Happy 1st birthday, FounderON!

I have 3 businesses.

Last weeks newsletter (here) talked about Kitchimo and the progress we’ve made since launching in November.

Next weeks newsletter will be a full explanation of what Cassidilly is, who it’s for and how big I think I can grow it.

But this week is all about the oldest of the 3 businesses. The birthday boy at the grand old age of 1 – FounderON .

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FounderON has been incredibly important to me.

I started it 12 months ago at a time when I was feeling a bit lost. I was nearing the end of the earn out after selling my business. I was becoming more and more irrelevant in the business that I had created and loved. And I wasn’t really sure what value I had to offer the world.

The last 6 years of my life were fully dedicated to achieving a specific goal that had now been achieved. At 39 years old, I hopefully still have a lot of life to live, so I had a bit of an internal crisis of what my life 2.0 would look like.

I very briefly trialled retirement and it was not for me!

So FounderON started as a weekly blog. You could even argue it was like a very public therapy exercise. Me giving insights into the highs and lows of growing and selling my business. Potentially looking for some kind of closure on the thing that had owned my brain for years.

I was as surprised as anyone that very quickly, people seemed to like it. I got (and still get) a lot of messages. Not just saying they like the blog, but quoting very specific parts of specific blogs. Someone even questioned whether I’d bugged their office, as the blogs were talking of the exact challenges they were facing at the exact time each blog was released.

A massive confidence boost and a demonstration that maybe I did have some value that I could offer. My journey as an agency founder was successful, but far from unique. We had experienced all the same downs as well as ups, and made the same mistakes that we learned from.

Being in the fortunate position to not have to work out how this new business would make money in the short term, I decided to focus on building an audience of the people that would be most interested in my content.

As I left my Amazon marketing agency, the majority of the 18,000 Linkedin connections I had at the time were ecommerce managers, Amazon employees etc. So I had to start from scratch to build up a network of fellow agency founders, so that they’d actually see the content I was creating for them.

A combination of many Linkedin connection requests, boosting distribution with Linkedin ads and having real-life calls meant that I've added around 5k connections in the last 12 months and now over 25% of all my Linkedin post impressions are from founders or co-founders.

This increases to over 70% on weekend posts which I think says a lot!

As this audience started to grow, I started thinking about what businesses I could create in order to support the audience. Rather than working out who the perfect client was for my business, I thought what was the perfect business for my client.

The below sketch is from April last year where I started to think about how I could grow the audience and commercialise it.

The idea was that I could give full focus to just building the audience, and the businesses would grow as a result. Rather than me having to worry about different sales strategies, marketing plans etc.

FounderON is designed to give a digital resources to founders, and provide a passive income stream to me.

Kitchimo is designed to give proactive consultancy to founders that want to scale, and provide an active income stream to me.

And Cassidilly, well it’s changed a bit since this sketch, but all will be revealed next week.

The only bit I really haven’t figured out yet is the short answer to an incredibly simple, and incredibly common question I get…

“what are you up to these days”