Hint: You can’t.

You’re sitting on a sunbed—or maybe just in your comfy office chair—watching the waves roll in. Or, more likely, watching your X feed and HackerNews with a fresh cup of coffee.

Ahead of you are three months of absolute freedom and zero financial pressure. Infinite space to build. It sounds like the ultimate founder dream.

But there’s an uncomfortable emptiness creeping in.

Here’s the thing: unlimited comfort is a cognitive trap. When you can do absolutely anything, you end up doing nothing because every new direction requires an uphill climb. You tell yourself you’re just “exploring,” but laziness wins because you lack a conviction engine.

I’ve written before about how your brain gets hooked on easy loops—like when I ditched social feeds for a private notebook. It’s the same trap here. Your brain doesn't actually want peace. It wants meaningful friction. If you don’t actively choose your challenges, your mind will invent stupid ones just to stay occupied.

You don’t need more rest. You need to figure out what you are doing, with whom, and why.

The Framework for Post-Comfort Building

Stop staring at a blank slate of infinite possibilities. That is exactly how you stay paralyzed or intellectually numb—what I call Level 1 on The Dopamine Ladder. You need to narrow the field using constraints that filter out the noise.

I’m not gonna lie: I’m feeling it again too. My way out, that I used in the past and I will probably use again, is to start with people and make testing ideas feel quick and short.

1. The “High-Signal People” Filter

Forget the product ideas or the market sizes for a second. Look at the people you want to spend your mornings arguing with in private Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, or over coffee and a good cigar. If a space lacks high-signal operators who are actually fun to build with, do not enter it.

Your next move must start with finding ten people who actually give a sh*t about solving (or even just exploring) the same hard problems you care about and you can have a beer with them (even if virtual one).

2. The 48-Hour Micro-Sprint

You are too lazy to commit to a six-month exploratory project just to see if you like it. I feel you, me too. And that is completely fine. I don’t fight the laziness anymore — I bypass it.

Compress your exploration into a 48-hour micro-sprint:

• Map out a single-page Lean Canvas.

• Go deep research with Claude, Perplexity or Gemini.

• Make summary of opportunities and context in NotebookLM.

• Ship one public thread on X.

• Build a stupidly simple MVP.

Do not look for long-term commitment. Look for immediate, raw feedback to spark your interest fire. If you need a playbook for this, look at how Tony Fadell structured his cycles in Make It. Fix It. Fix the Business - and shorten it.

3. The Reality Check for Utility

Are you building a real system that turns code into distribution leverage, or are you just chasing vaporware?

Too many founders make the mistake of building broad, empty spaces. It’s why I tell builders to stop building communities and build the tools they’re missing instead.

Please, only choose actions that provide clear, undeniable utility.

If an idea doesn’t solve a glaring bottleneck or an existential pain point for a specific, high-intent group — leave it on the beach. Your efforts would just drown in the noise that's getting worse and without a chance to stand out with clear positioning.

Let’s Bring This Home

The summer break is wrapping up, and the beach crowds are thinning out. The goal isn’t to invent a perfect, flawless 10-year master plan while tanning.

The goal is to pick one fight worth winning with people you actually respect and want to spend time with.

Focus on people, instead of product ideas, is probably the best hack I see now.

Get off the sunbed, close the browser tabs, and design your first constraint.

TLDR Takeaways

• Comfort is a trap: Endless chilling rots your drive. Your brain requires structured friction to feel fully alive.

• Filter by people first: Choose your next domain based on the caliber of your collaborators, competitors or peers, not just the hype.

• Kill exploratory laziness: Run 48-hour micro-sprints to test ideas fast instead of drowning in endless research phases.

• Focus on clear utility: Stop building empty, broad spaces. Build the tools they’re missing and solve immediate, real-world bottlenecks.

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

— Pete (aka BFG)

Tony Fadell said something on Lenny’s podcast last week that I have used as a reminder in several conversations already, so I can’t stop thinking about it — maybe it deserves to be repeated here as well:

"You make the product, then you fix the product, then you fix the business. Even the iPod took three generations before it became successful."

Here's the thing — this guy built the iPod, co-created the iPhone, and founded Nest. If anyone gets to claim first-try genius, it's him.

And he's telling you it took three generations. Every single time.

Why it always takes three

Generation 1 — Make it. You ship the thing. It exists. It mostly works. It's also rough, weird, and missing half of what people actually want. That's fine — the only job of v1 is to prove the idea isn't insane.

Generation 2 — Fix it. Now you know what's broken, because real people told you. You fix the product itself — the bugs, the friction, the stuff you were too close to see. This is where the thing starts feeling good.

Generation 3 — Fix the business. The product works… but the pricing is off. Or the distribution is wrong. Or the scale is small, and margins don't math. v3 is where you fix everything around the product so it can actually make money.

Make it. Fix it. Fix the business.

The part nobody likes

Most founders quit somewhere in Generation 1.

They ship v1, it's clunky, the numbers are bad — and they conclude the idea was wrong. Spoiler: the idea was probably fine. They just confused "first version" with "final version."

The iPhone we worship today? Not v1. The Nest everyone copies? Not v1. They're all v3-and-beyond products we pretend sprang fully formed from a keynote.

You're not failing. You're on Generation 1. That's exactly where you're supposed to be 😅

What to actually do with this

• Stop judging your product by its first version. Judge the trajectory.

• Budget for three iterations from day one — time, money, and patience.

• Separate the three problems. A v1 product problem is not a v3 business problem. Don't fix pricing when the thing doesn't work yet.

Consider this - maybe the builders who win aren't smarter. They just refuse to bail early

Hang in there.

Let's BUILD BETTER 💪

— BFG

Apparently, it only got worse. I was recently looking for a platform for random, not-yet-fully-formed thoughts. I don’t want to pay for it because it’s just a hobby, not a business. No multimedia, nothing big—just pure writing.

Asking the LLMs got me nowhere but frustrated.

The Landscape: Social Networks vs. Pure Text

Turned out my only obvious choices were big social networks like X, BlueSky, or Farcaster (the decentralized version of X). Or other networks like Nostr or Lens.

Even Tumblr is still kicking, which surprised me because I thought it died years ago.

But proper blogging platforms have too much UI overhead just to post a short thought. Micro-blogging it is.

Golden Rule of Capture For Me: If the friction to post a random thought requires more than two clicks, your framework is broken. Keep the pipeline stupidly simple.

My old favorite from 2020, Write.as, was beautifully designed just for writing and supported anonymous posts. They had a free tier and an iOS app. Too bad that app hasn’t seen an update in seven years, and the free tier is dead. Starting at nine bucks a month for a fun side project makes zero sense.

Then there is Micro.blog and Mataroa. Mataroa is too techie and lacks a native iOS app. Micro.blog almost won because five bucks a month is cheap, but I really didn’t want to pay. Bear Blog was another clean possibility, and I thought about Substack Notes, but you can’t download your data in bulk. Once it’s posted there, it’s lost unless you screenshot it.

The Pivot to an Unexpected Creative Vault

I thought I’d be swimming in options, but it felt like choosing different types of pain.

Since nobody likes pain, I almost gave up. I didn’t want to use Apple Notes because it gets chaotic too fast.

Then I had a last-minute idea: I created a private collection (like a notebook) inside the Sublime app.

I am chronologically saving my thoughts there. The magic happens when I review my text. Sublime resurfaces potentially relevant ideas and notes from other users inside the ecosystem. Reviewing my random thoughts became a much more fun and inspiring experience than I ever expected.

If you haven’t tried the Sublime app yet, you need to. For creative thinkers, it is a brutally under-promoted and under-appreciated tool.

TLDR Takeaways

1. The free tier era is dying: Most legacy text platforms have killed their free tiers or abandoned their mobile apps.

2. Beware of locked ecosystems: Avoid hosting your raw thoughts on platforms where you cannot download your data in bulk.

3. Clarity requires low friction: Traditional blogging setups have too much layout overhead for raw, stream-of-consciousness writing.

4. Sublime is a hidden gem: If you want an organized, chronological space that connects your notes to broader inspiration, try the Sublime app.

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

In this BuildBetter episode, Evin McMullen (co-founder & CEO of Billions Network, ex-Disco, ex-Privado ID, Consensys) walks through Know Your Agent (KYA) — the trust layer agentic commerce needs to actually work.

TLDR

• More than 51% of internet interactions today come from unidentified, unaccountable bots. Your AI agent is one of them — unless it has an identity.

• Billions Network (formerly Disco + Privado ID) is building the trust layer for the agentic internet: KYA, Know Your Agent — the same way we have KYC for humans.

• They’re already #3 in onchain verified agents, second only to Ethereum. By about 100 agents. As of this recording.

• The ZK query language they built makes zero-knowledge proofs accessible without cryptography expertise — drop-down menus, not circuits.

• Business model is real: token/airdrop integrity, government partnerships, EU MiCa sandbox, enterprise identity. This isn’t vaporware.

Pull Quotes

“More than 51% of online and onchain interactions today come from unidentified, unaccountable bots.” — Evin McMullen, [00:00]

“Identity isn’t the thing. It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.” — Evin McMullen, [16:50]

“We cannot be making payments at scale if we don’t know who we are paying.” — Evin McMullen, [14:20]

Trust and Identity problem

There’s a number that should bother every founder building with AI agents right now.

51%.

More than half of all internet and onchain interactions today come from bots. Unidentified. Unaccountable. Anonymous by default.

Your agent is one of them.

It has no papers. No verifiable link back to you. When it talks to another agent, neither side can prove who — or what — they’re actually dealing with. That’s not a future problem. It’s the current state of the stack.

