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Today’s Edition
📣 *Calling all founders* Wanna be featured on Minimum Viable’s Founder Friday edition? Reply to this email with your company and founding story!
🤖 AI Business Launcher
🚨 Cincinnati CEO Pleads Guilty to Defrauding Investors
⌨️ Code Translation Startup, Code Metal, Raises $36.5 Million
🍕 Pizza Wedge for Carryout Pizza Integrity
💡 Today’s Minimum Viable Idea
🤖 AI Business Launch Guide
IDEA: Imagine you’re scrolling through the Minimum Viable archive and you see it… the perfect startup idea that matches your passion with your skills. You take the leap and begin building the project. After a few weeks of finishing the MVP, you’re stuck. You’ve never built a company before and school never taught you how to file for an LLC. There needs to be an application that guides first-time founders to set up their companies correctly and help with administrative tasks.
PRODUCT: Create an application that guides founders when launching a company. Using AI and neural networks, ask users questions about their business and formation preferences and prompt them to register with the correct state Secretary of State office, get an EIN from the IRS, sign up for a bank account, and get right with tax agencies. After formation, find the right accounting service, CRM, and social media accounts, and prepare a solid foundation for companies to thrive so they can focus on building.
MVP: AI-powered company formation and launch platform for LLCs.
REVENUE MODEL: Transactional, one-time fee for each business setup.
EXIT STRATEGY: Sell to a company that specializes in business formation assistance like LegalZoom for 6x revenue.
Find your customers on Roku this Black Friday
As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.
Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.
Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.
Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.
🚨 Startup News, Trends, and Resources 🗞️
Publication: CNBC
Link: AI startup Code Metal is going beyond vibe coding with the help of $36 million in fresh capital
Summary: AI startup Code Metal has secured a $36.5 million Series A funding round led by Accel. The company aims to go beyond current “vibe coding”-style AI tools by building software that understands architecture, data flow, and business logic. Code Metal plans to use the capital to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development, integrate with existing developer environments, and launch enterprise pilots in 2026. The funding underscores investor confidence in developer-tooling and AI productivity platforms.
Spin: Code Metal is backed by Accel who took early bets on companies like Facebook, Dropbox, and Atlassian so confidence in the startup is at an all-time high. One of the coolest features that Code Metal has introduced is the ability to write code one time then translate it into other programming languages. This allows them to write code and ship new features faster and to a wider array of platforms.
Publication: WCPO Cincinnati
Summary: In Cincinnati, startup founder Benjamin Cantey pleaded guilty to federal wire-fraud charges after defrauding investors of approximately $6.54 million. From 2020–22, Cantey ran an e-commerce laundry-pickup startup named Rumby while falsely representing revenue growth, bank balances, and customer numbers. He submitted fake pitch decks and claimed the company ended May 2022 with a $1.5 million bank balance, when in fact it was in the red by around $53,000. Among his personal misuses of the funds raised, $850,000 was said to go toward a tradeshow but instead helped purchase a $1.7 million home in Cincinnati’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
Spin: Fake it til you make it has gone too far. With some companies, that mindset can be a good thing and lead to some amazing discoveries and inventions. However, it only works when your mindset is “we will figure this out” and not “we should lie now and hopefully one day we will be financially stable.” While lying to investors is obviously terrible and Cantey should serve his time, the VCs have to take some kind of responsibility for not doing due diligence and investing in a e-laundry company in the first place.
🚂 Motivation Station
🧱 Ready to run through a brick wall or do you need an extra push?
Today’s motivation comes from book The Sweaty Startup by Nick Huber. The main thesis of the book is that you do not have the be a genius to make it in business or even become a millionaire. If you focus on skills like sales, hiring, and delegation, the sky is the limit. What I really like about this book is that it does not just give you a theory or one successful person’s narrative. It gives you dozens.
Audiobook included in Spotify Premium below.
The Simplest Way to Create and Launch AI Agents and Apps
You know that AI can help you automate your work, but you just don't know how to get started.
With Lindy, you can build AI agents and apps in minutes simply by describing what you want in plain English.
From inbound lead qualification to AI-powered customer support and full-blown apps, Lindy has hundreds of agents that are ready to work for you 24/7/365.
Stop doing repetitive tasks manually. Let Lindy automate workflows, save time, and grow your business.
🔥 HighDEA
🍕 Pizza Wedge - aka Pwedge
IDEA: Have you ever picked up a large pie for carryout, put it in the passenger seat for the ride home, then open the box only to find that the cheese and toppings slid to one side? Of course, you have. Car seats are angled down towards the back of the vehicle and for whatever reason, pizza was never considered. There needs to be some sort of balancing device that allows pizza to retain equilibrium for the return trip home. Introducing the Pizza Wedge - aka the Pwedge.
📣 We Want to Hear from You! 📢
Send us an email! Let us know what you’re building, what you thought about today’s newsletter, or whatever else is on your mind.
Here’s an un-boring way to invest that billionaires have quietly leveraged for decades
If you have enough money that you think about buckets for your capital…
Ever invest in something you know will have low returns—just for the sake of diversifying?
CDs… Bonds… REITs… :(
Sure, these “boring” investments have some merits. But you probably overlooked one historically exclusive asset class:
It’s been famously leveraged by billionaires like Bezos and Gates, but just never been widely accessible until now.
It outpaced the S&P 500 (!) overall WITH low correlation to stocks, 1995 to 2025.*
It’s not private equity or real estate. Surprisingly, it’s postwar and contemporary art.
And since 2019, over 70,000 people have started investing in SHARES of artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso through a platform called Masterworks.
23 exits to date
$1,245,000,000+ invested
Annualized net returns like 17.6%, 17.8%, and 21.5%
My subscribers can SKIP their waitlist and invest in blue-chip art.
Investing involves risk. Past performance not indicative of future returns. Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd