Products that do one thing really well spread like wildfire. Three reasons.

People grasp instantly how it helps them. The founder can describe it in one breath. And the product positions itself automatically, for a specific person with a specific workflow.

A product that does twelve things badly has none of these. Every prospective user has to figure out what it’s for, the founder fumbles the elevator pitch, and the positioning is whoever happens to land on the homepage.

The bolt-on instinct makes this worse. When the core feature isn’t working, founders add more, hoping volume will compensate for clarity. It never does. A broken core feature plus three new ones is just four broken features.

There’s a deeper misunderstanding underneath this about how features should grow. Good products expand outward from a base. Bad products plant separate islands and call the archipelago an application.

The difference matters. A continent has a single landmass. Everything connects. Users moving between features stay inside one coherent place. Each new feature inherits the trust and understanding the core feature already earned.

The team rebuilds onboarding, navigation, and trust for every new island. Nothing compounds.

Once you do one thing well, you can add things that are natural extensions of that thing. That’s a continent growing. Adding a feature that’s really a separate app inside your app, sharing nothing but the login screen, is an island. It looks like progress on the roadmap and feels like nothing to the user.

So how do you figure out what the one thing should be?

Is there a workflow you understand intimately, one you’ve done a hundred times, where there’s no consistent way to execute it well? Start there. If you understand the process and you know what a good output looks like, you’re already ahead of almost everyone trying to build something.

Most founders are not in this position. They’re trying to build a catch-all solution before they’ve solved a tiny portion of the workflow. They’re guessing. The product reflects the guessing as a jack of all trades but master of none.

The scope of successful products is often so narrow it sounds laughable when you describe it. “It generates one specific kind of report for one specific role at companies of one specific size.” That sounds too small to be a business. It’s exactly the right size to be a business that works.

Start narrow enough that it sounds embarrassing. Build the one thing until it’s undeniable. Then let the continent grow from there.

Step one: ask every friend and family member he could get his hands on. He literally said he "Lifted them up by their ankles and shook them for everything they were worth”

Step two: use that “fundraising round” to attract institutional investors.

Step three: only then start potential revenue generating processes.

This has somehow become the default playbook. Raise first. Build second. Sell third, if you get around to it. The order is exactly backwards and nobody seems to notice.

Businesses exist to solve problems for people in exchange for money. That sentence is so simple it sounds stupid to write down. But it’s getting overlooked entirely in the current thirst for fundraising. Founders are treating the raise as the goal, not the means. The pitch deck is the product. The investor is the customer. The user with the actual problem, is an afterthought.

The fear underneath this is that real traction will look insignificant. Ten paying users sounds like nothing next to a fifty million dollar TAM slide. So founders skip the embarrassing small numbers and reach straight for the big ones, hoping that scale narrative will paper over the fact that nobody has paid them yet.

But ten to fifteen real case studies is the foundation of an actual business. It’s not a small thing. It’s the only thing. It’s what you should be racing to get before you do anything else, because everything else depends on it.

What matters to a VC and what matters to an early stage startup are fundamentally different things. VCs need stories that scale to billions. Early stage startups need evidence that ten people will pay and shout about the thing. Confusing these two is how founders end up spending six months on a deck for a business that has never had a customer.

Here’s the part that founders miss. Investors are not in the business of funding startups with no traction. They’re in the business of funding startups whose traction suggests massive scale. Those are different sentences. The first one would mean VCs are charities. The second one means you have to do the unglamorous work first, then they show up.

Skipping that work doesn’t get you to fundraising faster. It gets you to a longer fundraising process where you can’t answer the questions investors will ask. How many users? How are you finding them? What did the last ten conversations teach you? If you’ve been writing a deck instead of selling, you have nothing.

Even when founders here this their solution always seems to be,

“Well if we just get one onboard, others will come in later”

There’s a psychological trap here too. It’s roughly as hard to build a small business as it is to build a venture scale business. The work is similar in the early days. Talk to users, find the problem, deliver the solution, charge money. So founders who could be building real businesses get pulled toward the venture path because the upside looks bigger and the validation feels better.

But most businesses are not VC ready. Venture capital is a tiny sliver of how companies actually get built. It requires a very specific kind of business with very specific scale dynamics. It’s fine to go after that if you know what you’re doing, but it doesn’t give permission to skip over the initial traction. Pretending your business is one of these when it isn’t doesn’t make it true. It just means you’ll spend a year chasing money you were never going to get instead of building the thing that would have worked.

Fundraising feels like progress. It feels like something is happening. Meetings get booked, decks get refined, term sheets get whispered about. Months go by.

Meanwhile no one has paid you anything.

