Happy Friday Friends,

The All-In Podcast calls us the euro championship of early-stage startup pitches. Charles the 3rd calls us the “Friday newspaper for unicorn founders”. But since we’re friends, you can just call us, Napkin Notes.

The patios are packed, the cold plunges are full and the windows are rolled all the way down — it’s summer. 

And our Kernal crew couldn’t be happier. But just because the sun’s shining doesn’t mean you founders can complain about VC allocations slowing down.

Hold our beer:

📰 Our Menu For Today

• 🎙 Meet our speakers for July 24th’s pitch event

• 🚀 Read how the top B2B startup ideas landed their big ideas

• 👑 Apply to pitch at our next b2b startup pitch event

• 📷 Laughs of the week

P.S. Huge thanks to ChopShop for spinning up another amazing hype video for the big pitch day. If you are a founder needing help from an AI video agency, give Billy and his team a shout. They’re first class and super quick at turning around video ideas. email [email protected] and mention that Napkin Notes newsletter sent ya 🎥

🎙 Meet Our July 24th Speakers

Meet our 3 founders secured to pitch in 2 weeks:

• 🌱 Derek Hetzler from American Binary 

• 🌱 Valkyrie Holmes from Faura

• 🌱 Arshan Ahmad from Worksense AI

Want to be the 4th and final pick of the line-up?

Apply here.

And if that doesn’t get you excited, take a look at who’s on this event’s B2B panel…

• 💸 a Kernal Dealroom Favourite, the Founder of Hootsuite and the LOI Venture, Ryan Holmes

• 💸 The Head of Google’s USA Startup Ecosystem, Matt Ridnour

• 💸 The Managing Director of Forum Ventures, Derek Bugley

• 💸 Hailey Bryant from Hustle Fund

• 💸 Zach Johnston from 2084 Ventures

Enough event talk. Let’s get to meeting the B2B royal family.

B2B Unicorn Founders Making Waves

A little while ago, a friend of the newsletter interviewed 20 of the most successful B2B unicorns. People like:

• Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion)

• Cameron Adams (co-founder of Canva)

• Shahed Khan (co-founder of Loom)

• Sho Kuwamoto (VP of Product of Figma)

• Tomer London (co-founder of Gusto)

• and more

His name? Lenny Rachitsky.

His mission? To learn how the most successful B2B startups came up with their big idea.

Across all of the origin stories, Lenny found 3 core themes

• 1. Past pain: Identify a large pain you experienced at a previous company — then build a solution.

• 2. Ponder and probe: Pick a space you’re interested in, then whiteboard and tinker while talking to dozens of potential customers —looking intently for pain and pull.

• 3. Present pull: Identify something you’ve built that’s showing signs of pull —and pivot fully to that.

Lenny even put this handy dandy graphic together to see how they split

Some other discoveries about these 20 heavy hitters:

• they each spoke to ~30 potential customers to validate their ideas before committing

• ~40% of them pivoted at least once before landing on their winning idea

• Cold outbound works—it’s the second most common way to get your early customers.

• Every prosumer product (e.g. Notion, Figma, Airtable, Miro, Slack, Coda) took two to four years of wandering in the dark before they found something that worked.

• The majority of founders had no special skill or background in the problem space they went after.

💡In Lenny’s words, if you’re trying to come up with a great B2B startup idea, do these 3 things:

1. Look for ideas that are (1) important, (2) underserved, and (3) you’re excited to solve.

2. Pick one of these routes and ask yourself these questions:

   1. Past pain - What did you or others build at previous jobs that proved to be incredibly valuable to the company or your teammates?

   2. Ponder and probe - What’s a trend that’s emerging but underserved (e.g. security, collaboration)?

   3. Present pull - Of all the things you’ve built, what one feature is showing the most pull?

Now that you know how to drum up the perfect startup idea, come pitch it on Kernal Dealroom when you have it ready.

Or just come and watch our B2B Bonanza going down next week.

🥁 Wanna Speak At Our Next Event?

We’ve got room for one more investor and one more founder to join the panel

If you’re a nerd about B2B startups, we wanna hear from you.

Reach out here 👇

Swipes of the Week