Evin McMullen has been working this problem for nearly a decade. First as a researcher adjacent to the Ethereum identity space. Then as the founder of Disco — the data backpack concept, the idea that your credentials should travel with you the same way your tokens do. Then through an acquisition by Privado ID (a ZK identity spinout from Polygon). And now as co-founder of Billions Network, which launched at ETH Denver 2025 and is already the third-largest ecosystem of onchain verified agents on earth.

Second only to Ethereum. By about 100 agents.

What is Know Your Agent (KYA)

How does my agent know it’s talking to your agent — and not a bad actor pretending to be you?

Right now, it doesn’t. There’s no standard answer. There’s no trust layer. And without one, agentic commerce — agents transacting, negotiating, paying on behalf of humans — can’t scale. You can’t pay someone if you don’t know who you’re paying.

Billions Network built KYA. Know Your Agent. It assigns a verifiable identity to an AI agent instance, cryptographically linked back to the human who deployed and controls it. Your agent becomes a function of you — provably.

Same ZK technology that lets you prove you’re over 18 without handing over your passport. Same infrastructure, now extended to the agents acting on your behalf.

Here’s the part most founders miss.

Billions didn’t ship a product and build a sales motion. They open-sourced the primitive.

Their ZK libraries are the most widely used on earth. Worldcoin uses them. The European Commission has run sandboxed proofs with them. They’re the #1 identity skill on OpenClaw — the agent capability repository that works like a GitHub for AI behavior.

The distribution logic is clean: make the infrastructure so foundational that builders can’t avoid it. Let the ecosystem pull you forward. Then build the application layer on top of an installed base you didn’t have to cold-call.

That’s not luck. That’s a deliberate choice to build a primitive instead of a product — and to open-source it so adoption compounds.

You might also wanna read or listen to

• Is Web3 decentralized — Podcast - Your Web3 App Isn't Trustless

• Distribution via open-source — Distribution Is Day One Problem

• Onboarding tangent — Stop Onboarding Users. Onboard $100 Billion Instead

Billions roadmap is in three phases.

First: distribute the identity foundation. Get the data backpacks into the world. That’s now.

Second: introduce reputation. Layer in attributes — age, KYC, location, humanity, uniqueness — for both humans and their agents.

Third: the trust economy. Multi-step agentic workflows that actually move value based on verified reputation. Agentic commerce, at scale.

They’re in phase one. Phase three is where the real gravity is.

One more thing worth sitting with.

Evin made a point about the surveillance false dichotomy that I keep coming back to.

Governments and platforms keep framing online identity as binary: total anonymity or full disclosure. Hand over your passport, or stay anonymous. Pick one.

That’s wrong. And the people promoting that framing — Meta, certain legislators — know it’s wrong.

Zero-knowledge proofs are the third option. Prove you’re over 18. Don’t reveal your birthday. Prove you’re human. Don’t reveal your face. The technology exists. The open standards exist. The only thing missing is the will to use them — and infrastructure that makes them accessible without a PhD in cryptography.

That’s what the ZK query language Billions built is for. Drop-down menus. Pick your requirements. Generate the proof circuit. No cryptography background required.

The wall between “builders who understand ZK” and “builders who can use ZK” just got shorter.

Full podcast video with Evin McMullen

Timestamps

• 00:00 — The stat that reframes everything: 51% of online interactions are unidentified bots

• 00:32 — Intro: Pete & Evin catch up, sunny spots, and Switzerland

• 01:16 — Recap: Disco, the data backpack, and how it all started

• 01:41 — Evin’s origin story: from Disco to Privado ID to Billions Network

• 04:07 — How Privado ID spun out of Polygon and why ZK mattered from day one

• 05:29 — The merger: why Disco + Privado ID = Billions Network

• 06:28 — A lesson in global branding: why “Privado ID” didn’t survive the queen’s English

• 07:44 — The acquisition decision: values alignment over tech alignment

• 09:54 — Partner continuity: how 2018 relationships survived three company evolutions

• 11:56 — 2.3M users, 1,000+ integrations: the current state of Billions

• 12:19 — KYA explained: Know Your Agent and why it’s the missing trust layer

• 13:07 — The bot majority: why humans are now the minority on the internet

• 14:43 — How to actually onboard your agents into Billions (practical walkthrough)

• 16:50 — “Identity isn’t the thing. It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.”

• 18:18 — NFC passport tap + ZK proof: how the app works in practice

• 21:19 — Billions vs. Worldcoin / World Network: the honest comparison

• 24:38 — Why no single company should own the definition of a human being

• 27:36 — Government partners: what Evin can (and can’t) share

• 28:26 — Child safety, Meta, and the surveillance false dichotomy

• 31:17 — Business model: how Billions actually makes money

• 33:43 — Roadmap 2026: three phases — human/AI internet, reputation layer, trust economy

• 35:50 — “We’re already #3 in onchain agents. Number two is Ethereum — by about 100 agents.”

• 39:38 — ZK query language: making zero-knowledge proofs accessible for non-cryptographers

• 41:40 — Where to follow Billions and how to get involved

Resources & Links

• Billions Network: billions.network

• Follow on X: @billions_ntwk

• Billions Discord: via billions.network

• OpenClaw agent identity skill: search Billions KYA

BuildBetter

• Newsletter: https://paragraph.com/@buildbetter

• YouTube: BuildBetter HQ

• X: @BuildBetterHQ

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If you run a B2B service business — agency, consultancy, dev shop — generic case studies aren't moving prospects anymore. Here are 7 unconventional social proof strategies that get ideal clients seeking you out.

TLDR:

• Capture micro-milestone videos, metrics-driven mini case studies, and comparative "lift" studies

• Make testimonial-gathering a team sport and bake it into your SOPs

• Mine "overheard" mentions and embed proof collection into your delivery process

• Establish expertise through content so the proof comes to you

1. Micro-Milestone Video Snippets

Collect short, excited videos from clients after each project milestone. Systematize identifying key moments and automate the ask. These authentic snippets pack a punch:

"Just wrapped up user testing and wow — the insights from [Your Company] are transforming our onboarding flow. The best part? It took half the time we budgeted. These guys are wizards."

2. Metrics-Driven Mini Case Studies

Surface key metrics and outcomes to create data-driven success stories:

"By restructuring our Postgres schema based on [Your Expert's] suggestions, we saw a 43% query speed boost and cut infrastructure costs by 23%. I couldn't believe the impact from a single consulting session."

This is where positioning and proof meet — see my eight-step positioning framework for how to frame the before state so the metric actually lands.

3. Testimonials as a Team Sport

Empower your whole team to gather client wins. Make it part of your culture:

Institute a "client win story" agenda item in standups. Whoever shares the best one that week gets their favorite dessert delivered.

4. Mine "Overheard" Moments

Scour Slack communities, Twitter threads, and industry forums for positive mentions. Reach out for permission to quote them:

You spot an Indie Hackers comment: "Their Python optimization service is unreal. 2 hours of their time saved us 3 weeks of debugging." Jackpot.

Want help wiring all of this into your client process? Schedule a call and we'll map it together. 😉

5. Embed Proof in Your Process

Build feedback collection into your workflow. Make giving a testimonial the default offboarding step:

Include "What would you tell another founder about working with us?" in your post-project survey, with "Post this on your site" and "Use in a case study" opt-ins.

6. Establish Expertise Through Content

Showcase your expert process through content, speaking, and open source. Show, don't just tell, how you solve problems:

You present at a CTO roundtable on your novel Kubernetes migration approach. An attendee tweets the key slide: "How [Your Company] helped us cut deploy times by 85%."

This is also why distribution is a Day One problem — proof points compound when you have a place to put them.

7. Conduct Comparative "Lift" Studies

For established clients, coordinate a study comparing results with vs without your service:

In the past decade, whenever founders started using some of these tactics regularly, their qualified pipelines grew 45–150% compared to running just sales, BD, and marketing on traditional plays.

Pair this with a problem-first cold outreach approach and your inbound and outbound start reinforcing each other.

Make these part of your regular project delivery process.
Make them part of your client contracts and offers.
Make them part of your SOPs.

It's evergreen content and proof.

Want to see these social proof strategies in action? Schedule a call, and let's put them to work for your business. Together, we'll craft an arsenal of unignorable proof points that have ideal clients seeking you out.

Till next time, let's build better businesses via small improvements.

Cheers,
Pete (aka BFG)

BuildBetter HQ is a reader-supported publication.
To receive new posts and support my work,
consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

TLDR
• Hiring is the most under-rated founder super power. It's a skill, not luck — and almost nobody trains it.
• Hire almost too late, until your product earns the next hire.
• Every hire has to move "product lovability" or "distribution velocity." Anything else is decoration.
• The 4 mistakes that kill early teams: hiring out of fear, hiring out of habit, hiring junior, and waiting for the unicorn.
• Build the muscle: write the JD yourself, run the first five calls yourself, and steal people you've already worked with.

Most founders treat hiring like dental work or coffee break job. Necessary, painful, or fearful, postponed. Don't be that guy/gal.

The ones who build durable companies treat it like the actual job — the highest-leverage thing they do all month. The difference shows up later, when the product they shipped is good, and good is simply not enough these days. The team they assembled is mediocre. Not "Navy Seals" as Elon calls the exceptional hires, and by then it's too expensive to fix.

Hiring is a super power. And like any super power, it's built — not granted. 💪

Your goal as CEO is to build a team that runs your entire company better than you.

Codie Sanchez

@Codie_Sanchez

Your goal as CEO is to build a team that runs your entire company better than you.

311

5:32 PM • Apr 24, 2026

"First ten hires set the ceiling for the next hundred. Get them wrong and you're building on sand." — Ross Starkey

That's the whole game in two sentences.

Why founders dodge it

Founders dodge hiring for two reasons.

One, nobody taught them how. They learned to code, and sometimes to pitch — they didn't learn how to spot, attract, and close a great talent — whether for sales or an operator.

