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🤖 Meet the Founder of the World's Fastest Growing AI Newsletter

🤖 Meet the Founder of the World's Fastest Growing AI Newsletter

The reasons behind the re-brand and hot startup ideas in the branding space to check out for your next name change

Joel Hansen
August 04, 2023

☕️ Welcome back to Napkin Notes: the startup newsletter that feels like the first sip of coffee you take on Saturday morning.

Warm, calming and full of flavour. So even if you lost your top customer or got in a tussle w/ your co-founder, we’re still there for you holding your hand every step of the way.. Deep breath in... deep breath out... ahhhhhh.

Let’s dive in.

Today’s Menu

🗞 News round-up
👑 AMA with the Founder of the fastest-growing AI newsletter
💡 Startup ideas to build this weekend
🆇 X’s of the week (that sounds hella weird)

📰 News Round-Up: Uber’s finally cashflow positive. Barbenheimer box office stays strong. Tesla had a cover-up. Meta’s pulling news in Canada. NATO raised €1 billion for a fund that’ll invest in startups. There was a big Superconductor breakthrough from LK-99. UFO reports are grabbing Nasa's interest. It’s the first Friday of August which means we’re keeping today short so you WFH folks can drive out to the cottage early (we won’t taddle). 🚗

🎉 In other fun news: our CEO had their baby this week.

So today’s newsletter may get a little crazy. Q for the readers: how many days should our CEO get off work to celebrate?

How many days off work should our CEO get for having a baby?

That’s enough of a preface, now we’re moving straight to the end.

👑 Ask Me Anything with Rowan Cheung, the Founder of the Fastest-Growing AI Newsletter

Forget the summer swimming pool, today we’re diving into a chat with Rowan Cheung, the founder of The Rundown.

What’s The Rundown? It’s the fastest-growing AI newsletter in the world.

Don’t worry, we hear you in the back, Nick. That’s a fair question. For those that couldn’t hear him, Nick said “Everyone and their dog has an AI newsletter. What makes this guy any different?”

Well, Nick:

✍️ he’s averaging ~2500 new subscribers per day
📈 he just shared a photo of passing 250,000 subs in 7 months
🛠 he builds in public and consumes AI 12 hours per day
😳 Has a 42% open rate and an 8.1% click-through

In other words, he’s what you could call a “Mr. Napkin-Notes Nice Guy”

Enough soup and bread, let’s get to the main course. 🍽

🥁 Our Q&A With Rowan Cheung:

✏️ Q: Give us a 30-sec intro of who you are, your 9-5 job and what you’re most excited about this year.
☕️ I'm Rowan Cheung, AI addict and founder of The Rundown, a newsletter that's grown to over 250k subscribers in 7 months.
☕️ I'm doing this full-time now, I guess you could say it's my 9-9 job now since I'm pushing nearly 12-hour days aiming to become the AI education and news hub of the internet”
☕️ “I'm very excited about the developments in the AI x healthcare industry, fitness, autonomous vehicles, and of course, having my own digitalized personal assistant. I'm absolutely fascinated by the pace of AI and the rapid speed of developments coming out (which is why I originally started a newsletter to kind of, ramble my excitement).

✏️ Q: How do you prep, write and publish your newsletter each day? Is it a mix of web 2 and web 3 tools?
☕️ A: it’s pretty old-fashioned. I don't use AI to write my newsletter because
- A) there's a risk of hallucinations (which can lead to misinformation)
- B) AI produces really bulky, unreadable copy, and
- C) I just like the human touch
☕️ A: Occasionally if I'm stuck with writer's block, I copy what I've written, and I ask ChatGPT (GPT-4) to "Make this easier to read" or "Turn this into bullet points."
☕️ A: For research tools, I use:
- feedly.com
- Twitter
- As well as several "Influencer programs" with major tech companies, which give me big news drops a little earlier than publicly available.

Since I promised to get you to the cottage on time, I’m leaving out a couple more answers. To read Rowan’s full writing process, click below.

✏️ Q: What business verticals have the biggest disruption coming?
☕️ A: “There's a ton of room right now to build within the AI productivity tools niche, AI Characters, and AI education (which is what I'm building since I'm not the most technical).”

✏️ Q: How do people get started building in this AI gold rush? 5-10 fav tools/places to learn?
☕️ A: “Honestly, there's a ton of free information available right now on YouTube and Twitter. Start learning, testing tools, engaging with the community in the comments and DMs, and it will lead you to places you never could've imagined. Other than that (shameful plug) I post all the most important up-to-date news and tools in my newsletter, as well as Supertools- my AI tool database, where I post all of the most useful AI tools that are actually useful. If I were to pick my top most actually used AI tools right now, they would be ChatGPT and Perplexity for chatbots, Midjourney, Firefly (specifically Photoshop generative fill) for design, My Mind, Vimcal for productivity, Wondercraft, and Adobe podcast for podcast creation.”

✏️ Q: Most lucrative opportunities? Best moats to build OpenAI’s next feature doesn’t wipe out your startup idea?
☕️ A: “I think the most important thing to make sure OpenAI doesn't wipe your idea is to build something with a super strong user base that keeps people hooked to your product. What Character AI has done in terms of retention is honestly shocking, and is what anyone should strive for. But in the end, no one knows where we will be in the next couple of years, let alone the next decade. Jaspar AI, one of the largest AI startups in the world has been cutting staff amidst this AI hype cycle, which shows that there's always significant risk.”

✏️ Q: If you weren’t doing this Newsletter, what AI app/startup would you spin up today?
☕️ A: “Good question, I would try to target the AI education sector. There's just so much noise, too much, and I've noticed it overwhelms beginners when entering the space. I would target education in terms of where to start, how to actually apply AI tools, how to build AI products, how to integrate AI into your business, etc.

✏️ Q: Best way for readers to contact you?
☕️ A: “My DMs on Twitter are always open to anyone looking for help getting started in AI, as well as giving you my honest take on any potential startup ideas. I try my best to respond to everyone.”

🤖 3 Startup Ideas to Build This Weekend

The elevator pitch: a unique content-sharing platform for the 25 million knowledge workers
Shared on bulletpitch’s group
The Founder is X-McKinsey and X-Google

Timely startup idea to scale
Progress updates show they’re on a growth tear
ComplyDog now has dozens of paying customers and the founder’s looking for a marketing partner they can pay via revenue share. If you know someone that’d be interested and has the bandwidth to scale this product, email [email protected]