John Michael

I recently came across a post on X saying that "if you're strong at execution but struggling to level up as a leader, you may not be simulating before communicating".

This caught my attention as I do simulate a lot of important conversations before they happen. I've recently used LLMs and interview coaching tools, and even vibe-coded my own tool to act as an AI coach. But my main issue is that every time I use any of these, I have to start over and rebuild the context of what matters and what not, and run into the same frictions again. That in addition to constantly tuning the often sloppy AI advice.

When you're pre-launch with zero audience, the generic "hey, check out my product" DM just doesn't work, people can tell it's copy-pasted to 200 others.

What's worked better for me:

• Give value before asking anything (a real comment, a resource, actual context on what they built)

• Skip broad cold DMs, join niche communities instead (Discord/Slack) and let the product come up naturally

• One follow-up max, then let it go

Codie Sanchez suggested on X that founders should skip paid ads until they reach $5-10 million in revenue.

I like the idea of getting organic flow for the product, but this way, it can reach only a limited number of people.

+ I have been collaborating with companies that started running ads before hitting ~$50k in revenue.