Two, hiring confronts them with their own gaps, and sometimes ego gets in the way. Every JD is a public confession of what you can't do alone. That's uncomfortable, so most people skip the confession and write a generic "looking for a marketer" post on X or LinkedIn.

I'm gonna be blunt: if you can't articulate exactly what "outcomes" your next hire will own, what bar they have to clear, and what would make you fire them in 90 days — you're not ready to hire them. You're ready to feel less anxious about hiring them.

Big difference. 🎯

Hire almost too late

Until your product reaches PMF, you should stay as small as humanly possible. The pressure to "build a team" usually comes from outside — investors who confuse headcount with progress, or your own anxiety dressing itself up as ambition.

A hire is only worth it if it moves one of the two needles I keep coming back to:

• Product lovability — the thing customers actually want, more clearly delivered.

• Distribution velocity — the rate at which the right people learn about it and want it.

If a candidate doesn't move one of those, they're decoration. And decoration that is expensive for any size of the team.

"If you're starting a business today, you don't need to hire a team on day one. It's the biggest change in the Startup playbook in decades." — Sergio Pereira

You should hire when the shift from "vibe coding" to "software engineering" happens. But then you need to hire hard! And you should already know whom you will want to hire -- most likely someone you've worked with before. 👀

See, the tools changed. The math on early hiring changed with them. AI lets a single founder ship what used to take five people — use that runway to find the right people, not just people.

The 4 mistakes that kill early teams

After watching this play out across dozens of startups, the same four mistakes show up almost every time:

1. Hiring out of fear. The business isn't going where you hoped, and someone's whispering "you need a head of growth."

Spoiler: you need different positioning, not a head of growth. If you don't naturally feel the need, don't hire. Anxiety is a terrible recruiter.

2. Hiring out of habit. Corporate background creeping in. "We need a process for this, so we need someone to manage that process."

Wrong. If you, as the founder, can't keep a 5-person team aligned around a lovable product, no process and no hire will fix it.

3. Hiring junior, or project managers. Stop. Unless it's a temp intern for your X campaign.

Also, "junior" implies a senior to learn from — which you don't have. Hire for potential at full trust, not at junior titles. Either bet on someone, or don't. And, there's nothing a project manager can do in a 12-person startup that a founder can't do in 20 minutes a day.

4. Waiting for the unicorn. The "ideal hire" is mostly a coping mechanism for not deciding. Real hires are 70% of what you wanted with one absolutely non-negotiable strength. Hire that, support them, and let the other 30% emerge.

Build the muscle

Here's the part most founder content skips: hiring is learnable. It's a sequence of habits, not a personality trait. The founders who become great hirers all do roughly the same things:

• Write the JD yourself. Don't outsource it to a recruiter. The act of writing it forces you to specify what you're missing. Consult with recruiter friends when done, sure.

• Take the first calls yourself. No exceptions. Nobody screens for fit better than the founder.

• Maintain a private list. People you've worked with, people you'd hire when the day comes. Nurture it for years, not weeks.

• Steal smart. Your strongest hires are almost always people you've already shipped something with. The risk of those hires is a tenth of a cold hire.

"The shortcut to early recruiting is hiring people you've already worked with. You don't have to guess what they're like under pressure. You already know." — Scott Case, via @calbucci

Exactly this. The most successful early teams I've seen weren't assembled from LinkedIn — they were assembled from someone's old contact list.

The two roles that beat "process" every time

If you're building hardware, software, Web3, or anything in between, the early team that takes you from "founders + engineers" to "ready for scale" is almost always the same two people:

• A business-focused CBO who can run BD, partnerships, and the customer side without supervision.

• A marketing generalist who has shipped in your domain before — they don't need playbooks, they are the playbook.

Skip the project managers and the junior-everything. Hire those two right, and you'll do more in six months than 20 engineers and a recruiter will do in two years. ✅

Last word

If you take one thing: hiring is not the founder's chore. It's the founder's leverage — and one of the five core roles only you can own. Build it like you'd build any other muscle — deliberately, painfully, on purpose.

Hire almost too late.
Hire for what moves the needle.
And steal the people you'd already trust. 😉

Till next time, let's BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

ICYMI: Don't Use Agencies — Build Your Own Muscles — the companion piece on why agencies don't fix what hiring should.

Pete (aka BFG) | Lab2094

@aka_BFG

This is what’s wrong with the markets and the world atm …

sorry, but SF is really the worst place to be and even if the numbers were correct it should never be that concentrated and that’s what next revolution is gonna be about … peaceful or violent

h/t to Moonshots

0

12:57 PM • Apr 26, 2026

The specific number is almost beside the point.

The SHAPE is what should worry everyone.

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud:

When 90% of capital, talent, and decision-making lives inside one Bay Area zip code, you don't get more innovation. You get more correlation.

Every "contrarian" SF founder is reading the same blog posts as 50,000 other contrarian SF founders. Every investor is hearing the same pitch 17 times. Different words, same thesis.

That's not a market. That's a feedback loop.

And feedback loops do something specific to value — they inflate it.

Here's the part most people miss: the over-concentration we're seeing in US public and private markets right now isn't just inequality. It's a pricing distortion. When the same handful of names absorb most of the capital, "fair value" stops meaning anything. You're not paying for the company. You're paying for the consensus around the company. And consensus, as anyone who's lived through a cycle knows, is rented — not owned.

That's bad for everyone outside the bubble.

The Eye of the Storm Has the Furthest to Fall

But it's worse for everyone inside it.

Because when the consensus shifts — and it always does — the people living in the eye of the storm have the furthest to fall. The same concentration that made them feel safe is what makes the unwind brutal.

The interesting bets keep coming from the wrong cities anyway. Berlin. Lagos. Buenos Aires. Bucharest. Sofia.

Not because the people are smarter. Because the feed is different.

If you're building outside SF and wondering if you're behind — you're not. You're decorrelated. And in a market this concentrated, decorrelation is the only edge that compounds.

Till next time, let's BUILD BETTER!

BFG

ICYMI: Technology Cycles and The Anti-FOMO Playbook (Carlota Perez) — the framework for spotting which phase of the cycle we're actually in.

The shift from "about you" to "about the problem" — and the four frameworks that still work.

TLDR

• Hyper-personalized intros are dead. Prospects’ brains filter them out in under two seconds.

• The new personalization is a problem, not a person. Name the pain they’re living, not the school they went to.

• Four frameworks still work in 2026 — PAS, BAB, 4T, NOR — each for a different situation.

• Agents find the signal. Humans (or well-prompted AI) write the problem framing. Then agents distribute it with the trigger stitched in.

• Before you send anything: the cocktail party test. Read it out loud. If you wouldn't say it at a party, delete it.

You (or your agent) spent 15 minutes researching your prospect.

You found out where they went to college. You read their last three LinkedIn posts. You noticed they ran a marathon last spring. You opened your email with “Hey Sarah, saw you’re a fellow Stanford alum and just crushed a half marathon — respect!”

You sent 200 of those.

You got two replies. Both said “unsubscribe.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you weren’t doing hyper-personalization. You were doing hyper-stalking and we’re sooo over it.

In 2026, the game has changed in ways most founders haven’t caught up to. AI flooded inboxes with “personalized” emails that all start the same way — your name, your school, your recent post, your job title. Prospects got so numb to this pattern that their brains filter it out in under two seconds. Faster than you can say “I hope this finds you well.”

Which it doesn’t. Because that line is dead.

I’ve talked about this before — the shift isn’t from low-effort to high-effort. It’s from about you to about the problem.

The single insight that separates the 4% reply rates from the 0.4% ones: the prospect doesn’t care about you knowing some facts about them. They don’t care about your company, your funding, or your story. They care about one thing — is this person (you) aware of the exact problem I’m fighting right now?

That’s it. That’s the whole game.

Nobody needs more people “to know” them, but we all need someone to solve our immediate problems.

New personalization is a “problem”, not a person

Old personalization: “I noticed you went to MIT.”

New personalization: “Most SaaS teams scaling past 50 people watch their onboarding completion rate fall off a cliff. Usually around the time they stop doing white-glove demos.”

The second message is personalized to their reality, not their résumé. I didn’t need to stalk their LinkedIn to write it. I needed to understand (or guess) their situation enough to name the pain they’re living.

This is the difference between mentioning someone’s marathon and knowing exactly what mile they hit the wall.

The prospect reads that second message and (hopefully) thinks: this person has been inside companies like mine. That thought — that split-second recognition — is worth more than a thousand correctly spelled names.

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What a good cold message actually looks like in 2026

Short. Shorter than you think. Under 100 words is an ideal, not a limitation.

Here’s the anatomy:

You open with the problem. Not “I saw that you...” — the problem itself. State it like a doctor names a symptom. Precise. No warm-up.

Then you briefly make the cost of that problem visible. Not in an aggressive way — just enough to confirm you understand the stakes. One sentence. Maybe two.

Then you connect it to an outcome or a question. Not a 30-minute demo request. Something almost frictionless: “Worth a look?” or “Is this on your radar for Q2?”

This simple structure is enough. Problem → Stakes → Low-friction ask (PAS).

The PAS framework (it's official name) — Problem, Agitate, Solve — has been around for decades for a reason. It works because it mirrors how human decision-making actually functions.

We notice pain before we notice opportunity. We act to escape discomfort before we act toward reward. Any message that leads with your solution before establishing the problem is asking the prospect to care about an answer before they’ve felt the question.

The 4 cold outreach frameworks that still work in 2026

There’s no single best framework. There’s the best framework for the specific situation. If you only master PAS, you’ll be fine. But let’s expand your horizons.