If you can’t get ten people to pay you, raising money won’t fix it. It will just give you a bigger budget to keep not getting paid.

Get the case studies first.

Then decide if you even want investors.

The cost of finding someone who wants what you built hasn’t moved.

That gap is the whole story. And VCs are papering over it with cheap money, which means founders never have to confront it.

When building was expensive, you had to be careful about what you built. You talked to users first because shipping the wrong thing cost you six months and a co-founder. Now you can ship the wrong thing every weekend. The feedback loop that used to teach founders what a real problem looks like has been severed. There are advantages to this. You can bring something to market and get some real signal(like a credit card transaction, faster), but founders are avoiding this for just as long.

Most of what I see now is founders solving problems they’ve never had, for users they’ve never met, with a distribution plan that amounts to “post on LinkedIn and hope.”

There are two ways to actually get customers, and they’ve been the same for decades.

1. Direct outreach to specific people who have the problem

2. Content that compounds over time and builds trust with a targeted audience

Both require putting yourself in front of strangers and being told no. Both feel slower than building. Both are the actual job.

Technical founders avoid them because building feels like progress and selling feels like exposure. Every hour spent on a feature is an hour you didn’t have to be visible. The AI tools have made the hiding place infinitely deep. You can refactor, redesign, rebuild, regenerate, and feel productive for months without ever having a conversation with a person who might pay you.

The other pattern I see constantly is the breadth problem. Founders building “an AI assistant for teams” or “a platform that helps you launch a startup.” No specific user. No specific job. No specific alternative they’re better than. Just a vague gesture at a large market.

If you’ve never built a successful business, you can’t see how specific you need to be. The ICP isn’t “small business owners.” It’s “solo founders who’ve been technical for ten years, have built something, have fewer than ten real users, and avoid customer conversations.” The job isn’t “help them grow.” It’s “get them to send fifty cold messages this week without freezing.”

You can’t generalize your way to product market fit. You have to narrow until it almost feels embarrassing, then narrow more.

That’s not even the hard part. Actually delivering a solution that solves the problem, in whatever rough form you can manage at first, is what founders skip over.

The deeper issue is that AI is trained on the internet, and the internet is full of nonsense business advice. The software it generates is genuinely good because software has documented best practices. The business strategy it generates is mostly recycled generic processes like “make a business plan”, “define your problem statement”, “form your founding team”, because that’s what the training data looks like. Founders who lean on AI for code get a real edge. Founders who lean on AI for go-to-market get confidently wrong answers in a polished voice.

Solve problems you’ve actually had. Sell to people you actually understand. Use the AI to build faster, not to think for you.

Failure used to be expensive enough to teach you something. Cheap money and cheap tools have made it cheap enough to repeat indefinitely. The startups that survive this era won’t be the ones with the best AI stack.

They'll be the ones who used AI as a force multiplier on real customer understanding, not a substitute for it.

I hear the same story every week. It goes like this.

“We are building a super neat tool for a very complex problem, such as enterprise security. We are deep in the weeds of product development right now. Once we are done with that, we will start focusing on fundraising.”

Fundraising? Why does that obviously come after product development?

Then comes the diagnostic question.

“Do you have any customers?”

“We have lots of signups(clever sidestep)”

“Have you gotten results for anyone? Paying or unpaying?”

“That takes too long.”

Well, the time is going to pass anyway.

The Zero Revenue Delusion

There is a pervasive logic, too (immortalized by that scene in Silicon Valley), that no revenue is actually better than some revenue.

The theory is that zero dollars represents infinite potential, while a small amount of revenue reveals your true, likely unscalable ceiling. Founders use this as a psychological shield. They believe that if they show 20 to 50 manual sales, a VC will label them a lifestyle business and pass.

In the strange world of VC math. There is a small bit of sense in this opinion, but it has become a toxic excuse to avoid the market. They treat sales as something uncomfortable or too slow. They convince themselves they must wait months to ask for money, using that time to polish a product in a vacuum.

Narrative vs. Truth

Here is the reality. Founders are not avoiding sales because they are being strategic. They are avoiding sales because the code does not reject you, but customers do.

By prioritizing investor market fit over product market fit, they are optimizing for a check instead of a business. One is a narrative built on slides. The other is a truth built on friction.

• Fundraising is about momentum and storytelling.

• Product market fit is about the grueling, unscalable work of proving your solution is a necessity.

When a founder says they are deep in the weeds of development before talking to a single customer, what they are actually saying is: “I am terrified of finding out no one wants this.”

The Verdict

If you are waiting for a seed round to determine whether your product works, you are not building a startup. You are building a ghost.

