🎢 #53 - One year anniversary and what's next

+ personal updates!

Hey fam ❤️!

🎉 Today marks the one year anniversary of Consumer Startups.

I would like to thank all of you that have been reading my Substack in the past 52 weeks (60K+ views to date). It’s been quite surreal knowing there are real people in the world that care about what I write. You all inspire me daily and push me to deliver better content.

Seriously, there have been many moments in the past year when I thought about giving up, but your encouragements have kept me in the game. Below is a recent Twitter DM from a reader:

I am super grateful for all the investors and founders that have taken time to speak with me about their journeys and insights (check out all the founders and startups I have featured here). I am also really thankful for all the friends and mentors I have made. Special shout-outs to Ali, another Substack writer who has helped me a ton with distribution strategy, Zibo, a VC at Intonation that has shared with me a ton of cool consumer startups, and Kelvin, a great marketing mind that has helped me so much with my content.

What’s coming up next…

Moving forward this year, I will write more longer-form content that will focus on specific consumer niches and trends. I will still interview early-stage consumer founders and investors but there will be more of an emphasis on my own analysis and perspective on different sectors.

A quick sneak peek 👀 -- Next week, I will share a piece on an idea validation framework I created after interviewing so many founders in the past year. The week after, I will do a deep dive on the Amazon private-label buy and build space (e.g. Thrasio, Elevate Brands, etc)

🎓 Personal updates

Yup - I just graduated from the University of Michigan (aka Zoom university) yesterday. It’s quite a time graduating in the middle of a pandemic. Fortunately, I was able to experience a lot in the past four years. Some highlights:

• Started two tech startups with my best friends, both failed miserably

• Worked at several early-stage funds across three countries (China, Israel, and USA)

• Interned at Zapier building a super cool internal tool

• Helped a professor build an EdTech search engine that got founded by NSF

I am still not completely sure what I want to do in the long term, but I do know that I want to work on cool projects with really smart and interesting people. 

My plan is to move to SF in July - so please hit me up if you are in the area because I would love to grab a coffee and learn more about you!

In the meantime, I would like to take on a new challenge for the next three months with my ample free time. One thing I have been thinking about is working on a local lead generation project, but let me know if you have any other cool suggestions!

Peace and love.

-Leo Luo