PAS — Problem, Agitate, Solve

What it is: Name the problem, show what it costs, offer the fix. Use it when the prospect already knows something’s wrong but hasn’t made it a priority.

When to use it: Warm-ish ICP, mid-market buyers, known pain. You’re not educating — you’re reactivating urgency.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Say you’re selling a team knowledge management tool — something like Fibery — targeting an engineering lead at a 40-person SaaS company. The wrong message looks like this:

“Hey Marcus, saw you’re leading engineering at Acme and just shipped your v2 — congrats! I’m reaching out because we help teams like yours stay aligned. Would love 15 minutes to show you what we’ve built.”

That’s about Marcus. Marcus does not care about Marcus in the context of his inbox. He’s drowning. The right message looks like this:

“Most eng teams past 30 people hit the same wall: decisions get made in Slack, rationale never gets written down, and six months later nobody knows why the architecture looks the way it does. The new hire onboarding cost alone is brutal. Fibery connects the decision trail from product spec to code. Worth a look?”

Same product. Same prospect. Completely different nerve. The second message works because Marcus reads it and thinks: someone has been inside teams like mine. That thought takes less than three seconds to form. That’s your entire window.

BAB — Before, After, Bridge

What it is: Paint the before state, paint the after state, name the bridge that connects them. Best when your product creates a visible transformation.

When to use it: The contrast between before and after is dramatic enough to make someone stop scrolling. Think automation, efficiency plays, time-savings.

Before: “Right now, your SDRs spend 40% of their time on manual data entry.” After: “In six weeks, that number is zero, and they’re back on the phone.” Bridge: “We built the connection layer that makes that switch.”

BAB is a movie trailer for your product. Use it sparingly, use it well.

4T — Trigger, Think, Third-party, Talk (Josh Braun)

What it is: A real trigger event + a reframing question + a third-party credibility point + a soft ask to talk. Sophisticated, slower to write, higher reply rates on big-ticket deals.

When to use it: Large deal size, sophisticated buyer, a real observable signal you can point to (funding round, new hire, product launch).

You need a trigger — a real, observable signal that this is the right moment (a funding announcement, a new hire, a product launch). Then a think — a question that reframes their current approach. Not “do you have this problem?” but “most teams that do X end up hitting Y — have you run into that?” Then a third-party credibility point: a company they’ve heard of that faced the same thing. Then a soft talk — are you the right person to decide on this?

This framework takes work. You can’t fake the trigger. But for the deals worth fighting for, 4T gets meetings that PAS can’t.

NOR — Needle, Outcome, Request

What it is: What specific metric are you moving? What does moving it mean for their business? What’s your ask? Forty words. Maybe forty-five if you need a breath.

When to use it: High-volume outreach, agent-run sequences, automated DMs. Built to survive AI spam filters because it reads like a human who respects the prospect’s time.

Which, if you’re thinking about it correctly, is exactly what it is.

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Cold outreach is not just email

This is the part many founders also miss.

In 2026, cold outreach lives across every asynchronous channel where your prospect already spends their working day. LinkedIn DMs still get higher reply rates than cold email for B2B — but it’s changing quickly. Slack communities, Discord servers, and even WhatsApp broadcast lists have become legitimate outreach channels for the right verticals.

The rule doesn’t change. The medium and the channel does.

A cold LinkedIn DM that opens with “I loved your recent post on...” gets ignored. A cold LinkedIn DM that opens with “Most growth teams I talk to are seeing their LinkedIn CPL go up 30% this year while their email lists decay — is that pattern showing up for you?” much more likely gets a reply.

The channel is just the pipe. The problem-first message is the water.

What’s changed operationally: Your technical setup now matters as much as your copy. In email, if you’re sending from your primary domain (yourcompany.com), you’re already behind. Secondary domains (getcompany.com, trycompany.io) keep your sender reputation clean while you’re in the testing phase. Your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records need to be configured correctly or you’re landing in Promotions before anyone reads a word. Gmail and Outlook have hardened their filters significantly. Infrastructure is table stakes.

Agents change the game (without changing the rules)

AI sales agents can now research prospects, identify trigger events, write first drafts, and send messages across multiple channels simultaneously. That sounds like a distribution advantage. And it is — but only if the underlying message is right.

Here’s where many make the mistake: they automate the old playbook. They build agents that scrape LinkedIn for profile details and plug them into templated “personalized” intros. What they’ve built is a faster way to be ignored at scale.

The right way to think about agents in outreach: they should be doing the research legwork that surfaces real triggers — a company’s recent pricing change, a job posting that signals a strategic shift, a product launch that creates a new problem they’re now facing.

The agent’s job is to find the signal. Your job is to turn that signal into a problem statement the prospect recognizes as true.

A well-built agent running a 4T framework — with a real trigger, a real reframe, and a real soft ask — can outperform a human SDR on volume without sacrificing the quality of the signal. The output still sounds human because the underlying logic is human. The agent is doing the detective work. You’re providing the insight about what the clues mean. And the agent can improve itself — and even the frameworks it’s using — as it goes.

What I think is the winning motion in 2026:

• agents find the signal,

• humans (or possibly well-prompted AI) write the problem framing once per ICP segment,

• agents distribute it with the right trigger context stitched in.

You’re not automating personalization — you’re automating trigger identification so you can personalize around problems that are actually live.

And you should always, always, always review any message before it gets sent out en masse.

The cocktail party test (I like it a lot)

Before you send anything — email, DM, Slack message — read it out loud.

If you wouldn’t say it to a person standing next to you at a professional event, it’s not good enough. Delete it. Rewrite it. The words you use with a real human at a real event are the words that work now.

The English grammar and polite blabla they taught you at school is over.

“I hope this finds you well” — would you say that at a party? No. You’d say: “Hey, I keep seeing teams in your space struggle with X. Is that something you’re dealing with?”

See the difference? Feel the difference? That’s what you can send.

Builder’s takeaway

If you’re a founder doing your own outreach right now — or building an agent to do it — here’s your operating framework:

Pick one ICP segment. Understand their world deeply enough to name three specific problems they’re living with right now. Not hypothetically, but right now, in Q2 of this year.

Write one problem-first message for each. Keep each under 80 words. Don’t mention your company name until the second message. Choose the channel where they actually have their attention — LinkedIn before email if you’re in B2B SaaS, Discord or Slack if you’re in developer tooling, email if you have a warm signal, etc.

Test your messages. When a message gets a reply, ask yourself: what did they recognize? That’s the nerve you found. Go back and make the next message hit that same nerve harder.

The founders who win outreach in 2026 aren’t the ones with the best product. They’re the ones who can make a stranger feel most understood in forty words.

That’s not a sales skill. That’s a writing skill. And it’s learnable.

FAQ

What is the PAS framework?

PAS stands for Problem, Agitate, Solve. You lead with the problem the prospect is living, briefly make the cost of that problem visible, then connect it to an outcome or a low-friction ask. It mirrors how humans actually decide — pain first, solution second.

Is cold email dead in 2026?

No. Hyper-stalking intros are dead. Problem-first messages still work — they just have to sound like a human at a cocktail party, not a VA reading off a LinkedIn profile. Reply rates of 4%+ are still achievable when the message names a real, live problem.

How long should a cold email be in 2026?

Under 100 words is the ideal, not a limitation. 40–80 words for high-volume sequences (NOR). Longer is almost always worse. If you can’t state the problem, the stakes, and the ask in that range, your thinking isn’t sharp enough yet.

Which cold outreach framework should I use?

• PAS — known pain, mid-market B2B, need to reactivate urgency.

• BAB — dramatic before/after, efficiency or automation plays.

• 4T — big-ticket deals, sophisticated buyers, a real trigger event.

• NOR — high-volume, agent-run sequences that need to survive filters.

Is personalization still worth it?

Yes — but redefine it. Don’t personalize to their résumé (school, marathon, last post). Personalize to their reality — the problem they’re living with right now. That’s what gets read.

Related reads

• Stop Building Communities — Build the Tools They’re Missing — why distribution in 2026 is a tooling war, not a content war.

• The One Framework That Stops You From Building the Wrong Thing (Lean Canvas) — how to pick the ICP before you write a single message.

Hope you'll go and use it now!
Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Cheers,

Pete (aka BFG)

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Appendix: Before & After — cold outreach examples for a SaaS knowledge management tool

All examples use Fibery as the product. ICP: B2B SaaS companies, 30–150 people. The pattern is the same across every framework: problem before product, always.

BAB — Head of Product, Series A company

❌ Before:

“Hi Jana, loved your recent post on async-first culture. We’re building tools for teams like yours and I think there’s a strong fit here. Happy to jump on a call?”

✅ After:

“Right now: your product context lives in six tools. Notion for specs, Linear for tasks, Confluence for docs, Slack threads for decisions — none of it connected. Six months from now: one place where the spec, the ticket, the decision, and the outcome are all linked. That’s what Fibery does. Is this the kind of mess you’re currently navigating?”

NOR — High-volume, agent-run sequence, targeting Ops/RevOps leads

❌ Before:

“Hi Alex, I work with operations teams and wanted to reach out about our knowledge management platform. We’ve helped companies like yours improve team alignment. Are you free for a quick call this week?”

✅ After:

“Reducing the time your team spends re-explaining context that should already be written down — that’s what we move. Teams using Fibery cut onboarding ramp by ~30%. Right person to look at this?”

4T — LinkedIn DM, VP Engineering at a company with 3 active senior engineer job postings

❌ Before:

“Hey David, congrats on the growth — saw you’re scaling the team! We help engineering orgs stay aligned. Would love to connect.”

✅ After:

“Saw you’re hiring three senior engineers right now. Most eng orgs that scale that fast tell me the same thing three months later: the new hires are productive on tasks but completely blind to why decisions were made. It’s an undocumented architecture problem, not a skills problem. Seen that pattern yet? [Similar Company] fixed it with Fibery before their Series B. Happy to share how.”

