Q3 2022

Startup updates, awesome links, tv recommendations, and pics from the last 3 months.

Oct 01, 2022

Updates 🗞️

The past few months have been intense with lots of learning and hard work.

While Photography Lounge has continued chugging along thanks to my awesome team leading daily operations, Buildergroop has required some especially hard work.

Incorporating my first startup meant dedicating most of my attention to learning the legalities of a new business. All 4 co-founders being minors and spread across 4 different countries didn’t make things any easier. We paid far less attention to growth than we had hoped to in Q2, which meant we had to make up for it in this quarter.

Our perks program went from $30k to $500k in deals with software companies and co-working spaces for Buildergroop’s members. These deals can be accessed by all members free of charge.

We hosted a 48hr hackathon with Hop, a real-time cloud hosting startup. I ran my first influencer marketing campaign to try and ramp up event participants and it was a success. Big thank you to Alexa for sharing tips from her work as founding growth at Bloom, I would’ve been absolutely clueless if it hadn’t been for her help. We ended up hosting 600+ participants, a 142% increase from our last hackathon’s turnout. My favorite submission was SafeNet. Safenet uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze CCTV feeds in real-time and detect when a crime is happening, as well as what type of crime it is. If it’s sure a crime has been committed, it automatically calls local authorities. Incredible work from Arya Manjaramkar, especially for a project made within 48 hours! Turns out, Arya is actually a TKS student as well. You gotta check out this demo of it working, it’s wild.

Speaking of TKS, I left you guys on a cliffhanger in my last newsletter. To refresh your memory, TKS is “Olympic-level training for the next generation of entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators.” At the time, I was given the opportunity to work on an application project to receive a full-ride scholarship. After I sent off the Q2 newsletter, I got to work on my project, Earlume. Using 10-minute audio samples of your voice, you’re able to upload text into the program and have it generate a narrated version of that text in your voice. I recorded a pitch video, sent it off, and was accepted! I’m so thankful to have received the scholarship and have thoroughly enjoyed my first sessions thus far. I’ve had the opportunity to learn about topics like positron dynamics, self-driving cars, supersonic jets, space elevators, earth-to-earth rockets, neural networks, and loads more. I can’t wait to share what I’ve worked on at TKS in my next newsletter!

If you have an hour to spare, listen to my podcast episode with Charles Vien, one of the Co-founders of Branch. Branch has raised $15M to date and successfully pivoted from the remote work niche to web3 gaming. He has an amazing story.

Numbers 📊

Buildergroop 🔨

3.5k+ members (41% increase)
880k+ messages (27% increase)
$500k+ in perks (178% increase)
$17k+ in revenue (72% increase)

Photography Lounge 📸

7.8k+ members (19% increase)
3.6M+ messages (18% increase)
1.2k+ high-performing images posted (42% increase)

Links 👀

Must-watch shows and movies 🎞️

The Bear, Hulu

Fleabag, Amazon Prime Video

Why he’s the only honest man left in news, YouTube

Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin, YouTube

Top-notch links and resources 🔥

Colored Light, Josh Miller

AI Paraphrasing Tool, QuillBot

Positron Dynamics Paves the Road to the Final Frontier, Medium

Scrapbook 🤳🏼

After moving back to the U.S from Italy, I spent a month on the coast before moving to a census-declared village in rural Connecticut. It’s been an interesting stay.