Everyone is avoiding going after actual sales because it is slow and uncomfortable. But that small revenue founders fear is exactly what proves the desperate pull required for a real company. If you cannot get 20 people to pay you, you do not have a scalable business. You have a hobby. Stop hiding in the weeds and go get rejected by a customer. It is the only way to find out if you actually have something worth funding.

Stop hiding in the weeds.

If you are tired of wondering if your product is a ghost, I will take the reins and force your startup into the market. I specialize in the “uncomfortable” work of finding real sales and stress-testing your business until it is bulletproof. If there is a path to growth, I will find it. If your idea is trash, I will tell you why before you waste another year. I only work on products I see potential in.

Book a Call

Ideally, you sell the product before it’s built, but many aren't comfortable doing so. So you can at least build trust with an audience over time by delivering value and familiarity.

They either completely ignore distribution, view it as beneath them, or consider it something they can get to later. Constantly getting sucked back into the product and supposed important tasks that they don’t like. This is somewhere to start. It’s a surprising battle, but they don’t know how much effort it’s going to take. So many conversations I have with founders go like this

Me: Hey Founder, how is your project building?
Founder: Great, yep, we’re just wrapping up the last few features, and we’ll be ready to bring it to market soon.

A few months later…

Me: Hey, how did that launch go?

Founder: Oh, we’re almost done. We just need to fix a few more things, and we’ll be ready.

This was a problem in the corporate world, too. “Done” was seen as code complete by devs. The unglamorous work of getting the code out into the world was thankless. There appears to be a disconnect between producing the work and someone actually using it. Most technical people are heavily focused on the former, but that’s meaningless if the latter never happens.

Building distribution is its own beast. I’ve been working on it for over two years, and I can say it’s a slow burn because it’s valuable. It means that people are actually interested in what you have to offer. It always surprises me how much of an afterthought it is to people that they need to build an audience. Fear and misinformation are the root cause of this. They are astoundingly far away from the level of consistent value they need to provide to build enough trust for a purchase.

This is all very well when you’ve got a successful product that is already meeting customers’ needs. But what do you do when you’re far before that time? Well, people always value information that is relevant to them. So start creating content that speaks to their needs. Once your product is ready, you can position it as a CTA at the end, knowing that

1. Enough relevant people are reading it

2. They’re reading it consistently(open data)

The astounding thing for most founders is that, when it works, the solution is how simple it is once they’re plugged into what an audience is trying to accomplish. This is something I have learned too. What people actually want is to meet their basic human needs. Any product that doesn’t help with that is automatically uninteresting.

Even if it is interesting, they may not be in the market for that solution right now. So we need to create as many touchpoints as possible to get our product in front of people without spamming or overwhelming them, giving us the best chance of success.

Thanks for reading. What have you learned lately about audience building that you wish you knew when you started?

Cristina Bernardo lost her daughter Aviva at 10 months old.

Most people would need years to do anything other than survive that. Cristina built a company.

Avocado Health is a text-based AI that helps parents get real answers, fast, without needing to know the right question. It infers what you actually mean. “No diapers” becomes a search for the nearest diaper bank. “My kid isn’t walking yet” becomes a referral to early childhood intervention services that are free before age three, but only if parents know to ask.

The go-to-market is smart. They’re not trying to get parents to download another app. Instead, they’re embedding the AI inside organizations that already have trust, such as nonprofits, health plans, and rural health systems. The org gets a white-labeled tool. Avocado gets distribution and a real feedback loop.

Their first anchor partner is the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii, serving over 5,000 families. That’s the proving ground, and it’s already producing the kind of product signal you can’t manufacture: a parent almost drove to the ER because their kid’s fever medicine hadn’t kicked in yet. The chatbot told them to wait an hour. They stayed home. Another parent described wheezing. The chatbot flagged it as urgent. RSV diagnosis followed.

That’s the product working exactly as designed.

We talk about the origin story, why B2C was a dead end, how they’re measuring outcomes that partners actually care about (40% of pediatric ER visits are preventable), and what it looks like to build something from grief that actually functions as a business.

One of the more interesting conversations I’ve had in a while..

You can find the full recording with hyperlinks on Fathom below.

Key Takeaways

• Origin Story: Founded after the tragic loss of their daughter Aviva, Avocado Health aims to provide accessible, evidence-based parenting support to prevent similar tragedies and reduce parental anxiety.

• B2B White-Label Strategy: The primary go-to-market is partnering with trusted organizations (nonprofits, health plans) that white-label the AI chatbot, leveraging their existing trust and distribution channels.

