- Saturday Startup Stories
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- Housekeeping: 3 quick announcements!
TLDR:
We have a new podcast where I solely interview that weekend’s featured founder
The newsletter is about to change, experimentation time!
I’m behind a few weeks on write ups, expect ~4 emails this week to catch up, then back to weekly emails. Sorry if it’s a bit spammy! Bear with me 🙂
Announcement: new thing!
If you’re reading this, 2 things are true:
This will be deleted from the web version of this article in a few days
I’ve been a naughty boy as I haven’t been writing the newsletter for the last 4 S³ episodes!
Why? Because I wanted to focus my time on launching a new facet of S³, a podcast!
Jason, really? A podcast? S³ is supposed to be high signal, high effort content, unlike the average podcast…
Yes, I agree, which I believe our podcast is. Here’s my pitch:
Most podcasts, I’m sorry to say, suck. I’d like to make a less sucky one. Filming in founder’s factories, making it more of an interview than an opportunity for a podcast host to talk and talk and talk… seem like a great place to start. I’m also pretty well researched on my guests due to filming them with S³ so I have a great mind map to ask questions around.
S³ episodes are at their best when you have a ton of context. It’s hard, actually it’s impossible, to give all of this context and discuss all of the other things I’d like to in the average 6-10 minutes of an S³ episode. With a podcast, I can let the founder paint a wonderful picture of their endeavor and create an additive experience for the S³ fan. To be clear, the podcast will not repeat information from the main S³ episode at all — it’s best to watch both for the full experience of a company!
It’s actually… not that hard? Filming an S³ episode usually takes 90 minutes, adding 30 minutes to film a minimally edited podcast isn’t bad! It’s actually a lot of fun. And the editing? Pfft, easy. For example, I just edited a future podcast that runs 35 minutes in 25 minutes!
So, I hope we can create a new kind of podcast that people really enjoy, adds value to the S³ experience, and raises the bar for what it means to “podcast.”
You can watch the podcast here on YouTube and X, and listen to it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Another announcement: experimentation!
This newsletter will be… changing. I started S³ with a few motivations, one of which was to learn as much as I can about the deep tech space from builders on the front lines of innovation. I have ruthlessly focused on optimizing processes for episode editing, publishing, saying no to lots of things, and the new podcast!
The one thing that’s not optimized and a rather big drag to even do is this newsletter/blog/write-up thing.
So, I’m killing it — JUST KIDDING. Sorry, that was too funny to do in light of the mass number of YouTubers quitting YouTube this week.
No, I’m instead entering into a new mode of experimentation for the newsletter! So, expect that I will be working hard to make the experience (1) easier to write (2) more beneficial for readers. So, please reply to these with your thoughts and feedback when you have them!
All I know for sure is that this newsletter is primarily meant to be a notification channel for when new episodes release. The rest is to be determined.
On the one hand, perhaps people would like to hear my personal thoughts and views on the startups or the spaces they operate in. Perhaps people only want this as a text recap of the episodes. Or, perhaps people only want a link to the episode and podcast!
We shall see. We’ve grown this newsletter from 0 to 500 subscribers and I’m excited to keep it up, and enter into a new mode of experimentation with it! Feedback is hoped for and welcome.
Final housekeeping bit: brace for a week of lots of emails
Yes, yes, I’ve been a bad boy and have not sent the past 4 episodes out the past 4 weeks. So, I’ll send them out as sparsely as I can over the next week ahead of episode 29.
Please don’t unsubscribe!
Just archive this week’s emails if it’s a bit too spammy for your liking, we’ll be back to weekly reports shortly!
Thank you for supporting myself and our composer in this wonderful journey. Your following, kind words, commenting, and sharing mean more than you know — thank you. We are about to hit episode 30 soon, that’s absolutely wild! We’ve grown much and I expect 2024 to be a very exciting year.
Keep on building the future,
Jason