📊 CoFounder Weekly metrics, revealed

CoFounder Weekly: April 14, 2019

CoFounder Weekly is a newsletter that captures the zeitgeist of startup life.

This week: 🤔 Thought Starters, 📊 CoFounder Weekly’s metrics, 🚘 Uber factoids, 😸 Funnies, 🏆Challenge: Can you size the market?

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By Greg Kubin on Instagram

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🤔 Thought Starters

(Four Tweets this week that made us think )

Hobo John @john_hobo

Far easier to fix a fucked up you than a fucked up world

Norgard @BrianNorgard

The hardest thing to do in the universe is to make the complex simple.

Thibaut @Kpaxs

@BrianNorgard There are three levels of knowing according to architect Matthew Frederick. 1. Simplicity, the child's world view. 2. Complexity, the adult's worldview. 3. Informed simplicity, the enlightened view of reality.

Scott Belsky @scottbelsky

thinking: a key pillar of happiness, beyond having life’s basic needs, is feeling fully utilized. putting aside your comp/title/feeling of self-importance, happiness seems to peek when your skills are fully engaged (personal + professional) and learning curve is steep.

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📊 Open Newsletter: CoFounder Weekly

There’s a trend of startups sharing their growth and user stats, a topic we’ve covered a few times. Pat Walls of StarterStory, Sahil Lavingia of GumRoad and Buffer are great examples of this.

Isn’t it a bit hypocritical to cover the trend and not participate ourselves?

We’ve been pumping out one CoFounder Weekly every Sunday since August 2018. We started as a Twitter recap for those who don’t check twitter.

James Clear @JamesClear

Your 1st blog post will be bad, but your 1000th will be great. Your 1st workout will be weak, but your 1000th will be strong. Your 1st meditation will be scattered, but your 1000th will be focused. Put in your reps.

We’ve since broadened the scope of our content beyond curating tweets, making more original content. For example, last week we debuted a Day in the Life segment and a compilation of Out of Office emails.

Our readership growth has been linear in 2019. Each bump in the chart below was an instance where a reader tweeted about us or shared our newsletter on LinkedIn, which typically generates about 20 new subscribers. We’ve also been manually signing up subscribers at conferences, weddings, bar mitzvahs, at the DMV, and in line at Sweetgreen.

Who subscribes? A mix of founders, operators, investors, and startup enthusiasts.

Most of our subscribers are in the US, followed by Canada. The map below was pulled in Clearbit, which enriched our email subscriber data.

Our open rate has consistently been in the 50-60% range, which is super solid.

And the anecdotal feedback is encouraging!

Next step is to increase the volume of original content creation. Cartoons. Video. Provocative and weird essays. Behind the scenes. Etc.

We also just held a first writer’s room this week — including a few friends who work in tech and have ideas they want to contribute. If you have ideas, let us know as well.

We’d also love to hear from you what you like & don’t like, and where we can take this puppy.

Reply to us with your thoughts :)

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📈 Want to see the charts above keep going up and to the right? Share this issue of CoFounder Weekly on Twitter or LinkedIn 😉

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🚖 Five Uber factoids

Uber filed to go public. Here’s five interesting factoids about the company.

Mike Isaac @MikeIsaac

i cant believe the Delete Uber hashtag made it into the IPO Prospectus (cc @Bro_Pair)

Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman

Number of Uber drivers worldwide: 2019: 3.9 million drivers 2018: 3 million drivers 2017: 2 million drivers 2015: 1 million drivers

Rich Opara @richopr

Uber Eats has become Uber’s own AWS, with revenue > Lyft.

Benchmark @benchmark

3/ We are long Uber: Benchmark's comparative valuation analysis shows Uber could comfortably be worth over $100B in just two years.

Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj

Benchmark owns 11% of Uber which is worth ~$10B. Just on that one exit, they will return ~26X of their 2011 $425M fund in 8 years which is an IRR of 50%. Wild.

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💌 Did you share CoFounder Weekly on Twitter or LinkedIn yet? If not, consider sending it to your coworker who you get coffee with at 2:30pm every day. We’re waiting…. 😍

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😸 Funnies

(LOLs from this week)

Dan McArdle @robustus

Imagine Satoshi in a seed VC meeting: - What problem are you solving? Governments - What's your go-to-market strategy? Bitcointalk - Who's the exec team? None of your business - Hiring plan? If people want to help, great! - When 1mm ARR? Never - How many DAUs? Less than 10

nic carter @nic__carter

@robustus - What’s your TAM? All of the money

Sahil Lavingia @shl

Do VCs end their first dates with "How can I help?"

Konstantin Gizdarski @kosigz

At a San Francisco party and no one can figure out which of the size 9 Allbirds are theirs. Lots of confusion and name calling.

michael @__tusch__

Gmail has been throwing itself a birthday party for like a whole damn week now

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🏆 Challenge: Sizing the Market

Google, Amazon and other tech companies have been known for asking complicated brain teasers to employees.

Jeff Bezos used to ask questions like "How many fax machines are in the United States?"

As an experiment this week, we have a brain teaser challenge for our readers:

“How many avocados will be consumed in the US this weekend?”

While there’s no right answer, the most creative one will win a special surprise announced next week. Send us your answer (and show your work).

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Spring allergies 😭😭😭,

Greg & Wisam