LinkedIn DM (channel shift, problem-first logic unchanged) — Head of Product

❌ Before:

“Hi Sarah! I love what you’re building at [Company]. I work with product teams on knowledge management and thought there might be a fit. Open to connecting?”

✅ After:

“Quick observation from talking to a lot of product teams: the bigger the roadmap, the more the ‘why’ behind decisions disappears into old Slack threads. By the time a feature ships, half the team has forgotten the original constraint. Is that a problem you’re actively solving for, or still on the backlog?”

Let's connect on Farcaster: https://farcaster.xyz/bfg 😉

TLDR

• Every wallet and dApp you use today likely pulls data from a centralized RPC endpoint — and never verifies it. Colibri is a stateless client that changes that.

• Steffen Kux built it because the problem was obvious, the solution was technically feasible, and nobody was doing it. Self-funded, open source, first integration dropping at EthCC.

• The deeper insight: privacy maximalism kills privacy. His PAP (Pragmatic Adaptive Privacy) framework matches the level of privacy to the sensitivity of each request — instead of making everything expensive and unusable.

Full Episode

Summary

There’s a gap in almost every Web3 app you’ve ever used.
You built it to be decentralized. Trustless. Permissionless.

Then you plugged in an RPC endpoint and moved on.

Most teams never look at that decision again. It works. The DeFi logic is clean. The UX feels fine. Ship it.

Steffen Kux and his team looked at it again.

The problem nobody talks about

When Ethereum launched, Mist browser ran a full node locally. You had to wait for sync. It was painful, but the data was verified.

Then the chain grew. Mist became unusable. Light clients existed since 2016, but they were too heavy for real apps. Centralized RPC providers filled the gap — and they never left.

It's ironic with repeated calls for “trustless” dApps.

You built on a decentralized network. You wrote trustless smart contracts. Then you handed your data layer to a company running servers you don’t control, returning values your app never checks.

Steffen’s framing: “Most applications are not able — and not doing it at all — to verify the information they receive from these RPC endpoints.”

That’s not a critique. That’s just the state of things.

What Colibri actually does

Stateless client. No synchronization. No stored state.

You get two things alongside your data: an execution layer proof (this data belongs to a specific block) and a consensus proof (that block is part of the canonical chain). Both together let any device — smartphone, IoT door lock, air-gapped wallet — verify blockchain data locally.

The interface is the same as an RPC. Drop Colibri in, nothing else changes. Trustless by default.

Proof-of-stake made this finally feasible. With PoW you needed a network of nodes to generate proofs. With PoS, validator committee data is in the protocol — the signatures are there, verifiable directly.

They shipped the production version for Ethereum in November. Gnosis chain shortly after. Optimism-based L2s in MVP. First real integration: Kohaku wallet (a fork of Ambire), demoing at EthCC.

The adoption problem nobody wants to say out loud

Here’s the part that’s harder to solve than the tech.

When Steffen talks to teams, they get it. They agree it’s essential. Some say they’ll test it. Then they go back to their RPC provider.

“It’s not the top priority right now because it works.”

That sentence should sting a little.

It’s not unique to Web3. Security infrastructure, observability, data verification — anything that prevents a problem that hasn’t happened yet will always lose to the feature that ships this sprint. Until it doesn’t.

The Trustless Manifesto from the Ethereum Foundation got a lot of applause when it dropped. Lots of “yes, exactly, this is what we need.” Then everyone went back to their trusted endpoints.

Awareness isn’t the problem. Convenience is.

The synthesizer interlude

Before the privacy section of the conversation, Steffen went somewhere unexpected.

He grew up in East Germany. Loved electronic music. Moog synthesizers cost multiple monthly salaries — completely out of reach. So he went to the university trash bin a few times a week and collected discarded electronic parts.

Transistors. Resistors. Whatever he could find. Then he adapted circuits from books to use what he had.

Three or four years later, he had a working synthesizer.

The point wasn’t the hardware. The point was: stop waiting for the perfect tool. Build with what you have. Be pragmatic.

That story leads directly into their pragmatic privacy framework (PAP).

Privacy maximalism kills privacy

This is the contrarian take that holds up under scrutiny.

When people think about Web3 privacy, they think Tornado Cash. Railgun. Shielded transactions. Full obfuscation.

Steffen’s argument: that framing is too narrow — and the cost of maximalist approaches kills adoption before it starts.

There are two problems.

First, private reads. Before you ever send a transaction, you’re reading balances and contract state. Your RPC provider sees every one of those reads. They can infer exactly what you’re about to do.

“Sometimes these reads are even more revealing than the transaction itself.”

Second, the privacy-verifiability tension. If you try to fully obfuscate your reads using protocols like ORAM, you either verify too much (expensive) or reveal your actual interest (no longer private). They contradict each other in naive implementations.

The PAP paper (Pragmatic Adaptive Privacy) is their answer.

The core idea: not every request needs the same level of privacy. A dashboard pulling USDC balances? Low risk, low obfuscation needed. Preparing a Railgun transaction? Shield it — the request pattern alone reveals intent.

Instead of one setting, a matrix.
Transport layer vs. content layer.
Per-request sensitivity.
Pragmatic defaults with developer control.

It’s not as private as a pure ORAM approach. It’s dramatically more private than what exists today — and actually usable.

The three things every app needs

By the end of the conversation, Steffen had summarized the whole stack cleanly:

1. Trustless reads — verify every piece of data you pull from the chain

2. Local simulation — simulate every transaction before signing, locally, in the client

3. Pragmatic privacy — match privacy level to request sensitivity

Point two is worth pausing on. Colibri can simulate a transaction outcome inside the client before it’s signed. This isn’t just a UX convenience. In September last year, injected Node.js library code tried to manipulate the transaction signing process. If Colibri had been in place, it would have caught it — by re-verifying the signed transaction before broadcast.

These aren’t three separate products. They’re one stack. One client. One drop-in replacement for the RPC call you’re already making.

Lessons

• Pragmatic sequence - from self-funding, to community grants, to future Licensed products.

• Distribution challenge - even good infrastructure dies when it’s more convenient to do nothing or to do the “other thing.”

Steffen’s closing line stuck with me:

“If you are using an RPC in your application, don’t do it in the future. Start using trustless data. The time is now. There’s no excuse because we don’t have the information. We have it now. It’s available. It works. It’s productive. Just do it.”

It won’t happen all at once. It rarely does.

Resources & Links

Colibri Stateless

• Website: corpuscore.tech

• Colibri Whitepaper: Gitbook

• Follow Steffen Kux: https://x.com/SteffenKux

BuildBetter

• Newsletter: buildbetterhq.substack.com

• X/Twitter: BuildBetter HQ

• YouTube: BuildBetter HQ

It was a bit more technical. I hope you enjoyed it. Give Steffen a follow and Colibri a try if you're building something in the decentralized Web3 space.

Till next time, build better!

Pete (aka BFG)

Everyone’s saying it. VCs are funding it. Notion built its entire GTM around it. Figma’s former marketing lead literally defined her company’s go-to-market strategy as building a user base that powers product adoption — not as a program, not as a Slack group, but as the whole operating principle.

So everybody nods. And then goes back to posting on LinkedIn and X, and if “they know” then on TikTok. Or ask marketing to launch a Discord, set up a Telegram group, maybe start a newsletter.

Here’s the problem. Most founders hear “community is the future” and translate it as “We need to post more and on more places.” Stay consistent. The algorithm will do the rest. And they double down on building an audience.

It won’t work.

And the founders who figure this out first are going to eat the lunch of everyone still chasing follower counts.

The Feed Is Already Dead

Something structural is changing now, and it’s moving faster than most people realize. I mean, we know it - social media is not really social anymore.

Scary — but during Mark Zuckerberg’s antitrust hearings last year, Meta’s own charts told the story. The share of content from actual human contacts on Facebook dropped from 22% in 2023 to 17% in 2025. On Instagram, it went from 11% to 7%. We kinda feel it, but seeing it in raw numbers makes it very real.
That means over 90% of what you see on Instagram now comes from pages, brands, ads, and creators you never followed.

The platform that was built on sharing photos with friends now shows you almost zero photos from friends.

LTK CEO Amber Venz Box said it plainly: over 94% of people are calling social media no longer social, and more than half of them are already rotating their time into smaller niche communities — spaces they know are real, where the people aren’t trying to sell them anything.

This isn’t sentiment. It’s migration.

The algo took over completely. The following stopped mattering. Your feed looks like TV — endless short videos from people you’ve never heard of, served by a machine that optimized for engagement at the cost of everything else.

Sprout Social’s 2025 data shows roughly half of all global social media users planning to increase their time on community-driven platforms.
Gen Z is moving even faster.

The reason is simple: when AI floods every feed with generated content, human trust becomes a scarce resource. And trust doesn’t live in open algorithmic feeds. It lives in closed spaces where people choose to be — where the room has edges, shared context, and people they actually recognize.

We’re all migrating into private groups, niche communities, WhatsApp groups, interest-based servers on Discord, paid Substacks, and small Telegram channels. Builder first communities like Farcaster. Closed rooms where we know the people — or at least trust the signal.

NOEMA Magazine called it cleanly: intentional, opt-in micro-communities are replacing the feed. Smart startups and creators are chasing depth over scale. Retention over virality. Because your chances of success are dramatically better than virality bet.

Here’s what this means for you as a founder or marketer: posting is becoming branding. Your company’s social presence will matter the way a storefront sign matters — it proves you exist, it’s proof of life. But it won’t get you customers. Not anymore. The algorithmic feed is no longer a distribution channel. It’s a billboard on a highway where nobody’s looking at billboards.

