Kern.al
Platform for founders to find, share and grow startup ideas
We realized that there are platforms for products (like Product Hunt), questions (like Quora), and fundraising (like AngelList), but there isn't a platform for people to share and validate startup ideas.
The good times keep rollin' and we couldn't be happier. I'm excited to announce our team's passed 5,000 Kernalers and over 1,000 publicly available startup ideas any of you could go build this weekend.
Some takeaways:
Growth: We've been pretty shocked how fast this rocket's been taking off, without needing to tap into google ads, paid social etc. It's been pretty off the side of the desk and the startup community has been pretty receptive which is exciting to see.
People: We've been impressed with the great balance of investors and founders that have been interested. People like Sam Parr from Hutsle, Alex Lieberman from Morning Brew and Shaan Puri from My First Million have all jumped in to test it out and share their one-liner startup ideas.
Problem Solving: We've been inspired to hear dozens of entrepreneurs have been able to connect with new builders, potential co-founders and even interested investors based on the merit of their ideas. We believe in creating a space where anyone from anywhere should be able to post up their idea and get honest feedback on it. And we're excited to say, so far, that's been a success.
Ideas: It's been neat to score front row seats to seeing which type of startup ideas founder and investors connect with. Some of the hottest ideas have been in the widest of spaces. Here's some of the top voted ideas on the platform to get context:
Live Video Sales for Shopify Stores by Shaan Puri
Startup Saas Bundle by Elaine Zelby
Anonymize my Life by Sam Parr
Pitch Deck Analytics by Zain Jaffer
Yelp for Online Courses by Will Smith
To check out the full list of founders, investors and startup ideas available on Kernal, simply sign up here with the Indiehackers code I've created: https://kern.al/register?invitecode=INDIEHACKER
Over the last little while, we'd been having more indie builders test out Kern.al and so we thought to connect with the Indiehackers team to see what they thought.
We didn't hear back too much from the team, but shortly later, we were asked for an interview to learn more about what we were building....
One thing led to a next, and BOOM, the Kern.al story was featured on the front of a Saturday Newsletter leading to a lot of traction on the platform.
In the week alone, we brought on 1,000 new sign ups and 100+ ideas from the indiehackers community.
Huge win for both communities! Here's the article for a quick read:
After taking a break from some outreach to ideators, we took some more time as a team to refine our product offering...
- added in more info to the home page
- improved our onboarding process
- added a profile account information
- asked users for more feedback
- opened up a messaging test
- started a weekly newsletter
This all contributed to deepening our relationship with our users
It was easier to get users than it was to get ideas. So we started going back to our eager users to ask if they'd like to post a start up idea we can feature?
One thing led to the next, more people got the vision, and ideas started trickling in to the home page. After a couple weeks of bringing up the same question to different people, we hit the 200 startup idea milestone!
We knew Kernal would be a great spot for the “build in public” creators that are looking for good feedback on their idea to see if it’s worth spending time on.
So we reached out to our friends at Hustle Trends to see what they thought. Sam Parr and Shaan Puri. They loved the idea, tested it out, and that was enough validation to start showing it to others.
We started DM'ing builders on twitter, linkedin, facebook etc and eventually rallied up 1,000 users on the site.
For anyone that was worried about their idea getting stolen, we asked them to feel no pressure in sharing. "Keep working on it in your basement for 10 years" was what we told ourselves and if they want to come back to test out Kernal, they can.
Kernal is for the people that come up with a new idea a day and just need a public space to post it up to see if it’s got any legs.
We noticed too many great startup conversations happening on subreddits, Twitter threads, and podcasts. We wanted to launch Kernal to provide these creative people with the ability to post their startup idea onto a landing page so that they can validate the idea, get early adopters and see if it’s worth bringing to life.
Too many ideas die in notebooks or google docs without people knowing if they’ve got momentum. We want to arm the ideators and creatives of the world to get the feedback they need to know their idea is ripe for impact.
So we kept on building...
After we played around on Bubble (no code platform) and had a couple structures in place, we were off to the races!
When we think of the future of entrepreneurship on a global scale, we thought of a platform like Kernal can only further democratize the access to ideas and empower creatives from any age, background, or ethnicity to come together for impact.
So we started inviting founders, builders and idea people to come check it out and let us know what they think.
The working domain was and still is: Kern.al
(as in the kernal of an idea)
We realized that there are platforms for products (like Product Hunt), questions (like Quora), and fundraising (like AngelList), but there isn't a platform for people to share and validate startup ideas to see if they’re worth building. We built a consolidated space for entrepreneurial creatives to find, share and grow startup ideas.
Rounded together a few hootsuite friends and startup contacts to start building out what a startup idea sharing platform would look like...
After Ryan hired a CEO to manage the day-to-day of Hootsuite, Holmes started tinkering on ideas. One of the biggest ones he wanted to dig into was Kernal, a platform that allows users to share, browse, upvote, and comment on business ideas as well as socialize with fellow creators.