Hey Blooming Founders,

Welcome to…. December!

It’s -1 degrees outside and we had our first snow this week in Germany. 🥶

I’ve been getting deja vu’s as I’m sitting in the same room of my mum’s house thinking the same exact thing I did last year: “Geez, what a crazy year! Hopefully next year things will go back to normal.”

Anyone else feeling this?

By the way, cleaning your mailing list really does work to improve open rates.

Our subscriber size shrank by around 15% after using Neverbounce, but our opening rates jumped by 40% vs average (okay some of this can probably also be attributed to the Subject line).

In any case, it means that a bunch of people saw this newsletter for the first time in a while….

Hello there! Hope you are doing well and sorry if you don’t quite recall how you got onto this.

A quick reminder: You are on this newsletter because you had opted in on the Blooming Founders website, attended one of our 150 events in the past 5 years or asked me to add you once upon a time. 😊

You may not have received our emails because they’ve all landed in your junk folder. Things have changed a lot for me in the past 18 months, and I’m sure for you too.

So if you feel like you’re on a different path now and aren’t getting value from this newsletter anymore, then feel free to unsubscribe at the end of this email. There are absolutely no hard feelings. I know how previous inbox space can be.

To my long-time readers, thanks for sticking with me on this journey!

As you know, we have a new section about web3 now, which I’m super excited about.

In fact, I’m so excited about it that this entire newsletter could just be me waffling about web3, but I also still love startups and building businesses in web1 and web2 and am not quite ready to let go.

We will see how these two worlds will balance each other out in the coming weeks. Sometimes (like today) I might also add a funny Tweet into the mix because it’s Friday!

With this I will leave you head into the weekend. Don’t forget to check our community feature this week from Impact Central. If you are looking to build an impact-driven startup, their accelerator is pretty awesome and will kick off again in January. Get your application in.

Until Friday, keep blooming!

Lu

Founder of Blooming Founders

Impact Central - an accelerator and angel network for impact start-ups solving social and environmental problems - is looking for impact businesses to join their January Accelerator.  

Businesses from previous cohorts have developed partnerships with John Lewis, M&S, Facebook, Google, Vogue, IKEA, M&C Saatchi and Ben & Jerry’s, as well as attracting the support of The Royal Family.

What better way to kick off 2022 than scaling your impact-driven business so that you can make a real difference to the world!

Sound good? Apply here for the chance to take your impact business to the next level. (Application deadline has been extended for Blooming Founders until Dec 7th)

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Before web3, we had web1 and web2, so let’s start there.

Web1.0 was the first iteration of the World Wide Web and is in its nature a ‘read-only web’ or ‘Static Web’.

It basically allows us to search for information and read it. Users cannot interact with each other or contribute their own content.

For businesses, web1 is the brick-and-mortar approach applied to the web. You create a website to display what you have to offer. Your customer comes along and buys something off your website and then leaves. Or they read the information you provide and then get in touch with you to learn more about your product or service.

As you may realise now, the majority of the internet actually still operates at the web1 stage!

Web2.0 is the ‘read-write’ web or ‘Dynamic Web’. Now users can interact with each other and contribute their own content.

Social media platforms are the purest manifestation of web2.0 as their entire value proposition relies on these two things. However, this more participatory Internet also means that the big platforms now own all of our data which is becoming more and more a concern.

Enter Web 3.0 or web3: the ‘read-write-execute’ web or ‘Decentralised Web’. Web3 is meant to be a more autonomous, intelligent, and open internet where data isn’t owned by centralised entities anymore. It is the individuals themselves who own and govern pieces of the Internet.

Web3 does not require ‘permission’, everyone can (technically) participate. It also doesn’t rely on ‘trust’, meaning you don’t have to place authority in someone else, hoping they will do the right thing (with the data you give them, for example).

What web3 does require and relies on are so-called ‘smart contracts’.

Smart contracts are self-executing software agreements, i.e. pieces of code that run on a certain blockchain and execute automatically when a relevant set of terms are met.

As such, these contracts can independently verify and perform a transaction between different parties (users). There is no need for a specific company or individual to act as an intermediary anymore. Everything operates with higher transparency and accuracy as well as less room for manipulation and biases.

That’s all for this week. Hope you’ve learnt something new!

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