The real distribution is happening inside the rooms.
The era of chasing mass attention on open feeds is ending. Now.

Audience vs. Community — The Distinction That Changes Everything

Most founders who say they’re building a community are building an audience. These are not the same thing.

An audience consumes.
A community creates.
An audience shows up when you post.
A community shows up for each other.

Seth Godin named this in Tribes almost twenty years ago. He said the internet had killed mass marketing and revived something much older — groups of people connected not by location but by shared ideas and values, with leaders who serve the movement rather than broadcast at it.

The line that stayed with me: “You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”

Kevin Kelly also gave it a number. You don’t need millions. You need a thousand people who actually care (1000 True Fans) — who spend money, spread the word, and show up without being asked. Not scale. Depth.

The companies that have actually cracked this didn’t crack it by posting more. Neo4j CEO Emil Eifrem put it perfectly when asked why he chose a community-first approach: “We didn’t even think of it as a GTM strategy. We just figured it was the way to do things.”

But here’s the part almost nobody’s talking about yet.

The Tool Is the Ticket

I want to take you back to 2013. I was the founder of a digital publishing company in SF where we started publishing iPhotographer magazine and a handful of other titles under the FastTrack magazine umbrella. Times when the iPad was a novelty.

We weren’t really starting from zero. We were finding communities that already existed — photographers, artists, creative hobbyists, pet food enthusiasts — groups ranging from 50k people to over 2 million, all already doing the thing we wanted to write about in different magazines. The magazine wasn’t the product. The magazine was a tool we built for the community. (and then for some corporates as well)

What did it do for them? It gave them visibility. We’d feature everyone from photographers shooting for Forbes and Playboy to a school teacher in the Midwest doing remarkable iPhone art photography with her students. Different levels of fame. Same community. The magazine was how both of them got seen by more people who cared about what they were doing.

That’s why, in the first six weeks after launch — when iPads were still rare and expensive, and the app market was in its infancy — we got 10,000 paying subscribers.

It wasn’t because we were such good marketers or community builders. It was because we gave the community something they valued. They were already there. We just showed up with the right tool in our hands.

Now fast forward to 2026. What was “nice to have” in 2013 is becoming the only way forward.

The fight for community access is no longer about who publishes the best content. It’s about who builds the best tools for the community. An app that solves a problem the community actually has. A calculator, a tracker, a workflow, a chatbot, a magazine — something they care about, can carry with them and use repeatedly, not because you asked them to, but because it makes their life better.

Think about what Notion did. Think about what Pete Kazanjy did with Modern Sales Pro before he ever launched Atrium.

Technocrats often call this PLG - Product Led Growth. But the game is changing. What I’m trying to tell you is that you don’t need a product to start, and the product is not the main hero. Community tool is.

The Next Distribution War Is a Tooling War

Here’s where it’s heading, and I want you to think about this carefully because the window is still early.

Every major community is about to become a battleground for access.

Right now, companies spend money on ads, KOLs, influencers, and content to reach people. In the next wave, the smartest companies will spend money building tools for the communities where their buyers already live. And then those tools — embedded in the community’s daily workflow — become the distribution channel.

Not posts. Not newsletters. Not influencer deals.

A chatbot that helps a community of independent architects generate project proposals or find people right now thinking about their next house. An app that helps a community of Etsy sellers track their supply costs. A tool that helps a community of founders score their pitch decks. Each one gives the community something it values. Each one also gives the company behind it a permanent, trusted position inside that community — before the sale conversation ever starts.

When you start, you don’t need millions of downloads. You need the right five hundred people using your tool every day in the community where your next hundred customers already live.

Cloudflare’s CEO recently shared data that should scare every founder still betting on content: AI is repackaging your blog posts, your SEO, your carefully written articles, and serving the answer directly. People are increasingly not clicking through to the source. The organic traffic model that HubSpot and half the internet was built on is vanishing.

But a tool lives inside a community. A tool doesn’t get scraped and summarized by a chatbot. A tool builds habit and trust in a way that content alone can’t, because it does something — it creates value every time someone opens it.

And the company that built the tool? They’re embedded. They’re trusted. They’re not fighting the algorithm. They’re not hoping to go viral.

They own the access. Think about it … 🤔

What This Means If You’re Building Right Now

If you're starting now, here's the three-step playbook. They’re simple to describe and genuinely hard to execute, which is why most people won’t.

Find the community first. Don’t build for an imaginary audience. Find a group of people who already share a problem, a passion, or a professional identity — and go spend real time inside it before you write a single line of code.

Build the tool they need. Not the tool you think is interesting. Not the tool that looks impressive in a demo. The one that makes their specific, actual, daily work better. The one that earns its place in their workflow because it solves something they couldn’t easily solve before you showed up. (if you need framework guiding you → check the Lean Canvas essay)

Own the access before you worry about acquisition. Traditional marketing wants you to find a customer, qualify them, pitch them, and convert them. What I’m describing skips the first four steps. When your tool lives in a community your buyer already trusts, you’re not acquiring customers anymore. They’re already there. You’re just giving them a reason to look up.

Posting still matters. Don’t misread this. But posting is now what it was always supposed to be — branding, presence, proof that your company still exists and cares. It tells people you’re alive. It won’t bring you net new customers at scale anymore. Not in the era of algorithmic overload and AI-generated noise.

The distribution fight of the next decade will be won by founders who find their community, earn their trust, and put something genuinely useful in their hands.

The magazine was the tool. The community was already there.

Find the community. Build the tool. Own the channel.

That’s the whole game now. Hope you agree?

What’s your tool?

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

Publishing every Tue morning UTC and occasionally over the weekends.

ETH Sofia GTM Hackathon is coming in September — if you’re a builder who wants to launch with a splash and group of others and with distribution figured out, this is your room. Details dropping soon.

In this rant, I break down why your price tag is one of your most powerful distribution tools, and why anchoring it to competitor prices or your own spending habits can be quietly killing your sales.

If you're a technical founder struggling to charge what you're worth, this one's for you. Don't treat pricing like an accounting problem. It’s not.

It’s a story — and whoever reads that story decides whether they belong in your world or not.

Full Video

Price = Story

Here’s something nobody tells you when you’re building your first product:

• The moment you pick a price, you’re already marketing.

• Not with copy. Not with ads. With a number.

A €10 product says: this is for everyone.
A €1,000 product says: this is for someone with a specific problem, and they know it.

Same product. Completely different customer. The price didn’t just set value expectations — it filtered the funnel.

Most technical founders get this backwards. They build something, look at what competitors charge, calculate their costs, and then land somewhere close to the bottom of possible. Logical, but wrong.

Think about conference tickets. One person sees a $500 ticket and thinks it’s overpriced. Another buys the same ticket knowing they’ll close a $50k deal in the hallway. Same ticket. Same price. Completely different value. The difference isn’t the product — it’s the buyer’s context.

This is the trap founders fall into: projecting their own wallet onto their customers.

If you wouldn’t spend $2,900 on a tool, you assume nobody would. But you’re not the customer. Your customer has a problem you’ve solved — and the price of that problem, to them, might be much higher than the price of your solution.

Here’s how you should think about it: A high price with the wrong story is a scam. A high price with the right story is a filter.

It filters out people who don’t have the problem you solve. It attracts people who do — and who are serious about solving it. That’s not fewer customers. That’s better customers.

So before you touch a pricing page, ask yourself one question: What does this price say about who this is for?

If you can’t answer that, the number is arbitrary. And arbitrary prices attract arbitrary customers and that's not what I want for you! 😉

Quotes

“A price of €10 tells a different story than €1,000 — and the story is who this is for.”

“For one person, a conference ticket is worth $10. For another, it’s worth $10,000 — because they’ll close a deal in the lobby.”

“Stop projecting your own wallet onto your customer.”

Till next time stay positive and build better!

Cheers,

Pete (aka BFG)

Links

• X/Twitter: [@BuildBetterHQ]

• LinkedIn: [BuildBetterHQ]

There’s a line buried in a recent interview with Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz that should stop every B2B founder in their tracks.

He’s talking about AI disruption. About whether someone could build a competitor using today’s tools. And he says, almost casually:

“I would be very impressed if someone wants to vibe code payroll in Poland.”

“And when you’re done with Poland, you’re going to have to do it in many other countries.”

That’s a precise description of a moat. And it points to something most of the startup conversation — dominated as it is by Silicon Valley frames — consistently misses.

Silicon Valley Optimizes for the Wrong Thing

The Valley has a specific theory of defensibility. It goes like this: build fast, capture market share, then defend with network effects, switching costs, or proprietary data. The tech is the product. The tech is the moat.

It used to be a powerful playbook. It’s also a playbook built for a specific kind of company, in a specific kind of market, by founders with a specific kind of worldview.

When you grow up in San Francisco (or the U.S.), your default market is the United States. A clean, single-language, similar-regulatory-framework market of 330 million people. You build mono-country first because that’s your reality. International comes later, as a feature, once the core is stable. And you usually assume you’ll bulldozer your way into it because of scale and everyone wanting “the American” thing.

That default shapes everything.
The product assumptions.
The hiring assumptions.
The definition of what a “moat” even is.

It also creates blind spots.

European Outsider Sees the Market Differently

Bouaziz is French. Born in Israel. Based in London. His co-founder Shu was born in China.

When they built Deel, they didn’t decide to “go global.” They built global by default — because the world they actually lived in was either global or too small. For them, the question was never “how do we add international support?” It was: “why doesn’t any infrastructure exist for the way the world already works?”

That question led to an insight their US-centric competitors had hard time to see.

Global hiring, as it turns out, isn’t primarily a US company hiring an engineer in Germany. Although Americans like to think that 🙃
It’s a Peruvian company hiring in Chile.
A Nigerian company hiring in Kenya.
It’s the entire world hiring across its own borders — a market that was invisible to anyone anchored in the Silicon Valley mental model.

