CoFounder Weekly, your weekly taste of startup life. Best served with an iced coffee (hold the straw, please).
🤔Thought Starters
📆Day in the Life: Danny Taing (Founder & CEO @ Bokksu)
👩💻Investor & Founder Corner
🏛️ CFW Office Hours: Sales for Founders
🐇How I started a company with ADHD
🍳CFW Brunch Club
💭 Question of the Week: What was your first internet memory?
💌 Did somebody forward CoFounder Weekly to you? Subscribe here.
Drawn by Greg Kubin & animated by Victor Sanabria
🤔 Thought Starters
(Five Tweets this week that made us think)
📆 Day in the Life: Danny Taing (Founder & CEO @ Bokksu)
Who doesn’t love Japanese snacks? They’re salty, spicy, sweet, sour, bitter, umami, and.... weird (the good kind).
Founder Danny Taing realized there were tons of snacks that are artisanal and regional to Japanese prefectures — but nearly impossible to find in the US and throughout the world.
So he spent some time in Japan, filled his suitcase with speciality snacks, asked his friends on Facebook if they wanted to buy them, and boom...he launched Bokksu, a DTC snack box company that now has tens of thousands of subscribers each paying $39 / month (use promo code CFW10 for 10% off your order 🤫).
In our conversation, Danny talks about:
Why Japanese snacks are hot rn
How he attracted Bokksu’s early customers
How he funded Bokksu (bootstrap → debt-financing → equity financing)
The benefits of hiring a diverse team
Why he rockclimbs after work
🔗Here’s the full interview with Danny
What DTC products would you want to subscribe to? Reply to this email and send us your weirdest ideas.
💸 Investor & Founder Corner
(Startup tips)
🏛️ CFW Office Hours: Sales for Founders
Building the next unicorn startup but need help building your sales pipeline? Or just want to vent with other founders about some of the struggles (or wins) getting your sales scaled up?
Join us for CFW Office Hours with Sales Coach Dave Kennet. It will be a Zoom conference call with Dave and other participants. Spots are limited.
Dave is a seasoned SaaS and Software sales leader with over 20 years of progressive business development and sales leadership experience. His experience has centered around start-up, turn-around, and hyper-growth situations.
🔗 Sign up here if you’re interested in joining
🐇 We’re all a bit ADHD, right?
This article “How I run a company with ADHD” provides some actionable takeaways about getting stuff down if you tend to be a bit scattered.
Some good tips:
1) Keep your daily task list small (5-6 tasks).
2) Start with a small win. “A big, hard task is a chance to get distracted.”
3) Don’t beat yourself for moving tasks around. Unstructured time generates creative ideas.
4) Accountability is key. Investors can force it. Or hire a coach. Or find a cofounder :)
😹 Funnies
(LOLs from this week)
🍳 CoFounder Weekly Brunch Club
If you’re in NYC and would like to join our community of founders for brunch, sign up here to get on the list and we’ll notify you when the next brunch is happening.
💭 Question of the week
What was your first internet memory?
We’ll include a handful of responses in next week’s issue :)
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Sizzling into the Summer 🌞,
P.S. Special shout out to long-time CFW reader and now collaborator Sarah McBride for doing a final edit of this week’s edition while we’re still sleepy (and providing ice coffee to fuel shipping this).