Strong claim, hear me out.

Every founder update reads the same now. "excited to share," emoji bullets, fake vulnerability about the rollercoaster. doesn't matter if it's real or not, it all sounds identical.

Noticed this hard while hiring. read every dm myself for a growth role. most were obviously ai-generated, same tone, zero thought put in. the ones that stood out were rough, specific, clearly written by someone who actually looked at the problem first.

Think the same thing's eating founder credibility. people used to trust a post because it sounded like someone actually figured something out.

Every project felt like an opportunity small ones underpriced ones ones outside my expertise. My calendar was full and I felt important. Then the numbers came in. I started declining anything below a rate I set in advance. Income went up hours went down.

The opportunities weren't bad. I was using busyness to avoid the scary work of pricing myself properly.

For those who've started saying no: was it the requests' fault or your inability to prioritize? And what are you doing right now that you'd drop immediately if you were honest about its value?

Last year, we spent half a year courting a mid-market company. We did endless demos, built a custom integration for their legacy system, and jumped through every hoop. Finally, we closed a $2,000/month contract. The Head of Operations, who loved our product, was our internal champion and promised it would be a massive success.

Three months into the contract, our champion resigned.

Two weeks later, we got an email from the new VP of Operations. He wanted to "review the software stack." We jumped on a call, and he told us he was canceling the contract. His reasoning? "I didn't buy this tool. I don't see the ROI. And frankly, I want to consolidate vendors and use the tool my old company used."

I was devastated. We had built custom features for them, spent weeks onboarding their team, and the product was actually working perfectly for the users. But because the person who signed the check was gone, we were treated like an unwanted stepchild.

I've recently gotten into training grip strength and since it s a new area of strength training for me, I ve been asking Claude a lot of weird questions about training and recovery techniques. So now, my chat history is a ton of stuff about work with the occasional odd question about how often I should be using extensor bands haha

What are some of the strangest things you've asked AI to help with? Did it actually help?

Hey everyone,

Thinking about future-proofing my skills and I'm curious to hear from the pros in this community. We all have our core skills, but what's one skill that wasn't a big deal a few years ago but you now see as essential for your role in late 2025?

For Marketers: Is it data storytelling? AI prompt engineering?

For Designers: Is it prototyping with real data? Designing for AI?

I m increasingly noticing a trend: people use AI for (almost everything), especially for writing texts. it is nothing new, but it started to be annoying (?)

The problem is that AI often:
fully or largely replicates existing text without adding anything new
adds completely pointless things, like a two-line comment followed by
writes extremely long comments that no one will actually read

Our launch went live at 12:01 PT today. As I write this it is in single digits, nowhere near the featured cutoff. I would rather post the number than a vague "lots of learnings" thread, so here it is, plus what I actually think went wrong and what I am doing about it in the open.

What was ready: product worked, landing page up, payments live, guidelines followed, assets done. Every readiness item on a standard launch checklist was ticked.

What was not ready: I had 2 followers. Not 2 short of enough. 2 in total.

I had been treating "build an audience" as one more checklist item, something you do a bit of and then tick off. It is not that kind of item. Every other thing on the list is work you can finish in a sprint. This one has a lead time measured in weeks, because a follower is fundamentally a person who receives a notification, and you cannot notify people you met an hour ago.