Forty thousand customers and $1.4B+ ARR later, that insight is beginning to look less like a lucky accident and more like (potentially) structural advantage that compounds.

Being Outside the Echo Chamber

There’s another telling moment in the interview where Bouaziz describes how the ecosystem reacted to Deel’s growth. He says people tried to invent explanations for it — because they couldn’t reconcile a non-SV founder, not based in the US, not running the Silicon Valley playbook, growing as fast as Deel did.

“How could a company whose CEO is not based in Silicon Valley grow as much as we did?”

The answer, of course, is that the question itself is the bias.

But there’s a second-order effect worth noting. Being an outsider also meant Deel was left alone to execute. No roadshows. No narrative management for the tech press. No distraction from the performance theatre that consumes so many valley-adjacent founders. Just customers, product, and compounding revenue or no payroll money.

Bouaziz didn’t raise outside capital from 2022 until recently. Every round came from investors already close to the business. He wasn’t selling a story to strangers — he was building a company that made the story irrelevant.

Profitability isn’t the point here (maybe a little bit).
It’s the outcome of not playing the SV game.
Spend $300K before your Series A.
Stay profitable for three years while growing from $800M to $1.4B ARR.
When you don’t need the money, you don’t need the narrative. That’s freedom most founders never experience. And many can’t even imagine.

Why Regulatory Moat Beats Tech Moat in the AI Era

Here’s the uncomfortable question every B2B founder should be sitting with right now: if an AI agent can write my code, design my onboarding, and replicate my UX in a weekend — what exactly is my moat?

For most pure-software plays, the honest answer is: less than you thought.

Deel’s answer is different.
Because the product isn’t primarily software.
The product is operational infrastructure.
Legal entities in every country.
Local payroll licenses that take years to acquire.
Compliance engines built to local law.
Seven thousand people across 120 countries who carry the institutional knowledge that makes the whole thing work.

You cannot vibe code that over the weekend. You cannot prompt-engineer your way to a Polish payroll license. You cannot deploy an agent to build five years of local regulatory relationships in Brazil.

This is what a regulatory moat looks like in practice. Not a single defensible position, but a compounding stack of operational complexity — each layer harder to replicate than the last, each new country entered making the next one slightly easier for Deel and slightly harder for a challenger.

And here’s where it gets interesting in the AI context specifically.

Bouaziz doesn’t see AI as a threat to this model. He sees it as an amplifier. The regulatory infrastructure doesn’t get disrupted by AI — it gets augmented by it.
AI handles the surface layer. The moat is what’s underneath.
His read: Deel could potentially double revenue without increasing headcount, because AI makes their existing operational depth more powerful, not redundant.

That’s a fundamentally different relationship with AI disruption than a pure-software company faces. When the floor of your business is operational complexity that can’t be automated, AI raises the ceiling rather than threatening the foundation.

Everyone will wish soon they had something like this.

The European Founder Reframe

European founders have always operated under a specific tax. Multiple jurisdictions from day one. Fragmented (often stupid) regulatory environments. Labour law that varies country to country. The conventional wisdom says this makes European companies slower to scale than their US counterparts.

That framing is worth challenging or maybe embracing.

Yes, regulatory complexity creates friction in the early stages. But it also builds a muscle. Founders who learn to operate across regulatory environments early develop a different kind of commercial instinct — one that’s oriented toward depth, compliance, and local trust rather than speed and surface area.

That muscle, when applied to the right market, becomes a moat.

Deel is the perfect example. But the principle extends.
Any B2B category where the value is delivered inside regulatory, operational, or institutional complexity — fintech, healthtech, legaltech, HR, infrastructure — favours founders who have already learned to think this way.

Silicon Valley will always have advantages. Capital density. Talent density. The network. But the Valley selects for a specific set of insights, in a specific kind of market, for a specific kind of founder.

Some of the most durable B2B businesses of the next decade will be built in markets the Valley can’t see clearly or can’t even reach. By founders who don’t fit the template. Who build global by default because they never had a single home market to start from. Who discover, sometimes by accident, that the thing they were building wasn’t a tech product with international features.

It was infrastructure. — And infrastructure, once laid, is very hard to disrupt.

Deel was founded in 2019. Today it operates in 150+ countries, serves 40,000+ customers, and recently raised at a $17B+ valuation — profitable throughout.

To close this optimistic rant off — Let’s wish Alex Bouaziz and Deel bright future and let’s hope other European companies will follow the playbook of profitable growth rather than VC-fueled hope-for-the-best wheel (which Europe is not built for).

Let's build better,

Pete (aka BFG)

TLDR

• Kevin Rusher is the sole founder of RAAC — a DeFi liquidity protocol that tokenizes real-world assets (starting with gold mines and real estate) to back a stablecoin and generate sustainable, layered yield.

• His core insight: DeFi’s volatility problem isn’t solved by better tokenomics — it’s solved by bringing dollar-denominated yield from outside crypto back into the system.

• Most RWA protocols are building for the market they wish existed. RAAC is building for institutions — the only actors who can actually move the needle at scale.

The Core Idea Worth Sitting With

Most DeFi protocols are held together by game theory — staking incentives, emissions schedules, and social coordination that unravels when prices drop. RAAC is betting on something older and more boring: contracts.

Real-world asset owners who tokenize through RAAC are legally bound to participate in the ecosystem. That’s not a whitepaper promise. That’s a signed obligation.

It’s the same logic that makes traditional finance stable — and it’s almost entirely absent from DeFi. Kevin’s insight is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to bolt a seatbelt onto the one that already exists.

The stablecoin market is the infrastructure layer for everything that follows — on-chain forex, tokenized real estate, institutional liquidity. If Kevin’s right, RAAC is less a DeFi protocol and more a piece of financial plumbing for the next decade.

Moments

On the product thesis (~9:30)

“Everyone’s goal is onboarding the next billion users. Our goal was always: how do we onboard the next $100 billion?”

On sustainable business models (~22:20)

“We found our product-market fit before we launched. We found our customers. We are our own supply and demand — because real world asset owners are contractually obligated to participate in the ecosystem.”

On the DeFi-to-institution pipeline (~10:30)

“The flood of capital hasn’t come from retail. It’s come from institutions... It’s much more efficient to onboard one institution than 2,000 individuals.”

Resources & Links

• 🔗 RAAC / Regnum Aurum: raac.io

• 🐦 Kevin on X: [kkrusherr]

  
  

• 🐦 BuildBetter on X: [Pete aka_BFG]

• 🎙 BuildBetter Podcast YouTube: [BuildBetterHQ]

Let me know what you think? I loved this episode.
Till next time,

Pete (aka BFG)

Nassim Taleb calls this the Lindy Effect — the longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep surviving. Schwartz’s core framework has been pressure-tested across six decades of markets and it hasn’t cracked. Which means it’s probably more relevant to what you’re building right now than whatever “2026 GTM playbook” hit your feed this morning.

Here’s why it matters to you specifically.

You ship a technically superior product. You write the landing page. “The fastest L2.” “AI-powered productivity.” “Better weather data.” And the market yawns. Not because the product is wrong — because the language is wrong. You’re speaking to a market that has already evolved past the words you chose.

The Five Stages Nobody Told You About

Schwartz’s core framework is called Market Sophistication. And it's a good one! The idea is deceptively simple: every market moves through five predictable stages, and each stage demands a fundamentally different way of talking about your product. Use the wrong stage’s language, and you become invisible — regardless of how good your technology actually is.

Here’s the thing most builders miss. You don’t choose your message. Your market’s sophistication level chooses it for you. Play along or get ignored.

Stage 1 is the pioneer moment; You’re the first to make a claim. “Digital gold.” “Chat with an AI.” The result itself is the miracle, so you state it directly and boldly. Bitcoin in 2011 lived here. ChatGPT in late 2022 lived here. But Stage 1 is almost extinct for most products now. If you think you’re in it, you’re probably wrong.

Stage 2 is the arms race; Competitors arrive making the same promise, so the only play is to enlarge the claim. Faster. Cheaper. Bigger context window. More throughput. This is where most copycat products live — and where most of them die, because expanding the claim has a ceiling. At some point, “faster” just sounds like noise.

Stage 3 is the mechanism shift; The market has heard every version of the promise and stopped believing. So you stop selling the what and start selling the how. You introduce a new mechanism — a named, specific process that explains why your result is achievable when others have failed. This is where skepticism meets innovation. The mechanism becomes the hero of your story and you live on.

Stage 4 is the refined mechanism; The market already knows your category’s “how.” They’ve heard the pitch. Now you’re competing on the elegance of your architecture — the precision, the sophistication, the specific engineering choices that make your version superior. You’re telling a technical audience: “You know the old approach was flawed. Here’s the version that actually scales.”

Stage 5 is the identity shift; Features are a commodity. Technical specs are table stakes. The product’s function becomes secondary to the identity it confers on the user. At this stage, you’re not selling a tool. You’re selling a mirror.

Each stage earns the right to introduce the next. And the most dangerous mistake you can make is using Stage 1 language in a Stage 4 market.

“The copywriter does not create the desire of the public for the product. He can only channel that desire onto a particular product.” — Eugene Schwartz

This is Schwartz’s deepest insight, and it’s the one most founders ignore. But it applies to founders too! You don’t educate a market into wanting something new. You find a desire that already exists — security, profit, status, ease, the fear of being left behind — and you position your product as the fastest path to it.

Stop trying to create demand. Start channeling the demand that’s already there. And before you start arguing — you may have a new product, but you will not create a new need (that's the demand driver). The demand is here for all products. You have to find that demand and address it.

