Premoney List 7

Start-up trends to watch, more nocode & headless commerce add ons.

October 13, 2020

Hi Everyone & welcome to list 7! The fury of cool a$$ companies never ends.

Premoney is a weekly digest of 10 super early-stage companies that launched a product, mvp, or beta in the previous few weeks. Help me amplify the work of these founders.

A warm welcome to our new subscribers! Please reach out with feedback, suggestions, and requests. If you’re an investor & interested in connecting with one of the companies listed, send me a note and I’ll make an introduction.

I'm excited to partner with an awesome newsletter, Venn Diagrams, this week which focuses on Entertainment, Tech & Emerging Trends. Powered by Swapstack :-)

Trends.PM:

We reviewed over 400 products/companies in the past two weeks to curate Premoney, and found it interesting to see what categories are being built for over time. Some data below on the top ten categories by day!

Productivity: A crazy number of companies self-label their tools as “productivity” tools. We saw most of these being built for individuals, supporting the new world WFH order, but also a ton of enterprise-grade time saving, efficiency plays.

Design Tools: As design and no-code enable more and more people to build without a technical background, design tools with unique angles and entry points are being released daily. What I’m seeing: plug-ins for the “me too”  Figmas, free versions of enterprise design tools and a consistent renewal of free icon & image services.

This weeks list:

  • 10 Companies (Do you want more? Less?)

  • 40% Female or bipoc founders

  • So. Many. New. Payment. Options!

Highlights in Payments:

A quick note on why. One of my freelance clients wants to try out a new subscription model for a fall/winter promotion. They use Shopify’s storefront and Bold for their subscription processing. Payments still cost 2.8% + $.30 per transaction for most upstarts…wtf?

  • Billsby: Billsby is a Bold-killer who helps any company implement a subscription service for .4% per transaction.

  • ServiceBot: Similarly, ServiceBot is a no-code slap on to Stripe which charges a low rate based on monthly revenue. While intro levels are high (~2.5% at $2k MRR), they decrease much faster than the incumbents processors (ie: .7% at $100k MRR).

The early success of these companies will largely depend on Shopify, BigC, WooC etc’s platform policies (granted the platforms don’t build their own subscription payment solutions).

See you next week.

All for now! Please send your feedback, friends, and founders my way.

Jake