• Product Evolution: Real-world user feedback is driving rapid product iteration, teaching the AI to infer intent from natural language (e.g., “no diapers” → find diaper bank) and provide hyper-local resources based on a user’s zip code.

• Focus on Measurable Outcomes: The product is being developed to track KPIs critical to partners, such as reducing preventable ER visits (40% of pediatric visits are preventable) and increasing attendance at prenatal and postpartum appointments.

Topics

The “Why”: A Personal Mission

• The company’s mission is rooted in the founders’ experience with their daughter, Aviva, who passed away at 10 months old.

• This experience highlighted the critical need for immediate, reliable parenting information and support, especially for parents without easy access to medical professionals.

• The founders’ goal is to make parenting easier and less overwhelming by providing constant access to evidence-based answers.

The “How”: A B2B White-Label Strategy

• The core insight is that busy parents are unlikely to download and use a new app, making a text-based AI chatbot a more accessible solution.

• The primary go-to-market is a B2B white-label model, where Avocado Health provides the AI tech to established organizations.

• Rationale: This strategy leverages partners’ existing trust and distribution channels, which is more effective than building a brand from scratch.

• Target Partners:

  • Parent advocacy nonprofits

  • Rural health organizations (tapping into the Rural Health Transformation Program)

  • Tribal communities

  • Baby brands and parenting experts

Product Development & User Feedback

• The first anchor partner is Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii (HMHBCH), which serves over 5,000 families.

• Launch Plan: A direct-to-families launch is scheduled for June 5th in Hawaii.

• Feedback Loop: HMHBCH’s team is actively testing the product, providing critical feedback that is driving rapid iteration.

  • Key Learning: The AI must interpret natural language, including statements and slang, not just formal questions.

• Core Functionality:

  • Local Resources: Provides hyper-local resources (food/diaper banks, clinics) based on a user’s zip code.

  • Intent Inference: Infers the “question behind the question” to provide more relevant support.

    • Example: “My child is almost one and not walking” → Infers concern about a developmental delay → Provides articles and contact info for local early childhood intervention centers.

    • Significance: These services are free if accessed before age three, making early detection critical.

  • Behavioral Health: Infers mental health needs (e.g., postpartum depression) and provides local specialist contacts.

  • New Feature: A partnership will soon offer users 12 free/low-cost therapy sessions.

Future Development & KPIs

• Future product development is focused on features that align with partner KPIs.

• Upcoming Features:

  • Developmental Milestones: Age-based texts with activities and things to watch for.

  • Pregnancy Cycle Messaging: Weekly check-ins, appointment reminders, and preparation guides.

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Partners:

  • Reducing preventable ER visits (40% of pediatric visits are preventable).

  • Increasing attendance at prenatal and postpartum appointments.

• Case Study Examples:

  • Prevented ER Visit: Provided reassurance that a fever medicine could take up to an hour to work, preventing an unnecessary hospital trip.

  • Prompted ER Visit: Identified wheezing as an emergency, leading to a prompt pediatrician visit and RSV diagnosis.

Next Steps

• Feargal Walsh:

  • Send a free trial code to Feargal Walsh for testing.

  • Connect with organizations serving rural and tribal communities.

  • Continue hosting weekly parenting workshops.

  • Follow up with Feargal Walsh on specific product feedback, particularly regarding onboarding friction and payment processing.

• Feargal Walsh:

  • Conduct a screen-share walkthrough of the onboarding process to provide detailed feedback.

Action Items

• Email Hans onboarding/UX suggestions; propose screen walkthrough if helpful - WATCH (5 secs)

Someone reaches out, skips hello, skips context, and goes straight to the pitch.

No curiosity.

No sign they’ve paid attention.

Just here’s what I have, do you want it?

That kind of selling feels bad for a reason.

You weren’t a person to them.

You were a target.

And the attention cost of this stuff is real. Every cold, irrelevant pitch asks for a slice of your focus with no regard for what it takes from you. One message is small. Ten a day is draining.

But that is not all selling.

Selling feels completely different when there is already trust. Or when the person has clearly paid attention. Or when the offer fits something you are already trying to do.

I spent a long time assuming people would be repelled by the idea of selling itself. So I braced for rejection before I ever made the offer. But the more I paid attention, the more I noticed something else:

People are not always rejecting being sold.

They are rejecting being treated carelessly.

They may also view you much differently than you expect if you’ve clearly made an effort to warm up the relationship first.

The bar is not that high in a world where a cold pitch is what many lead with.

Selling feels good when someone understands your world well enough to make something relevant.

When they can see the gap.

When the offer slots into your life instead of interrupting it.

When it feels less like persuasion and more like recognition.

