Month: April 2022
Introducing the future of sleep.
This message is sponsored by StimScience.
Founders and startup leaders will be the first to admit that they have struggled with sleep at some point in their career. It can easily turn into a vicious cycle: sleepless nights lead to moody and unproductive days, which lead to more stress and insomnia. StimScience’s CEO, Aaron Bromberg, is sleeping great, even though his company has all the early stage startup challenges you’d expect.
Meet the email delivery service that people actually like.
This message is sponsored by Postmark.
Email infrastructure isn’t the most exciting thing — setting it up is no Friday night at your local disco—but it sure plays a crucial role in most applications: If your account confirmations and password reset emails don’t reach the inbox, your users get stuck, support queues get flooded, and your team tears their hair out while trying to figure out what in the [bleep] is going on.
With Postmark, a reliable email delivery service with a rock-solid API, these nightmares are a thing of the past.
Code Story – March 2022
April showers bring May flowers… but we’re here to talk about March. Check out all of the AMAZING guests we had in March, along with our exclusive interviews with the great folks over at Mentorcam!
Mentorcam March – Highlights & Takeaways
Now that Mentorcam March has come to a close, I wanted to highlight the fantastic mentors we interviewed on the podcast.
Each of my conversations with a mentor produced fantastic insights into the topic of the episode, whether it be VC’s, product, angel investing, and branding. See the episodes themselves, plus my main takeaways from each conversation.
Make sure you use the promo code CODESTORY, for 20% your first session.
Mentorcam March – Rune Hauge
Rune is an expert in funding your startup, and is a multi time founder. Prior to Mentorcam, he founded three startups and had one successful exit. He has raised millions of dollars in venture capital from top tier Silicon Valley VCs and high-profile angel investors, and also took Mentorcam through Y Combinator.
Noah’s Main Takeaway: Do your homework first, and make your list of potential investors before you start reaching out. Create your strategy ahead of time, and execute – don’t blindly reach out.
Mentorcam March – Max Samuel
Max Samuel is a venture capitalist and lawyer. He formerly worked at Thiel Capital, Wilson Sonsini and Credit Suisse. A graduate of Yale, Penn Law School and Wharton, Max is passionate about mentoring both startup founders and people looking to break into the VC industry.
Noah’s Main Takeaway: The first thing VC’s look for in a startup is the strength of the team – this can be industry expertise, complimentary founders, and/or a good working relationship between the people. And… do these founders have a “secret” that others don’t know.
Mentorcam March – Benjamin Balazs
Benjamin Balazs is the Co-founder & CTO of Mentorcam. At the age of 15, Benjamin taught himself how to code and hasn't stopped since. Before co-founding Mentorcam, he single-handedly designed and developed apps for companies like Lamborghini, Visa, and Maserati.
Noah’s Main Takeaway: What is a great MVP? It’s not necessarily about numbers. It’s about people responding to your product, giving feedback and being excited about using it.
Mentorcam March – Edvard Engeseath
Dr. Edvard "Eddie" Engeseath, MD is the Co-founder of a tele-health startup Nurx, angel investor, startup advisor, and a former family physician. He founded Nurx to make prescription birth control more accessible.
Noah’s Main Takeaway: When getting in early through angel investing, the diligence process is very different. Often VC’s do much more diligence in their process, while angels are investing before much of that information exists.
Mentorcam March – Josh Campbell
Josh Campbell is the founder and CEO of protein supplement brand Human Improvement and wine brand So Gay Rose. Formerly a Starbucks Executive and President of cannabis wellness company Dosist, Josh has founded, funded, built, and exited multiple startups in the consumer packaged goods space.
Noah’s Main Takeaway: A brand is all the touch points of a product. As such, you may be able to build a brand around a product, but if the product itself is krap, it won’t work.
Most destructive? Ransomware.
This newsletter is sponsored by our friends at Anomali. Download their Cybersecurity Insights Report for 2022.
In recent years, no cyberattack payload has been more destructive to business and government organizations than ransomware. And to be clear, this is not new… the earliest variants of ransomware were developed in the late 1980s. This type of malware made a resurgence in 2019 with high profile attacks made on state and local government.