Productive Week, Mental Health Tools, Sam Altman Saga, Cute Robot, and more

I have swapped the ‘Title’ and ‘Subtitle’ of the newsletter and I’m planning to keep it this way. Let me know what you think!

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: I will be traveling next week, there might not be an edition next Tuesday or there might be a shorter edition. If I don’t send anything, please don’t forget me🤗

In today’s edition:

• Reality Check: A Productive Week

• Ideas and Success Stories: A Productive Week

• Articles: Sam Altman Saga, Startup Culture, and more

• News: Altman to Microsoft, Cute Security Robot, Flying Taxis, and more

• No sponsored or paid content

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Reality Check
A Productive Week

Here’s a summary of things I have done this week:

• Micro-SaaS eBook: I am more than halfway done with the draft and I should be finishing the complete first draft by the end of this week. It is coming up well and I hope you’ll like it. I’m thinking about a Product Hunt launch for the eBook, a free launch for the first 100 customers or so? Still figuring that out.
  Reminder: It’ll be a complete guide for micro-SaaS development from ‘Ideation’ to ‘Growth’ and free for all my newsletter subscribers!

• I returned to X: Now that I’m writing and producing content regularly, it was time to be active on a social platform like X or LinkedIn. I chose X because it’s easier to be active with some short-form content. The decision has been good. My tweet impressions have increased by 6,467.2% in November. You can find me here.

• I started learning Remix: Remix.js is a framework that I have been keeping an eye on since some time. I have now started learning Remix.js with a course. Let’s see how it goes. (My next SaaS might also be in Remix!)

• BONUS - Spent a night crying: Well, not literally! This is the sports fan in me. If you’re an Indian, you already know what I’m talking about💔It was the Cricket World Cup final - undefeated India faced Australia and lost. It was probably the best World Cup team that India had assembled in a long time and they messed up in the last game of the tournament.

How was your week? Let me know about your wins and losses by replying to this mail.

Ideas and Success Stories
Promoting Mental Health Through Software

Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about the health of the people around me - my family, friends, and myself. You can treat physical ailments with medicine, medical advice, exercise, or other physical help.

But, mental ailments cannot be seen directly or cured with a week of paracetamol tablets. With another wave of tech layoffs looming, I spent the last week taking a look at good mental health tools available online.

Some random mental-health related observations:

• I know that in a country like India even visiting a psychiatrist can trigger a buzz around the neighborhood.

• School shootings in the US are increasing every year.

• Student suicides are increasing every year around the world.

• Hate-mongering and fake news through social media are making the world more divisive.

Mental health is important.

If people don’t reach out for help, we need to reach out to them. As entrepreneurs, it’s important to create social solutions.

Success Stories

• Therappy: “I am not a fan of self-help books.” “I do not have enough money for therapy.” Therappy solves both these issues and provides audio courses for mental health issues and improvement. Used by more than 15000 people and received $200K in funding.

• Woba: Woba from Denmark measures the mental health of employees at the organizational level. They have packages from small to enterprise-level teams. Estimated $1M ARR.

• AlphaBeats: Music-based mental training. Backed by neurology. Received $800K in funding.

• Kona: It gets lonely at the top, they say. Expert AI-powered leadership coaching for managers through Slack. Received $1M in funding.

Potential

Okay, I know you want to do business and make money. So, just think about it, if a person says, “give me $10/month, you’ll be free from anxiety and depression.” Would you not pay? If you’ve ever dealt with depression or faced a mental breakdown, I already know your answer.

Learn about unaddressed mental health issues around you and develop a tech-based solution. Help someone. Money won’t be an issue.

Articles
Sam Altman Fired! How the AI World Is Set To Change (Again)

Aditya Kumar Saroj

The Sam Altman Saga is the tech drama of the week. Techies around the world were engrossed in this high-profile high-stake Game of Thrones. I wrote an article about whatever happened on Day 1 of this story. And, I (kind of) predicted Sam and Greg would end up in Microsoft.

Read the complete article

Nurturing Culture in Startups

Marc Bromhall

If you work at a startup, it might feel like a collection of individuals rather than a team. It’s important to establish some common values to cultivate a team culture. Here are some tips on how you can achieve this.

Read the complete article

Bootstrapping to $10k MRR with 2 employees: Here is StageTimer's story

Leo Askan

With the simplest of ideas, Lukas Hermann co-founded StageTimer and now they make 10K every month. Trust me anyone with average coding language could’ve made this but they were the ones who made it first. As I always say, find problems, create a solution and implement it.

Read the complete article

News
Altman to Microsoft, Cute Security Robot, Flying Taxis, and more

• Altman was fired from OpenAI on Friday after the board said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” After a weekend of negotiations to potentially bring Altman back to OpenAI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that both Altman and Brockman will be joining to lead Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team. Altman will have the CEO title of this new group…read more

• Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI technologies, promises to be a big moneymaker for the company, with one analyst predicting that it could generate $10 billion in annualized revenue by 2026. Despite a staggered and somewhat confusing rollout, 40% of companies in the Fortune 100 were testing Copilot by fall, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella…read more

• Because the world wasn’t frightening enough already, companies can now buy a security robot from Amazon to patrol their businesses. Lucky for humans, this thing looks like it’s just a step above a Roomba — it’s giving Wall-E instead of Terminator…read more

• On Monday, transportation startup Joby Aviation conducted a demo flight of its six-prop electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in New York City. The exhibition was part of a press conference held by NYC Mayor Eric Adams…read more

• The concept of keeping a brain alive and working while separated from the body it once inhabited is something often seen in sci-fi media. Now, scientists have developed a device that can isolate blood flow to the organ, keeping it functioning independently from the rest of the body for hours…read more

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