That is why great ads and sales messages are so effective. They do not just push. They pre-handle objections, name the problem clearly, and frame the offer so cleanly that it feels discovered rather than forced.

And it is also why automation so often falls flat.

We have a pretty good instinct for whether there is a real person behind a message. Video helps. Voice helps. Presence helps. You can automate distribution, but there is still something hard to fake about aliveness. Plus, it’s much harder to reject a real person on the other end.

So this is where I’ve landed:

Selling feels gross when it is cold, careless, and self-serving.

It feels good when the person on the other end feels understood.

Pay attention before you pitch.

Make the offer fit.

Show your face when you can.

You cannot control whether someone buys.

You can control whether the experience of being sold by you feels like being understood or being used.

Software developers: if you're building a company and nobody outside your network knows you exist, Escape The Terminal is a 6-week program that teaches you how to create social media content that actually builds distribution and trust. No marketing degree required.

Learn more at EscapeTheTerminal.com

Nevertheless, if you want to get past this initial slow point faster, here are a few things that help.

1. Be consistent.

In the beginning, it’s easier than ever to fall off. You haven’t announced yourself publicly, so it feels low stakes to stop. But if you do fall off, it’s much harder to get started again. Pick a cadence and platform to start with, ideally at least 3 times per week, and stick to it.

2. Make friends.

You’re not alone. Find people who are at your level and engage with them. Some platforms have built-in ways to support other creators. If not, there are still ways to borrow audiences and support each other. Ideally, you find people at a higher level to refer their audiences to you, but they may not be interested.

There will be plenty of similar people who are willing to collaborate, though. Side note: if anyone reading is in a similar niche, I’m open to swapping recommendations.

3. Engage with your audience.

Initially, anyone who likes your post is worth talking to. Don’t be pushy or weird about it. But check in. If they comment, respond, and keep the conversation going. If they reply to your email, keep chatting. Every single one of those interactions can compound in unexpected ways.

There are many ways to move past this initial stage, but the most important thing to remember is that everyone goes through it.

The people who made it out the other side just didn’t quit during the part that felt like it wasn’t working.

After previously only working at bootstrapped startups, I landed my first role at a public company. I was used to pushing code and getting very little feedback. But here the standards were much higher. I would spend days in code review. Finding every which way to push it through my co-worker. Bristling with frustration at the injustice.

But sometimes when I would do this, things would break in production, and I would be frantically fixing things late in the evening with no one around to support.

So I started to listen to and address all the feedback religiously. Adapting my code. Making it more robust. Little by little, things got better. Code review cycles shortened. Defects dropped.

This pattern repeated itself throughout my career and into entrepreneurship. Each time, the same feelings would surface. Always surprising to meet them again.

But I learned to treat it as data.

The thing is, engineers already know how to do this. We do it every day with our code. A test fails, and we don’t take it personally. We read the output, trace the problem, fix the variable, and run it again. We understand that failure is part of the process. It’s how the system improves.

But the moment the rejection is personal, a pitch that doesn’t land, a customer who says no, a cold message that gets left on read, that same brain that debugs flawlessly goes into a completely different mode.

Shame.

Withdrawal.

“I wasn’t ready.”

The input changed. The logic didn’t.

Try running the same process. A customer said no. What was the input? A cold LinkedIn message with no context, sent to someone who had never heard of you.

What output did you expect? Why? What would you change on the next run?

Most of the time, when you actually trace it back, the rejection wasn’t a verdict on you or your product. It was a data point about a specific input that didn’t match the expected output. That’s it. That’s all it was.

The founders I’ve seen break through the sales wall are no less sensitive than the ones who stay stuck. They feel the same sting. They’ve just built a better failure loop. They collect the data, adjust the variable, and run the test again faster than the feeling can take hold.

The best engineers I know have high defect rates early in a new environment. They also have the lowest defect rates once they’ve been there a while.

Because they don’t take rejection personally.

They rejoice in the new data.

A founder I know has been in stealth for two years. When asked why he wasn't talking to customers, he said he already knew the industry so well that it wouldn’t be productive. He already knows everything about everyone else’s workflow in the entire industry?? That’s insane. I didn’t know anyone else’s day-to-day workflow at my previous role.

What often happens when companies take this route is that they end up launching an MVP that makes the isolation obvious. The onboarding assumes knowledge nobody outside the team has. The navigation only makes sense to the three people who built it. There’s a feature that exists because two engineers disagreed, and nobody wanted the fight. It looks exactly like the nearest competitor, only worse, and you can tell within thirty seconds that no outside human ever touched it before launch day.

