#104 - Design Inspo, Should your employer fund your startup?, Privilege and bootstrap
Really interesting discussion on Techish which questions the likelihood of people being successful pursuing entrepreneurship, especially without privilege that some members of society have such as a family they can fall back on or not having to help their parents pay their mortgage/rent.
If you’re not super privileged you should let your employer be your Angel Investor.
If you are talking about creating wealth, then you need to assess the most realistic, least risky way to do that. Entrepreneurship is high risk/high reward aka low probability of success.
Too long, didn’t read: The majority of people that pursue entrepreneurship end up more broke than if they stayed in a job, worked their way up the ladder, got promoted by moving jobs/moving companies.
Why do we ignore the fact that we can buy assets to accrue wealth?
————————————————————————————–
This week I started using Bootstrap (known as Twitter Bootstrap) as it was started by former Twitter employees.
It’s amazing for creating responsive websites quickly
Design
Land-book - the finest hand-picked website inspirations
A curation of good web designs to help you get inspo split by:
Landing
Portfolio
Blogs
Stores
Good Web Design
The best landing pages, split by section
How designers can help the world in creating a tech diet
Do you agree that the world needs a tech diet?
Here’s some inspo on how to bridge the gap between feel-good Design & Ethics from the perspective of digital product designers
Insights
Below is a super interesting discussion that resurfaced the discussion about privilege and it’s role in whether people can be successful with their startup.
The next time someone claims that starting startups is for rich kids, remind them that Airbnb happened because its founders literally could not pay their rent.
Like an Experian credit score, but it's free and matches new small businesses with lenders
Matching small business to lenders
Looking to enable small businesses. Diff come Funding Circle, in that FC have struggled to automate and you still go through a lengthy process.
Find alternative lenders who are more specialised to what you are doing and get better rates.
Built around Open-Banking initiative
Business Score provides free business credit scores, based on your financial data. Get the information you need to secure better credit rates.
Makers
Recommended
He breaks down concepts really well. He’s really corny but it’s still somehow entertaining
Higher-order functions - Part 1 of Functional Programming in JavaScript
I took 1.5 years to hand curate 50K visa routes (he had financial grants from a government)
The key takeway for me here is that this Digital Nomad was trying to create something he wanted - he was frustrated with the fact that as a regular traveler, he was constantly scouring Govt websites . He and some people spent over a year manually curate the visas and its requirements resulting in them creating the first human curated Internet visa database indexing 300K visa routes for the citizens of 200 countries going anywhere for any purpose.
Its like IMDb for visas
Visadb.io is a global platform for visas & immigration. We use technology & data to assist people to move abroad globally to visit, work, study and live. Our mission is to bring design to the government information.
They plan to make money by sharing
Every wondered how to do a button class properly?
Checkout out this stackoverflow answer
Viz Devices :: Devices Screen and OS Details
A handy website to check the size, resolution & densities of Android & iOS devices and here is an explanation of how density buckets work on Android.
Culture Chat
Beautystack raises £4M seed to help beauty professionals become financially independent
Probably the largest Seed round a black woman has raised in London or even the UK
Part booking, part social media - transform the bea
Creating a beauty professional booking app with heavy focus on social
People spend so long on social media browsing hair styles/nail styles. She is looking to close a loop
We make excellent patient records & management achievable for hospitals of all sizes
I love this, they are solving a big problem from the grassroots.
Another one of Nigerias founders who are going to San Fran (Y Combinator)
Provide a smart electronic medical records platform for hospitals in the developing world.
Want to accelerate the transition from paper to digital so that there is real-time data available that can help governments or the people who have decision making.
Checkout their interview with the Founder done by early stage investors, Microtraction
The tech stack is Firebase, Android and Google Cloud
Nigerian Founder based in the UK doing a demo day
Ola Bayoji is one of the co-founders of Gyre - an app to help people buy and sell unwanted items and snap up a discount. He’s doing a demo day this Friday so if you’re planning to build your own product some day it’s a cool way to meet other people, hear the founders story and more.
BBC accused of plagiarism by Slay in Your Lane author
Make no mistake: this has happened because they have a) arrogantly assumed we wouldn’t have it trademarked and b) that we would for some reason be grateful at this plagiarism disguised as a nod
Illustrated with stories from best friends Elizabeth Uviebinené and Yomi Adegoke’s own lives, and using interviews with dozens of the most successful black women in Britain – including BAFTA Award-winning director Amma Asante, British Vogue publisher Vanessa Kingori and Olympic gold medallist Denise Lewis – Slay In Your Lane is essential reading for a generation of black women inspired to find success in every area of their lives.