Website Planet interviewed Goutham Bandaru, Founder of Founders’ Book, an award-winning (and free!) podcast player and discovery app. We will learn from the company’s story and achievements, before looking at the recent trends that will impact online entrepreneurs.
Please, Introduce Founders’ Book To Our Audience. What Tools Are You Offering to Startuppers?
There’s an abundance of information out there for people who want to start a business. As you’ve probably seen, it’s often outdated, incomplete, SEO driven, or simply more “I am a GURU” theory.
We’ve spent the last year focused on one thing:
how can we serve you better?
That’s taken us on a journey. From the first MVP of the Founders’ Book to building out a suite of products, tailored to founders and early-stage startups.
Here’s what will help you build your business inside Founders’ Book;
- Digital Content Library – Knowledge base with tools, resources, guides, and hacks to ideate, plan, build and scale your startup
- Startup OS – Eliminate 10+ productivity apps and build your startup with Notion. Significant savings on both cost and learning curve fronts
- Startup Credits – The current investment landscape is very competitive and not looking good for many first-time founders and early-stage startups. Increasing runway by spending less on their SaaS subscriptions will give you an operational advantage.
What’s Your Mission?
Founders’ Book is what we believe the world’s largest collection of tools and resources for first-time founders and early-stage startups to turn their pony idea into a unicorn. The idea is not to build a unicorn on day one but to spark the habit of watching the space, experimenting and collaboration that may lead to building a unicorn
It comes with everything that reveals the secret of starting up, motivating you to build and launch your moonshot idea/startup 🚀 fuelled by your passion, creativity, time, imagination, discipline, and juice, of course.
Founders’ Book is built with a belief;
- Founders build communities and ecosystems, ecosystem powers next-generation founders and problem-solvers.
- Entrepreneurship and Startups give people who come from absolutely nothing a fair shot at generating life-changing events and wealth.
We personally bet on great entrepreneurs. Some startup ideas seem impossible in the hands of one founder but inevitable in the hands of others.
Founders’ Book is a shoutout to all the entrepreneurs out there chasing their dreams and all of you inspire us!
- Educate next-generation entrepreneurs on DIY tools and techniques
- Create awareness on the available no-code tool landscape and save $$$ on development costs
- Tiny guides to turn complex concepts into actionable insights
- Turn an idea into an MVP and then enter the growth stage in less than 1 year (estimation)
- Micro SaaS – The next big thing
- Biggest – Build confidence in first-time founders and reduce time spent on searching for resources in early-stage startups
The idea is not to build a unicorn on day one but to spark the habit of watching the space, experimenting and collaboration that may lead to building a unicorn with a belief Founders build communities and ecosystems, ecosystem powers next-generation founders and problem-solvers.
What Sparked The Idea, And How Has It Evolved So Far?
Motivated and inspired by my own struggle of spending hours to find resources and ending up nowhere or information overload, I slowly realised there are many founders and startups that suffer from the mighty knowledge gap that in turn affect their confidence. in big time.
Let’s accept this, we as founders are judged on many fronts. From business knowledge to tech capabilities, working with a team and being mentored in the traditional startup world. But startups and their landscape are evolving faster than we as a human race. We now have jobs that never existed 5 years ago, No-Code is accessible to the consumer level not just for legacy businesses. We have to educate and upskill ourselves to foresee what future problem solving would look like.
Adding to this, founders and startup teams spent a good amount of time looking for resources. We wanted to slash those times and give back that missed opportunity to build their businesses which results in a better efficient product ecosystem.
Our primary goal at Founders’ Book is to re-skill and pre-skill the next generation of founders and startups. It is an honest attempt to support aspiring and first-time founders to identify new startup opportunities, understand the art of starting up and the convergence of the Internet, consumer technology, automation, content, curation, platform and no-code economies.
What Are The Common Pain Points That Your Platform Helps Solve?
- There is a significant gap in resources for founders and entrepreneurs when it comes to knowledge-based materials.
- The truth is; sadly all the information is scattered all over the web, and we have no choice but to search for it a lot and learn by messing up.
- Founders and early-stage startup teams spend over 200 hours searching for tools and resources to fit their purpose
- The knowledge gap is real and costs many non-tech founders, solopreneurs and first-time founders a lot of time, money and energy!
What Makes You Stand Out From The Competition?
Building a business is hard as hell. It’s lonely and a ton of work. Even with hard work, success is far from guaranteed. And it typically takes 8-10 years to know whether you’ve won or need to throw in the towel.
Founders’ Book is your dedicated resource for climbing the mountain of entrepreneurship. We’ve spent hundreds of hours combing through thousands of guides, resources, and tools creating and curating the very best startup content on the internet.
From building an MVP to scaling your startup, Founders’ Book supports you build better and succeed.
Founders’ Book is your “DIY Startup Accelerator” if:
- You are a first-time entrepreneur or you run an early-stage startup
- You are a non-technical entrepreneur
- Have a business idea but don’t know how to get started
- Want to learn how to come up with business ideas, build MVP, validate with your customers and scale
- Learn how to validate your business ideas quickly
- You tried before but failed or got stuck
- Want to save time and money along your startup journey
- Want to build your business and get first-paying customers
Can You Share Any Recent Success Story From Founders’ Book Users?
There are multiple stories we are very proud of in our journey so far. Two of our users recently got accepted into an Australian incubator to build a product and scale.
We also work with many accelerators, VC communities globally. The feedback coming in from them has been absolutely amazing and founders in their community see amazing value.
Most of our users on average save little under $8,000 (that’s 23x ROI) on their initial SaaS costs reinvesting their savings in product development, marketing or having multiple freelancers to accelerate product development.
What Is The Techstack You Are Using To Manage And Promote Founders’ Book?
We have used simple no-code tools that gave us the most advantage and flexibility to get to the market as soon as possible.
All the content is built on
Notion (I personally vouch if you are looking for a CMS),
Super.so to turn Notion pages into a publishable site and memberships are managed using
MemberSpace and payments are processed through Stripe.
Our love at first sight, the website is built using
Typedream (beautiful as Webflow, easy as Notion) which offers maximum beauty with a ZERO learning curve. We’ve also used Airtable and Chillipepper for collecting feedback,
Tolt for our affiliate program (recommended), Notionlytics to learn page view stats and Splitbee for web/page analytics.
These no-code tools tied up with
Zapier gave us the power and birdseye view of every aspect of our business and help us to help YOU.
How Do You Envision The Future Of Online Entrepreneurship? How is AI going to affect it?
The future of online entrepreneurship is likely to be heavily influenced by advancements in technology, particularly in the fields of no-code tools, stronger startup ecosystems (COVID proved us there is no location dependency to build a scalable and profitable company), better founder communities and generally advancement in technology that reduced the time of building from month to days.
A few ways in which I think the future of online entrepreneurship would look like leverage AI;
- Increased automation: As AI technology becomes more advanced, it is likely that many tasks currently performed by humans will become automated. From customer success to video editing, product demos, accounting and many time consuming tasks
- Personalization: AI can help entrepreneurs to better understand their customers and create more personalized experiences. By analyzing data on customer preferences and behaviour, entrepreneurs can create products and services that are tailored to individual customers
- Improved decision-making: AI-powered analytics tools can help entrepreneurs to identify trends and patterns in their sales data, allowing them to make strategic decisions about product development and marketing
- Chatbots and virtual assistants can help entrepreneurs to provide better customer service and automate certain tasks, such as scheduling appointments or answering frequently asked questions.
- New business models: AI technology is likely to inspire new business models and revenue streams. For example, entrepreneurs may be able to monetize data collected by their AI-powered tools or create new products and services that leverage AI technology in innovative ways
Overall, the future of online entrepreneurship is likely to be shaped by the continued development of startup ecosystems and technology. Entrepreneurs who are able to adapt to these changes and leverage AI in innovative ways will be well-positioned to succeed in the years to come.