I recently witnessed a launch in which the MVP was so bloated and complex that the product's value was completely obscured. Clearly, a case caused by zero customer usage.

Stealth isn’t the problem. Total isolation is. You can protect what you’re building while still staying connected to the world it’s supposed to serve. Here’s how:

Build an audience before you have a product to show

Talk about the industry publicly. Deliver value to your potential future customers before you launch in simple ways. For example, a founder building in the nursing space could spend six months sharing tips and insights publicly before launching, interviewing people who work in that world, and writing about what the broken status quo actually costs people. By launch day, they have an audience that trusts them because they’ve been useful for months.

You can generate revenue this way, too. A newsletter with sponsored posts or affiliate relationships means you’re not burning runway while you build, and you’re learning what your audience actually responds to before you ask them to buy anything.

Get real humans to break your app before strangers do

There is nothing worse than launching with bugs and usability issues that any independent third party would have caught in twenty minutes. Before you launch, invite members of the audience you’ve been building. Give them early access in exchange for brutal feedback. Ask them to complete specific tasks without any guidance and watch where they get stuck.

Don’t brief them first. The moment you explain how something works before they use it, you’ve invalidated the test. If it needs explaining, it needs fixing.

Start closing customers before you have anything to close them on

Even without a launch, you can test willingness to pay. Reach out individually to people in your target market and offer them a manual version of what your product will eventually automate. A coaching engagement. A done-for-you service. Something that puts you inside their actual workflow for a few weeks.

The quality and depth of information from working with a client manually is infinitely higher than an abstract discovery interview, or worse, analyzing analytics on a dashboard.

You will learn more about your customers’ day in two weeks of actually working alongside them than in six months of building in isolation.

Even if someone does care enough to steal your idea. Which they won’t, because they’re too busy.

They can’t steal your audience, your perspective, or your expertise.

That’s what actually matters in a startup anyway.

When my department got eliminated, I thought the problem was the company. Wrong industry, wrong timing, wrong fit. I told myself that story for a while.

So I went full-time on a product that I’d been building on the side. If I could just get it just right I thought I could launch a killer app and replace my salary immediately.

But the longer I toiled the more complex and further away the finish line got, so I finally started getting out to talk to people about it. It was in the credit card space, and once I told people they would need to hand over their entire transaction history to get a small bit of value, which I hadn’t even delivered yet, they told me they wouldn’t be comfortable with that.

Then I read something damning. You need at least 1,000 people on your mailing list and an audience of 10,000 on social media before you start a business.

Gulp, I wasn’t even close to that.

Startup killed.

Then I sat down and looked at what I’d actually been doing for the previous few years.

I’d been inside a box. Head down, building things that had no commercial path, in an organization that kept me isolated from anything that required talking to a human.

My social skills had quietly atrophied to near-zero. I didn’t notice because I was “busy.” My anxiety around talking to strangers, pitching ideas, writing publicly, making videos where I looked like I didn’t know what I was doing, all of it had quietly calcified into something I could barely move.

The terminal was comfortable. It always is. I was competent in there. I could do things other people can’t. There’s a pride in that. A kind of invisible power that gave me a sense of worth.

I spent the last couple years dismantling that. Not with a system. Not with a framework. Just relentless exposure. Public speaking. Networking events where I was genuinely bad at networking. LinkedIn posts that embarrassed me a little. Video where I looked awkward. Writing that wasn’t polished. Sharing ideas that weren’t fully formed.

I did it poorly for a long time. I got comfortable doing it poorly. And after enough of that, I realized I actually knew how to do it, so I may as well do it well.

That’s the whole arc.

Now I sit across from technical founders who are earlier in that arc, often without knowing they’re on it at all. They’re building. They’re coding. They’re getting pulled in by the next shiny AI breakthrough, the next feature that would really make the thing pop.

I had a conversation recently where someone told me he didn’t want to do sales because of the “slimy types” he’d dealt with over the years. That landed. Because it’s not ignorance. It’s a story. A coherent worldview that protects them from something uncomfortable.

The problem is the protection is costing them everything.

Every failed startup says the same thing in the postmortem: not enough distribution, no product-market fit, didn’t talk to enough people. It’s always the same reason. And it’s always framed as a business failure when it’s actually a human one. They didn’t build the wrong thing, they built for someone they hadn’t met.

The terminal is not the enemy. The problem is when you use it as a place to hide from the part of the work that actually determines whether any of this matters.

That’s what I help programmers fix. You can’t build a startup alone. I know that now.

When did you first realize you’d been hiding?

Hit reply to let me know.

That’s not sales. That’s manipulation. And it’s understandable to want nothing to do with it.

But there’s another way.

