Hey, starter! Read on for…

🚨 I’m working on the next era of For Starters and I’d love if you could answer these 10 quick questions. Huge thanks if you already filled it out. I’ll be sharing some of the juicy insights here in the newsletter.

—Danny

Very much starters. FS subscriber Virgilio Guidi just launched a bootstrapped cookie brand called MOLTO with his best friend and flatmate of 7 years, Sofia Pinho. The inspiration for the biz was a Sunday ritual the two shared: a warmed-up cookie with ice cream on top, made from ingredients that weren’t full of unhealthy junk.

I asked Virgilio to tell us more…

They did an audit of 83 cookies on one delivery platform for stuff like refined sugar, syrups, palm oil, seed oils, diphosphates, gums and glycerol, and found they were full of what Virgilio calls fake-clean marketing: “the worst labels were exactly the functional and health-led brands.”

The friends are now building something that “explicitly rejects the Anglo wellness industry’s language of less,” he says. Molto bene. 🍪🍪🍪

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İlayda Bakare taught herself to code. Her sister Dilara studied rocket science. Together, they built Exhibits, the most comprehensive guide to every exhibition in London.

The idea arrived during lockdown in 2020, when İlayda was at a coding bootcamp with a pitch due and… nothing to pitch. What she did have was a long-running grievance: she kept missing all the good exhibitions in London, and every online search turned up the same handful of big museums.

So she pitched an app that would list all of them and then spent the next 4 years building it. Now with her sister as co-founder, their app’s been downloaded nearly 10K times, they’ve got IRL experiences ramping up, and NYC in their sights.

→ Below, İlayda tells For Starters about the metric that matters most for them: how many people leave their events smiling… 😃

💬 İlayda, hello! Tell us how you got started.

Hey! Way back at the start of lockdown, I worked at a tech company and they asked, “Do you want to learn to code?” It’s always kind of been my dream to work from my laptop on a beach – and I thought this would be a great step in that direction. So I joined a coding bootcamp.

In the last two weeks, we were given the chance to pitch an idea. I had no ideas until a little voice popped into my head: “What about exhibitions?” I thought, why do I keep missing all the cool exhibitions in London? Why isn’t there one place where I can see what’s going on? So I pitched Exhibits for the first time. And it was overwhelmingly the most popular project. After that, I spent four years teaching myself how to code for mobile and I made Exhibits.

💬 A starter through and through. When did your sister get involved?

I’m a mathematician and an artist, so I care about both logic and creativity – about what things look like and how people use them. And because I’d built this whole app myself, whenever I came across something I didn’t understand, I’d learn by Googling. But what I’m really not so good at is backend engineering. Databases aren’t my strong suit! So when my sister Dilara got back from her rocket science masters degree…

💬 Wait, what?

She studied astronautics and space engineering!

💬 Wow.

Yup. And when she saw me struggling on the backend stuff, she had so many good ideas for that challenge and for the business more broadly. So we locked in as co-founders. She now runs our operations, our social media, and graphic design.

💬 And how’s it been going with the app since then?

We’ve been live for about two years now, and the app’s been downloaded almost 10,000 times. We started with a list of 150 people – aunties, uncles, old colleagues, you name it.

💬 Downloaded at gunpoint. Brings me back to the first few weeks of For Starters…

Yeah exactly: “Guys, you really have to download it, please!” But we’re very happy with the growth since then. We’ve got more than 3,000 exhibitions in our database in two years, which goes to show how many exhibitions are actually happening in London.

To be honest, one of the main reasons I bothered to do all of this was because when people search for exhibitions in London, they always get the same big places. But there’s so much more out there. 

We started with a list of 250 museums and galleries pulled from Wikipedia and now we have almost 550, which is bonkers. We’re the most comprehensive guide to all exhibitions in the city. Other lists tend to focus on just art, and even though I’m an artist, sometimes I want to go and learn about the history of glasses or anaesthesia… or dinosaurs!

💬 How do you find the listings? Are they submitted by users? Do you pull them via AI? Is it… manual? 

Yeah we collect them ourselves. If we waited for other people to send them to us, we’d probably have only four things on the app. As a software engineer one of the first things you learn is you can’t rely on user input. We did try to automate it in part with AI, but it just wasn’t reliable yet. So we collect them manually via the venues’ websites.

💬 And how about going beyond London? Do you want to expand Exhibits to other cities?

Our grand goal is to be in every capital city in the world in our lifetime. Once we’ve figured out how to monetise it and make it a healthy business in London, we’ll expand. New York is the next city we’re looking at. We’re beginning to make connections there. And while our listings are great, there are other ways to expand the biz too, such as taking young people to exhibitions.

💬 Love that – going from the app to IRL experiences.

