Kernal: the all-in-one startup hub that's doubling down on newsletters

Every startup begins with a single idea.

With a bit of effort, that idea can translate from a neuron to a napkin.

However, at this point, most business ideas breathe their last breath.

The reason? The ideator couldn’t find the resources or people to realize their vision.

Until now.

Kernal is a platform that connects startup ideas, founders, and investors. The membership site, in conjunction with its newsletter, allows the startup world to connect, share ideas, and gain the validation it needs to turn a concept into a venture-backed reality.

We recently sat down with Joel Hansen, Kernal’s marketing advisor and newsletter creator, to discuss his approach to building an ideation hub and marketplace for the startup world.

Joel was happy to share how he was able to leverage his expertise as a leading marketer and community-builder in the startup world to get Kernal and its newsletter to 10,000 members—two of which include the founder of HubSpot, Darmesh Shah, and the founder of The Hustle, Sam Parr.

Key takeaways:

• How Joel leveraged his existing platform to grow Kernal and the newsletter.

• Gaining traction among giants.

• Rapid growth within their community.

• Why (and how) they are doubling down on the newsletter.

As part of this Creator Spotlight, the team at Kernal has provided beehiiv users and Spotlight readers with a code to skip the waitlist and access the platform right away! Check it out!

Joel’s Backstory: Connecting Founders, Builders, Investors

Joel Hansen has always had a passion for startups. Whether it’s building them, investing in them, or founding them—you could say he’s been around the startup block once or twice.

As a two-time TED talker, a leading LinkedIn voice with 47,000+ followers, and the Head of Community & Marketing at LOI Venture, Joel has been in the startup world long enough to see plenty of ideas.

But, too many of them end up falling off because they weren’t given a big enough spotlight.

Joel shared, “I grew up in the Vancouver area. I have always been a fan of startup ideas and the movements behind ideas that make them worth following. I was connected with the Kernal founding team and fell in love with the concept of, ‘Why isn't there a marketplace where a founder can meet a startup idea that meets investor dollars? And help build a marketplace to validate opportunities worth working on.”

It’s true that there are several platforms that have accelerated the startup world. There’s Product Hunt for products, Quora for startup questions, and AngelList for fundraising. But, there isn’t a place to validate ideas so they can grow into real, viable businesses.

Joel shared, “I've always been somebody that is drawn from one shiny object to the next shiny object. I feel validation from mentors, from friends, and from colleagues has always been helpful. I and the Kernal team really fell in love with the idea of what it looks like to build a community that can actually give honest feedback and healthy criticism for the good of the idea versus the good of the relationship with the founder.

He continued, “We are focused on that first-time founder. It feels like the serial founder that's maybe had one or two exits—they already have their community, they already have their group chat of buddies that are super well known.”

“But, the first-time founder that's making that jump away from working at a big tech company or away from their nine-to-five working on the side of the desk…I feel like there's not as much of a community for that first-time founder, first-time builder. So that's what we're really passionate about—helping that person along the journey through the startup idea wilderness.”

Gaining Traction Among Giants

Kernal has already started attracting giants in the startup space, including:

• Dharmesh Shah, Co-founder/CTO, HubSpot

• Shaan Puri, Founder of Twitch

• Ryan Holmes, Founder & CEO of Hootsuite

• Sam Parr, Founder of The Hustle

• Alex Lieberman, Co-founder of Morning Brew

• Jason Warner, CTO at GitHub

• David Rock, Creative Director for GaryVee

These major players in the startup space oftentimes take the role of investor, advisor, or mentor at Kernal. However, many of them are also sharing their own ideas, such as Shaan Puri and Sam Parr’s Michael Jordan Museum idea that began as a “kernal” on their podcast, My First Million.

You can read all about their idea on Kernal here, which is one of many from the MFM podcast.

Elevating the Hidden Founders

Many founders build in the dark, often alone, working evenings and weekends with little support. Kernal is a way to help build a community around founders and their ideas to make them a success.

Joel shared, “The startup founder journey is such a lonely path. Often, they're not really celebrated until they've raised a pre-seed round or they've met Mark Cuban for a selfie, or they've been a panelist at South by Southwest.

What we wanted to create was a community where these founders could be celebrated from day one by seeing somebody share their napkin startup idea on Kernal.”

“If they're looking to get more validated exposure—When we feature them and they go and celebrate that with their community, we want to give them the right formula. “

Social media is a common breeding ground for startup ideas. But, the problem is that there’s limited validation that often ends with a little pat on the back, rather than a real, tangible business.

Joel shared, “If your community wants to upvote, or say that they'd invest in the startup idea, or pay for the startup idea, Kernal is that toolset that helps that founder further validate their idea versus just getting vanity metrics from Twitter.”