Real sales is about finding people with a genuine problem and helping them move forward. Think about the last time you discovered something that actually solved a problem you had. You weren’t annoyed. You were grateful.

That’s what honest sales feel like from the other side.

Ethical selling is harder than the manipulative kind. You're not just closing a deal, you're delivering real value on top of it. But you won't feel awful doing it.

That’s not beneath you.

That’s a higher standard than most people hold themselves to.

If you want a straight conversation about where you're stuck and one thing to try this week, book a call here.

Two likes.

No shame in that. But hardly worth the effort.

Here’s what actually happened: he didn’t have a distribution problem. He had a math problem. A brand-new profile, with any quality of content, equals nobody seeing it.

But here’s the part that keeps me up at night on his behalf. Every week he spent in feature mode was a week the product got objectively worse for the users he didn’t have yet. The thing that was supposed to be good is now quietly broken in three places while he’s busy building a fourth room onto a house nobody’s visited.

Feature-itis looks like diligence from the inside. You’re working. You’re shipping. The Jira board is moving. But it’s a form of hiding. As long as there’s one more thing to add, you don’t have to face the market yet.

The market, though, doesn’t care how long you spent. It will tell you what it needs if you let it. And what it tells you is always simpler than what you think it needs.

Find the demand first.

Build the simplest possible solution.

The product will reveal itself.

What’s one feature you could cut to launch sooner?

And then six months later, they quietly shut down because they never figured out who actually wanted to buy the thing.

Chasing investment feels productive. It looks like traction. You have meetings, you get feedback, you build a pitch deck, you refine your story. There is motion. Motion feels like progress.

It isn’t.

Here is what actually happens when you go deep into fundraising mode: you start optimizing for the wrong audience. Investors are not customers. They do not think like customers. They are not asking “Does this solve my problem?” They are asking, “Can this become a big enough market?” Those are completely different questions, and they produce completely different answers from you.

You start talking to founders who have raised. You start reading about TAM. You start framing your product in terms of what makes a good investment story rather than what makes a customer pull out their credit card. Slowly, almost invisibly, your customer development work stops. Because investors do not reward customer development. They reward a narrative.

The really insidious part is that fundraising and customer focus should reinforce each other. Better product, more customers, easier fundraising. That is the theory. In practice, they compete for the same limited resource: your attention.

Fundraising is a full-time job disguised as a side task. The pitch does not get better in one meeting. It gets better over forty meetings, through iteration, coaching, and practicing your answers to the same fifteen questions investors always ask. That is real work. Necessary work, if you are going to raise. But it is not the work of building something people want.

The founders who figure this out early make a deliberate choice. They either fundraise or they sell. Not both, not simultaneously, not “I’ll do both and see what happens.” They pick one mode, go all in, and switch when they have something to show.

If you do not have customers yet, fundraising is not the answer to that problem. It is a way of avoiding it. A well-funded product without product-market fit is just a more expensive failure.

Talk to customers. Sell something. Then, if you need outside capital to scale what is already working, go get it.

That is the sequence. Everything else is just a story you tell people who are not buying.

The engineer or CTO founder who avoids the commercial side entirely and delegates it to the CEO causes more problems than the engineer who awkwardly tries to figure it out themselves.

I spoke with an Account Executive who had joined late in a startup’s lifecycle. They were in Palo Alto, so raising funds from friends and family to build a product in the HR space was no problem. Once they brought it to market, they didn’t get anywhere near the avalanche of traction they expected. All the people closest to them were depending on them to deliver. So they hired an Account Executive to find the elusive Product-Market Fit.

It didn’t work. Product-Market Fit isn’t something you hire someone to find after the fact. By the time they brought in outside help, the founders had already disconnected from the customer. The AE couldn’t bridge that gap.

Don’t be like these guys. Integrate the customer into your process on day one, and only consider outside investment when you’re sure there’s strong demand for what you’re building.

What startups predominantly don’t do is focus on a set of potential users who have a particular issue or are trying to achieve something in their lives. This is much more fertile ground for a novel solution that can be presented to the user, making competition temporarily irrelevant. The product is built around a specific person’s reality rather than a competitor’s feature list. This is a doubly beneficial tactic because many competitors will try to create a copycat product, which will never be as good as the original. Copycats can never beat the original by imitation alone. Only by doing something genuinely different can they hope to disrupt it. This is more of an exercise in positioning. Perhaps your solution has already been done, but yours solves the problem in a novel way and is distributed to the right people more efficiently.

Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra didn’t look at Gmail and try to beat it feature-for-feature. He found a specific type of user, people who lived in their inbox and were borderline obsessive about email efficiency, and built exclusively for them. He charged $30 a month when email was free and had a waiting list. He never tried to take Gmail’s customers. He found the people Gmail had never bothered to build for.

