Hey Founders,

☕️ Welcome back to our Friday newsletter: where we break down decades of startup wisdom into snack-sized emails you can take to your meetings.

📰 Latest news: The AI Godfather threw in the towel. 18 of the 20 largest tech IPOs are underwater. 23% of you went to the Milken Global Conference. ChatGPT made Chegg’s stock drop 48%. JPMorgan is acquiring First Republic for $93.5B. We turned down an invite to The Met Gala on Monday to focus on our startup idea. And J-Powell says the banking system is “sound and resilient”. Welcome to another Friday in 2023.

Enough tech talk, let’s get to the goods 👇

Meet The AI Product Report

Each Friday, Tyler Swartz (a former product lead at Reddit) shares the best new AI tools that he’s actually tested. Tyler’s free newsletter cuts through the marketing hype and helps you position yourself for success in the rapidly evolving world of technology. Want the top AI products in your inbox? Click to Subscribe

🍽 Today's Menu:

• ✔️ 25 Tools Every Founder Should Use to Attract Customers

• ✏️ Fresh startup ideas to join, invest or try out

• 🐦 Top tweets you can share with your staff

🛠 25 Tools Founders Should Leverage to Build Their Audience

We came across a post by Neal O’Grady the other day and wanted to pass along some of his pointers to you.

Why? Because good ol’ Neal knows a thing or two about building an audience. And if you haven’t already noticed, every startup on the planet is quickly realizing it’s a smart thing to do.

An audience gives you:

• an unfair advantage

• direct access to your customers

• creative ways to validate startup ideas

Neal’s gone from 0 to 35,000 followers in 8 months (through some side-of-the-desk ideas/tools). So since you’re all to busy to read his article we’re gonna round up our favourite ideas from it (plus a few bonus ones from us for good measure):

✏️ Writing Tools

• Notion: dashboard for all your notes/docs, ideas (Free, AI is $8/mo)

  • Save to Notion Web Clipper is powerful as well (Free)

• Grammarly: Lifesaver for editing if you’re a solo builder/lean team (Free)

• ChatGPT: Not sure if it’s going anywhere, but could be fun to beta-test if you’re bored one day. 😉 (Free)

• Copy.ai: AI content generator that delivers results in seconds

• Gamma.app: Generate docs, decks & webpages in seconds via AI

🎨 Design Tools

• Midjourney: AI-generated photos for all things content, blog, audience growth etc (Free trial)

• Canva: off-the-shelf visual designs; Kernal users this for all our memes, photos etc (Free)

• Figma: more robust design platform, great for UX, UI, product design and more (Free)

• Unsplash: Unlimited library of visuals for content, blogs and social (free)

• Microsoft Design: spin up stunning designs in seconds

• Remove.bg: flawless background remover

• Runwayml.com: creative suite of tools with AI functions

• Supermeme.ai: super easy and fun to use AI meme generator

💻 Digital Products Tools

• Gumroad: 10% slice off every transaction, handy for selling PDFs etc

• Substack: easy stand-up newsletter service, 10% slice of anything paid

• Carrd: simple one-page sites for anything

• Beehiiv: the email platform we sent this newsletter on

• Bubble.io: no-code website builder if you can’t fork out $$

• Durable.co : AI website builder literally done in 90 seconds

⏰ Time Savers

• Loom: less pointless meetings, more valuable video recordings

• Zapier: your go-to platform for automating tasks across platforms

• Airtable: google spreadsheet’s older cousin that got a Harvard MBA

• Sheetplus.ai: AI helper for spreadsheets to speed up 10x

• Calendly: calendar scheduler; can also charge $$ for monetizing

Hope you learned something new and if not, unsubscribe at the bottom to let your anger out on us. If we missed a tool you swear by, hit reply and we’ll add it to our next newsletter.

Now, the main course you’ve all been waiting for…

✨Fresh Startup Ideas ✨ 

Who’s the Founder? Szymon Blazynski from Poland. Formerly at EY and now at Citi Bank.

Problem: The main issue people encounter is disorganized prompt storage and challenges in using them effectively. People are not able to tag/group their prompts and search by tag.

Solution: Let Users can store their prompts with instant access to all of them. Users are always able to effortlessly find, organize, and efficiently utilize the most relevant prompts.

Like the idea? Join the waitlist: duccle.com and upvote the startup idea by clicking below.

Idea credit: Erik Torenberg, founder of OnDeck

Idea: You identify what you want to learn and the trainer tells you what to read, who to follow & assembles domain-specific tutors & peers.

MVP concept: imagine a product where people can apply to be tutored by specific experts and the experts can pick & choose which people they want to teach.

Like the idea? Go build it below.

Customers: Entrepreneurs, investors, and technologists who are eager to explore the newest products shaping our future.

Problem: There are new tools launching every day, some of them great and many of them not so great. People need help cutting through the marketing hype and finding AI tools that actually help them do their jobs better.

Solution: Give people vetted and trusted recommendations of the best AI tools.

💡 More Startup Ideas to Browse

Got a startup idea of your own?

Quit watching talks by TED and start gettin’ that bread.

Smash the button below.

📩 Golden Gems In Our Inbox:

• 30 folks have quit Open AI and raised $2B+ in the last 5 years. Meet the OpenAI mafia here

• How much equity to give early employees

• A Guide to Crafting Clear and Effective ChatGPT Prompts

• Run a newsletter? Jennifer Chou is looking to swap sponsorships

• Make Tim Ferriss your personal assistant with this tool

• Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman and more chop up AI ideas on a podcast

• The trap of overbuilding your product as a founder

• Balaji wrote about the fiat crisis

• The best audience-building tool stack for founders

• Questions to think about when finding a co-founder

🐦 Tweets of the Week

Enough reading. Go have an 11/10 weekend.

💚 The Kernal Fam

Remember: share the newsletter and good things will happen.

Can we count on you?