Again, make sure to check out Kernal here.

Growing the Startup About Startups

Kernal is a single place for creatives and entrepreneurs to find, share, and grow their startup idea. It’s an all-in-one platform to connect founders and investors with the latest ideas and opportunities in the market.

By encouraging ideators to lay it all out, they’re able to get early feedback from other founders and investors to help validate their idea–or help them move onto the next one.

And Kernal is taking off big time. In just a year and a half after CEO Paul Donnelly and the Kernal team launched the platform, they’ve already grown their membership base to five-figures.

Joel shared, “That’s what we're excited to be building at Kernal. We're thrilled to see there are already over 10,000 members and 2,000 ideas on the platform. There’s that line from the founder of Twitch—Justin Kan. He says, “First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.”

Using beehiiv to Get the Ideas Buzzing

So where does the newsletter fit?

Shortly after Kernal launched, Joel joined the team to help fuel engagement and growth.

Since Joel has his own newsletter of 20,000+ subscribers, he understood the opportunities a weekly newsletter could provide Kernal in serving its audience.

Joel commented, “I think from day one, our team has realized the power of an idea really depends on where it's shared and the environment that intersects with it.

So what we wanted to do in building out the Kernal product was to have a roundup service once a week.”

“As someone curious about ideas, or startups you're seeking to join, or a VC looking for a founder to back… What if you had a weekly digest of the newest and earliest startup ideas that you could hear about and get involved with?”

He shared, “In the early days, we started on a platform called Medium to share five startup ideas a week. And then that evolved to Ghost. And eventually, this last month, we moved to beehiiv because we found that Medium and Ghost didn't really have the tools we wanted to engage with the community. That's where beehiiv hit that sweet spot for us as a startup.”

Make sure to check it out here:

Rapid Growth: Using What’s Already Working

Joel understood that a key to growing a platform like Kernal would require moving at a fast pace. By leveraging the tools and communities that are already successful, the Kernal team was able to quickly create a product and community built for the end user.

Joel shared, “Kernal is built on a no-code platform called Bubble.io, led by CEO Emanuel Straschnοv, who's also a member of Kernal.

We really love using off-the-shelf tools instead of making ourselves work hard. We love to take things already executed in the marketplace.”

“Bubble " was how our CEO, Paul Donnelly, could spin up a quick minimum viable product (MVP). We shared it with communities like Hustle Trends started by Sam Parr, My First Million podcast, started by Shaan Puri and Sam Parr, and Indie Hackers by founders Channing and Courtland Allen. Sharing with those three spots got us from zero to 5,000 members for Kernal.”

The Double-Play: Memberships & Newsletter Signups

Many companies add a newsletter as just another medium to speak to their audience. They’ve got social media, live chat, and ads already, so why not add email?

However, the plan for the Kernal newsletter wasn’t just to be another medium to market to their audience. It was created to be a part of the membership experience.

By integrating the newsletter as part of the business, Kernal could offer more value to members, while growing its subscriber base at a rapid rate.

Joel shared, “When people became members on Kernal, once a week we would auto-sync them into the newsletter so they could be natural subscribers, learning about the top stuff happening on the platform and the top members that were joining to share an idea or potentially meet with other founders in the ecosystem. If you become a Kernal member, you get access to the newsletter.” You can sign up here.

He continued, “Now you can subscribe just to the newsletter. As you become a member, we have an email drip sequence where you get notified once a day for seven days on how to use Kernel. In that process you naturally get spun into the weekly idea roundup of the newsletter. But we also wanted to open it to people that were outside the platform.”

Joel shared that even though they only initially offered the newsletter to people who became Kernal members, they want to give everyone access to the newsletter to further Kernal’s long-term growth.

He continued, “We wanted to create some luck surface area for a founder or a startup idea that was featured. If they shared on social, or if they passed it to their cousin who's not a member, we wanted an easy way to just sign up to get an inflow of ideas each week.

Then throughout the newsletter on beehiiv, we have ideas that people can actually click on, and when they click, they can see it.”

Kernal uses the newsletter to provide value to its subscribers, offering the latest ideas, startup tips, and insights. But, if people want to really dive into the details, they have to join.

He shared, “In order to leave an upvote or a comment, they need to become a member. So certain functions on the platform are gated to sign up. That's been a great inbound flow. When we share a newsletter or when we feature a founder, when they share it with their community, just like on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Product Hunt, you are encouraged to sign up because you want to learn more about the startup platform.”

Why Joel’s Doubling Down on Newsletters

With nearly 50,000 followers on LinkedIn, a successful YouTube channel, and a TED Talk on social media, there’s no doubt that Joel knows a thing or two about social media marketing.

Yet, when it comes to growth and maintaining an engaged community, Joel’s betting on newsletters. He says it’s allowed him and the Kernal team to better understand their audience so they can create better content for them.

He shared, “Instead of being subject to the Instagram algorithm, or the Twitter algorithm, or the LinkedIn algorithm… We’re at their luxury if that post gets seen.

What we love about building in the newsletter avenue is that we own direct access to the subscribers and members. If a newsletter has a 50% open rate and a 10% clickthrough rate, we know that our members really love the content and we can further iterate on creating better content for our members.”

“Whereas on Instagram or Twitter, if there's a news event or a change in the algorithm, that's a black box that we can't understand. So, we as a team really love having transparency into what our members enjoy seeing. That's where we love building the newsletter.”

Favourite beehiiv Features: Text Editor, A/B Testing, beehiiv Team

Joel only switched Kernal’s newsletter over to beehiiv a month ago, but he’s already got a few favorite features, including beehiiv’s A/B testing and recommendations.

He shared, “I think my favorite tool, as a writer of the newsletter, has been the A/B testing of subject lines. It has been super handy.”

“The beehiiv recommendations—being able to refer friends of Kernal or members of Kernal in other newsletters, and vice versa, if they trust us—that's been a great inbound lead generator.”

Joel also shared his thoughts about beehiiv as a company, the development team behind the platform, and the vision moving forward.

“I think the beehiiv community is so synonymous with what we're trying to build at Kernal. The values that, as a marketplace, we exist for. We want to help the build-out-loud kind of creators. We see the CEO, Tyler Denk, tweeting almost every day about features he's building for members, or other newsletters he's featuring. We also are from a community of move-fast-and-break-things, and see how fast you can ship something to your community.”

Joel also shared how seamless beehiiv’s text editor is to use. Crafting email newsletters can take quite a bit of work, especially when you’ve got a lot on your plate. beehiiv’s text editor was designed by creators to make designing and publishing newsletters as easy as possible.

He shared, “The other thing we love is the dropdown menu when you're in the publishing tool. It’s super handy to quickly add photos or GIFs or tweets or hyperlinks. We really appreciate that dropdown tooling to quickly spin out easy newsletters. That's been a really great way for us to easily replicate the newsletter on social and bring in more subscribers through the platform.”

Kernal’s Future Features

We asked Joel what’s coming down the pipeline for Kernal users in the next few months.

He shared, “One big thing we've been thinking about is similar to how Facebook has Facebook groups. We have a Kernal main feed of ideas, but we're also creating a community page of ideas.”

“If you have a podcast, startup accelerator, incubator, or forum you lead that's always sharing ideas that should be built—We've built that out for community managers. Bucket number one continues to iterate the community pages for Kernal that we see good success in.”

To see how this looks, you can see a community page here:

He continued, “The second goal is really getting granular on how many minimum viable products (MVPs) are being built out of the startup ideas on Kernal. It’s easy to share an idea. But, it's hard to go and execute on it.

We're trying to be really close to the ground to see which founders are actually building on the platform, which ones are shipping apps in the app store, and which ones are creating landing pages.”

“We’re wanting to really dial in on what kind of partnerships we can set up across that pipeline after the idea. Different idea validation tooling has been really helpful for the founder to just use right in the platform.”

One of the biggest challenges startups face is cash flow, particularly when it comes to having enough. While receiving funding is a major roadblock, another subtle, yet crucial one, is keeping operational costs down.

Joel shared a nifty benefit to growing your startup idea on Kernal.

“The third goal is launching a set of perks. HubSpot, Zapier, Loom, Canva—all those big tools that founders want to use at a discount. That's something we're plugging into the member journey as they build out the idea in public.”

“Those would be the top three: the community forums, tracking of MVPs and how quickly founders are building things, and the perks partnership package for founders that need tools but want to save money.”

You can see an example MVP here.

Growth Tactics

While Kernal’s growth has been impressive so far, Joel’s plans to grow aren’t slowing down anytime soon.

He shared, “Some growth hacks and techniques we've been thinking through have been—where are people already sharing their startup ideas that instead of getting validation, they're getting vanity metrics.”

“For example, what if, when you shared a podcast, you could have an idea URL that allowed listeners to vote on if they'd use, buy, invest, or actually help build the startup idea you're talking about? So we've had some success with working with podcasters.”

“Social media is that digital water cooler where you share a startup idea, or even a joke of a startup idea, in its early days. Having that hyperlink available for people to shout out some attention to and get people to vote on to see if it's worth building is really cool.”