If you’re looking at competitors to determine your product’s roadmap, be careful. Using their feature spec as a list of necessities for your product is acting like a big company when you’re, in fact, the underdog. Being nimble, solving a specific problem for a specific person, and iterating from there is how underdogs win. The alternative is spending years building something the market already has.¹

¹ Competitive analysis does have a place in seeking investment. They want to understand a product’s potential, and you should too. Market analysis is completely different from product development, though. Many tools are competitors in the same market but offer completely different products, especially at the beginning.

One engineer spent a year building in isolation without the technical skills to complete an ambitious project. He ended up with a half-broken app nobody wanted and a short timeline to find a job instead.

Another spent two years building in isolation. Now has a few short months to find customers before the money runs out.

Another spent five years, only to launch to crickets and go through a painful grieving process, gain 50 lbs, and ultimately return to a corporate job he desperately wanted to escape.

Same mistake. Three different sentences.

This is due to a common misconception that a high-quality product must be in place before customers can be engaged.

This misconception is what hinders technical founders more than anything else. Especially as the build becomes increasingly complicated. There’s a hesitancy to release something less than perfect due to their fear of being judged.

Instead, Engineers need to be disciplined with their ship dates, talk to at least 10 customers before building anything, and continuously show their products and get feedback at every stage of the process. Bonus points for testing live and guiding users to solve their problems manually first if you haven't yet built the functionality.

The engineers who build great companies aren't the ones who wrote the best code. They're the ones who found out they were wrong fastest and adjusted.

Simulation theory is a whacky concept. The kind of thing I would usually ignore out of skepticism. I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in horoscopes or voodoo. But hearing about simulation theory at a time when I was struggling to put myself out there for my business and deal with the discomfort of launching to crickets consistently helped me a lot.

I don’t even fully understand the technicalities. All I needed to do was be given the frame that the whole world could be a video game; therefore, I should approach it with the attitude that it is a winnable game and try to do things that seem risky, even if they at least guarantee learning and growth.

Of course, this has bitten me a few times, but overall, my gut intuition has been the strongest guide in figuring out what is a healthy risk and what is not. As long as I follow that, the video game has a funny way of working out and consistently unlocking new levels.

It’s often one thing to put yourself out there and another to experience the world consistently rejecting you. Something about that rejection has given me more motivation to keep going than building in isolation ever did. There’s a sense of public accountability that pulls me forward that simply wasn’t there when I was working alone.

If you’re struggling with this and would like some support, I’d love to help. I’m opening up a few spots for a completely free, no obligation call to uncover whatever is keeping you stuck and get your work out into the open. You can reach out to schedule at sdstartupclub@gmail.com

P.S. 2021 Was a year for it

Then there’s stealth mode. A common practice many startups adopt out of fear that someone will steal their idea. But it’s not productive. It actually makes the product more likely to stall and be of lower quality, even if it did get stolen. Everything is stolen anyway.

In both cases, the lack of external feedback and accountability to keep moving forward when you hit roadblocks is much higher when you’re building alone in the dark.

Then there’s building in public. Launching extremely early, showing everyone what you’re doing, getting feedback, and building a following of early adopters. It also helps with accountability. If you can do this, great.

Many founders see the value and know stealth is detrimental, but aren’t comfortable going all the way out in public. So they end up somewhere in the middle. Hiding in plain sight.

I realized there needs to be a third space. Where founders can get feedback on their ideas in private, practice telling the stories of their companies, and get honest input from trusted peers who actually have context on their business.

That’s San Diego Startup Club. We’re building it in public and in private, which means we’re applying the same philosophy to our own growth that we teach in the room.

Members practice introducing themselves and get real feedback from the group, get private support on social media posts so they’re never posting to crickets, and stay accountable to working on sales and marketing rather than disappearing back into product development.

Applications are open for a few more members outside San Diego. Check out the landing page or email me directly.

Another founder spent fifteen minutes on his background in product development, his career as a DJ, his launch strategy, and his vision for the category. Then, at the end, the reveal: 100 signups from a social media campaign.

The ask: $1.5 to $2 million across the board.

Here’s what’s interesting, though. We act like this is a waste of everyone’s time. Maybe it’s not. About 3% of startups get some seed funding. By my count, only about 1% of the companies I’ve seen pitch recently had any traction worth mentioning. Yet some of them are still getting funded.

Which means the smoke and mirrors are working. Someone is writing checks to founders with nothing but a story and a slide deck. And until that stops, the theater continues.