

​HeadSpace's SEO strategy. HeadSpace is one of the biggest companies in the meditation app space, with over 2M paid users and $215M in funding. In this (quite technical) article, Ryan Berg analyzes how they are using topic clusters to get organic traffic.

​Constraining a marketplace to solve the chicken and egg problem. This is the first article of a guide on how to kickstart and scale marketplaces. In this post, Lenny Rachitsky shares a solution to the chicken and egg problem, which consists of setting geographical or category constraints to your marketplace.

​Pros and cons of being an open startup. VEED is one of the largest open startups, with +$500k in MRR. Recently, they announced they were stopping posting about their growth and revenue milestones. In this article, VEED's founder analyzes the pros and cons of being a transparent startup.

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That's all for this week. Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Nico

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