“I think the newsletter platform for writers is also a smart way that we're teaming up in the recommendations ecosystem within beehiiv, or if somebody's building their idea out loud, to give updates and milestones.”

Perhaps the best way Kernal will lean into growth moving forward is through product-led virality. One of the key issues startup founders face is proving to investors and potential builders that their idea has shown some level of validation—especially in the pre-seed and seed phases.

Joel shared, “The last growth plan is giving founders ammo when they're chatting with investors or pitching a customer or accelerator.”

“Often when you're in the early days, you might not have a website or a million in revenue, so we’d like to be the idea landing page for that founder. If you're going to talk about your pitch deck, or if you're going to present to an accelerator, what if you could actually have a screenshot of your idea?”

“How many people would use it, how many people would invest in it, and the ways that you're pushing that idea forward? That's been really helpful for us to team up with accelerators, incubators, groups like Indie Hackers. That's where we've been really spending our time to get a high conversion of new members.”

Advice for Founders & Creators

We asked Joel what he would have done differently if he and the Kernal team had to start all over again. He wasn’t shy about leaning on outside help.

He shared, “We likely would've built an advisory board of startup idea creators. So that would be big podcasters, big bloggers, big social media creators that are in the startup idea space.

I feel like we could have better validated the early stages of the product around their feedback, versus maybe just our team. The other thing we would've done is a deeper dive into the incubator and accelerator world to see the ways other founders have used tooling to get their early startup idea off the ground.”

“I think we had a good idea,” he explains, “but we probably could have done a deeper dive chatting with successful YC alumni, Techstars Alumni, and programs like that.”

Joel also shared that he would have leaned into content even more, particularly when it came to the newsletter.

“The third thing we would've done would be going harder on the newsletter and content game from day one. I think we were a bit slow at first, in publicly announcing our plans.”

“We want it to be in a learning stage. I think what we've seen is that there are only usually good things that can come from building in public, getting feedback, and iterating on that first draft. We would've maybe come out a bit stronger on who we are helping, and why this is valuable in the early days, versus waiting until later to do that.”

Joel also touched on the importance of digital events, and how they could be a major help—especially hackathons.

“Probably making it more into hackathons and pitch days,” he adds. “I feel like we could have probably taken advantage of the huge move to digital and remote. When weekend hackathons or online demo days were happening on Stonks or Hopin, or digital communities, I feel that could have been a cool way to leverage that.”

What’s a hackathon, you ask? It’s an event, usually run by a tech company, where developers get together for a short period to work together on a project. If you’ve ever seen the Facebook movie, The Social Network, it’s kind of like this scene below (minus all the drinking):

Because the event usually lasts only 24 hours (or at most a weekend), the programmers work quickly, often with little or no sleep, to reach their goal.

Simply put, it’s a super nerdy and exciting way to collaborate and bring the tech startup community together.

An Unexpected Value-Add for Ideators

While the primary purpose of Kernal is to bring ideas, founders, and investors together to provide a breeding ground for startups, there are dozens of other benefits for members. For instance, when you post your startup idea on Kernal, you can link to your website or landing page and collect email addresses.

The platform is a great way to not only connect with those who can help you build your startup, but it can also help you build your audience and your potential customers.

Joel shared, “There's a lady named Alexis Grant who's building essentially the Wikipedia of startup exits. She had this idea, shared it on Kernal, and got close to one hundred upvotes.

Because she had linked her landing page for subscribers, she got, I think, close to 500 free subscribers as she built out her napkin startup idea.”

“I think that was really cool for her to see the validation, and then to update everybody when she'd launch, as she was buying herself time to build a website. It was a really cool story for us to see in the early days of how she leveraged Kernal to build an audience before she actually launched the product.”

Kernal: For Startups & Newsletter Ideation

As an ideation hub, Kernal is at the forefront of the startup world. Over 2,000 startup ideas have been published on the platform, and they come in a variety of flavors—including newsletter ideas.

Joel shared, “Aside from startup ideas, we've also seen Kernal used for content ideas, newsletter ideas, and creator ideas. There are readers or members thinking about a newsletter idea, they're thinking of an interview idea, something that could turn into a startup idea or startup down the line.”

“We'd love to be a community they could share it in. We feature it, we give them a spotlight, and maybe we can see how we can get their side idea into something that becomes a full-time project for them down the line.”

If you’ve got a startup idea that you want to test, or even a newsletter idea, then head over to Kernal today. A Kernal membership is completely free and gives you access to thousands of ideas, founders, investors, and of course, Kernal’s weekly roundup newsletter, written by Joel.

Or, if you don’t have a startup idea yet, but you want to be inspired, you can check out the latest startup ideas trending on the platform right now.