My sister and I are Turkish and Nigerian. We grew up in Peckham. Our mum was very into art and on the weekends she’d drag all of us and my dad to places like Tate Modern. We went to the free stuff and didn’t spend a lot of money, but I don’t think we realised just how much going to those places affected us until we grew up. For many people, there’s such a barrier to even stepping foot in those creative places. So we said, let’s change that. 

My sister and I have since taken about 200 young people – people of colour in particular – to exhibitions. We call it the Curiosity Club. And we’ve now incorporated our business in the UK as a CIC (Community Interest Company) so we can get funding from Arts Council to run more of these.

💬 I also saw that you two launched a video series, that’s cool.

We built an app, but we really wanted to encourage people to get off the app and start exploring in real life. So Exhibits Explorers was born. In the first season, my sister and I dressed up as old-timey explorers with leather boots and a hat, and visited seven museums and galleries. We talk to the curators, check out the gift shop, and do cartwheels in the park. It’s like a kids TV show, but for adults. The goal is to show that life is more fun if you leave the house, get outside and explore. Otherwise you fall into this rut of constantly scrolling on social media. 

💬 And what’s your biz plan? How are you positioning Exhibits to make ££?

First, advertising in-app. The reason we didn’t go after it initially was because we didn’t feel we had enough users to support people actually wanting to pay for ad space. But our number of users just keeps growing. So having advertising in the app could keep the lights on while also funding the development of the app so we can launch in more cities. 

And then for our community group trips, we’ll do ticketed events. They were free for a long time, because we wanted to make it accessible to everyone. The free tix sell out in hours, but then on the day only a fraction might turn up. We’ll have to stop that. I’ve spoken to loads of founders of community-related businesses and they say, the moment we started charging, people started showing up.

💬 Yeah I get that. Paying for something gives you a stake in it.

Yup. And with our events, I promise you’re going to have a great time. While I can’t control how people arrive at our events, I can control how they leave. As founders, one of the main metrics we track is how many people smiled during our event, and how many leave with smiles.

💬 Who do you want to be connected to? Shoot your shot.

One of the best things that we could do learning-wise right now is speak to someone who regularly does partnership and sponsorship related things. We just have so many ideas! ☼

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Transparent outdoor gear 🫥 → What’s up with all the new transparent shells and packs?

Fine jewelry is taking off 💎 → “Undeterred by the price of gold, which hit an all-time high of $5,600 earlier this year, luxury customers are buying fine jewelry like never before.”

It’s a shoe store! It’s a wine bar! 🍸 → The hottest hangouts are increasingly between the retail shelves.

GenAI images on menus 🤢 → Leathery meat and bread resembling reptile skin.

The future of reservations 🤖 → People are using AI agents to grab hard-to-get restaurant reservations. Resy is fighting back.

Personalized pricing 🤔 → “Changing the price for a consumer based on their personal data and what businesses think a consumer is willing to pay.” Smells fishy, says the FTC…

Free AI tokens with your dumplings 🥟 → China does it differently.

Fines on fast fashion 💶 → France has started imposing fees on ultra-fast fashion, with charges set to rise to almost €20 per garment.

The Erewhonification of grocery stores 🥑 → “Deeply sinister.”

The asshole threshold 😡 → “Civilizations can carry a surprising number of parasites and live. But there’s a line – Rome crossed it, the Gilded Age toed it, and for the first time in history, we can measure it.”

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Industry Standard Tools → ‘Every trade has a small number of items so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool... Entries are written, contested, and voted on by the people who use them.’

Kive → ‘Create stunning product shots and brand visuals in seconds.’

Intertapes → ‘An updating collection of found cassette tapes from around the world. The audio fragments include: voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs and more.’

Simply Bread App → ‘The command center for your baking business. Accept orders, process payments, schedule pickups or deliveries, all from one place.’

Ten Outside-of-the-Box Benefits for Hospitality Workers → ‘If you’re an operator looking for more ways to support your staff – or a staffer looking to advocate for your team – read on for ideas…’

Everything I believe about being a founder changed in my thirties. The Checkout (featuring FS subscriber and legend Hugh Thomas)

A rich European kid launches a fancy sauna hat brand. Thingtesting

This forecasting agency wants to help designers reframe how they see trends. Business of Home

Gen Zers quit their jobs to start a pickle company – now it’s valued at $8.5 million. Make It

Graphic designers are trying to fix people's terrible AI flyers. Creative Bloq

What do vintage dealers actually earn? Pre-Loved ($)

The legacy of a Hong Kong cleaver store. SCMP

America’s greatest hot dog. The Ringer

We used to log off. Doc

$3 billion → The investment that flooded into the lab-grown meat sector, which sorta/kinda imploded. (As per this great Harper’s piece.)

27% → The slice of British adults who admit they’ve stolen tableware items from a pub, bar or restaurant. So, the real number is, like, 50%+.

Any human ever.

What we tell AI.

Freewrite.

Merch!

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Fun updates from For Starters subscribers I spotted this week…

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