Four Products, Four Stages: The Diagnosis

Theory is useful. Application is everything. Here’s what Market Sophistication looks like when you map it onto real products builders are shipping right now.

Polymarket Copy-Trading Apps — Stage 2: The Arms Race. The prediction markets wave created a rush of copy-trading tools all making the same core promise: follow the smartest traders and profit. “Copy the top wallets.” “Mirror the best portfolios.” “One-click whale tracking.” Every app is enlarging the same claim — faster execution, higher win rates, broader coverage. Textbook Stage 2. But the clock is ticking. The moment users stop believing that copy-trading reliably delivers outsized returns, the market jumps to Stage 3 — and whoever introduces a compelling mechanism first (a proprietary signal model, a named risk-management architecture) will own the next chapter.

WisprFlow — Stage 3: The Mechanism. Voice-to-text tools are everywhere. The promise of “dictate and it types” is Stage 1 territory that expired years ago. “More accurate transcription” is Stage 2 — and nobody cares. WisprFlow’s move is pure Stage 3: they introduced the mechanism. Advanced cloud-powered context aware language models that don’t just transcribe your words — they understand your intent. Near-error-free output that captures how you actually think, not a garbled approximation you spend ten minutes cleaning up. The how — an AI pipeline engineered for fluency, not just phonetic matching — is the hero of their story. They aren’t selling transcription. They’re selling the mechanism that finally makes voice a real input method for builders who think faster than they type.

Superfluid — Stage 4: The Refined Mechanism. The market already knows what programmable money streams are. Token vesting, salary streaming, real-time subscriptions — the concept isn’t new. Superfluid’s play isn’t introducing the mechanism. It’s enlarging it. They built a protocol-level primitive — not an app, but the infrastructure layer that other apps compose on top of. Composable streams, a single contract call that replaces entire payment architectures. They’re telling a sophisticated audience: you know the old way of streaming tokens was limited by design. Here’s the version built to be a financial primitive, not a feature.

That’s Stage 4 — competing on the elegance of the architecture itself. And they need to do way better job to get it into the real world.

Bitcoin — Stage 5: The Identity Shift. Nobody buys Bitcoin in 2026 because of SHA-256 hashing. When BlackRock packages a Bitcoin ETF, they talk about “legacy,” “sovereignty,” and “the future of wealth.” When a founder puts laser eyes on their profile picture, they’re not making a technical statement — they’re making an identity statement. Bitcoin has fully transitioned from product to symbol. This is Schwartz’s concept of Identification at its most powerful: in mature markets, the product becomes a symbol of the user’s place in society. Your product isn’t something people use. It’s something people are.

Stage 5 is the stage where brand matters, and only brand matters.

The Weapon Most Builders Never Pick Up: Verbalization

Schwartz spent entire chapters on something he called “the art of the build-up” — the skill of taking a simple claim and verbalizing it into a vivid, felt reality. He never wrote “this car is fast.” He described the sensation of being pressed back into the leather seat as the world outside the windshield turned to streaked light.

This is the weapon most technical founders leave on the table. You describe what your product does. Schwartz would describe what it feels like to use it.

I know we can't all be genius copywriters, but we can try to be better than absolute ignorance.

Take WeatherXM. A Stage 3 mechanism play, sure. But the verbalization layer is where the magic lives. Don’t just say “decentralized weather stations powered by community hardware.” Paint the picture: you mount a small device on your rooftop, and within hours hyperlocal data streams in from your exact coordinates — data no centralized provider has ever captured. Your station joins a mesh of thousands. You earn rewards while the network gets smarter. You didn’t buy a gadget. You became a node in the world’s most granular weather intelligence system.

That’s verbalization. It turns a mechanism into an experience. And in a world flooded with AI-generated slop, vivid, high-agency writing is one of the last real differentiators.

The Three-Question Diagnostic

Before you write your next landing page, pitch deck, or launch tweet, ask yourself three things.

First: what stage is your market actually in? Not where you wish it was. Where it lives. Have your prospects heard this promise before? Have they heard the mechanism? If so, you need to be further up the ladder than you think.

Second: are you channeling an existing desire, or trying to create a new one? If your messaging requires the reader to want something they don’t already want, you’re pushing a boulder uphill. Find the fear or ambition that’s already there — and make your product the obvious outlet.

Third: can you verbalize it? Not describe it. Verbalize it. Can you put the reader inside the experience of using your product so vividly that they feel the shift before they’ve signed up?

Schwartz wrote Breakthrough Advertising sixty years ago.
The products changed.
The markets changed.
The psychology didn’t.

The only question is whether you’ll meet your audience where they are — or keep shouting Stage 1 headlines into a Stage 4 wind.

If you’re building something and want to pressure-test where your market sits on the sophistication ladder, come and join me for the GTM Hackathon at ETH Sofia this September. We’ll rip it apart and launch your project live.

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

It goes like this: people flock to Polymarket and Kalshi because they're truth-seekers. Civic-minded participants, aggregating information, sharpening collective forecasts, making democracy smarter one trade at a time.

It's a beautiful story.

It's also mostly wrong.

And the fact that it's wrong is not a criticism. It's actually the key to understanding why prediction markets are quietly eating every speculative market around them — and what builders in this space should pay attention to.

Start With the Feeling, Not the Thesis

Think about what makes gambling addictive. Not in the clinical sense — in the felt sense. The variable reward. The small bet with the possibility of an outsized outcome. The story that resolves cleanly: you were right, or you were wrong, and you know within a defined window.

Now think about what makes Hyperliquid — or any perpetuals exchange — sticky. You pick a direction. You size up. You watch a binary outcome unfold faster than your nervous system can process it.

The dopamine isn't coming from the intellectual exercise. It's coming from the asymmetry. The ease of entry. The variable reward dressed in a clean resolution.

If you've ever traded a perp at 2am and told yourself you were "managing risk" or "expressing a thesis," you already know this. The story you tell yourself about why you trade is almost never the reason you trade.

Prediction markets offer the exact same psychological loop. Just stretched over days or weeks instead of minutes. And wrapped in language that sounds more like the Financial Times than a sportsbook.

So Why Aren't They Just Another Casino?

Here's where it gets interesting — and where most people analyzing this space stop one layer too early.

If prediction markets were just gambling in a Bloomberg terminal costume, they'd be a novelty. A niche. A slightly more intellectual version of DraftKings. They wouldn't be growing the way they're growing.

The real unlock isn't the psychology. The psychology is table stakes — every speculative market exploits the same dopamine loop. The real unlock is the surface area.

Legacy leveraged markets constrain you to instruments someone else decided were worth trading. Equities, bonds, commodities, crypto. A few thousand tickers, curated by institutions, bounded by regulation and convention.

Prediction markets let you trade on anything with a resolvable outcome.

Elections. Criminal verdicts. Fed decisions. Sports championships. Whether a specific CEO will still have their job by Q3. Whether a bill passes. Whether it rains in Dubai next Tuesday.

The underlying mechanics are identical to a leveraged position — you're expressing a probabilistic view with capital at risk. But the menu has exploded from a few thousand tickers to essentially the entire surface of observable reality.

That's not a small thing. That's a category shift.

The Generation That Was Already Ready

For a generation that grew up placing parlays on their phones before breakfast, prediction markets don't feel exotic. They feel obvious.

You can now apply the same speculative instinct that once required a brokerage account or a casino to basically any question in the news cycle. Will the ceasefire hold? Will the merger go through? Will this politician survive the scandal?

The "skill vs. luck" framing that makes prediction markets feel more respectable than a sportsbook? That's mostly post-hoc rationalization. A story sophisticated bettors tell themselves to feel better about what is, at its core, the same risk-seeking behavior — just wearing a nicer suit.

And I say this without judgment. Because here's the part that the purists miss:

The information aggregation benefits are real — even though they're incidental to why most participants show up.

Nobody opens Polymarket thinking, "I'd like to contribute to humanity's collective forecast accuracy today." They open it because there's a Fed meeting tomorrow and they have a take and they want to put money behind it. The truth-seeking happens as a byproduct of millions of people acting on self-interest. Same as every other market that has ever worked.

Adam Smith would recognize the mechanism instantly. The invisible hand, applied to information instead of goods.

What This Means If You're Building Here

If you're building in the prediction markets space — or adjacent to it — the lesson is this: don't sell truth. Sell surface area.

The people who will use your platform aren't looking for a better way to aggregate civic knowledge. They're looking for a better way to express a view they already have, on a topic they already care about, with the possibility of asymmetric return.

The more topics you can make tradeable, the more of reality you can make resolvable, the stickier your platform becomes. Not because your users are truth-seekers — but because every news event, every political drama, every corporate shake-up becomes a potential market. Every dinner conversation becomes a potential trade.

And the permissionless version of this? Where anyone can create a market on anything? That's not just a feature improvement. That's the endgame. The moment you remove the curation bottleneck, you turn the entire surface of human events into a tradeable layer.

Could be even better in a fully permissionless way. But that's a conversation for another day.

The Honest Version

Prediction markets are leverage and gambling — for most — with a better costume. And that costume is the product.

None of this is a criticism. Leverage and speculation are ancient human impulses. Prediction markets are simply the most honest and versatile expression of them we've built so far. The costume isn't hiding anything shameful. It's making something ancient accessible, expandable, and — almost accidentally — useful.

People love prediction markets for the same reason they love any market with leverage and variable rewards: the chance to be right, be early, and get paid asymmetrically for it.

Just now, on topics that actually feel alive. On questions they already argue about at dinner. Without needing to get off the couch.

That's the real product. Not truth. Not civic duty.

Access to the entire surface of reality — with skin in the game.

Till next time, let's BUILD BETTER!

Pete

PS1: I wrote longer piece about variable rewards that might interest you if you're building product:

Why Infinite Scroll Wins and Your dApp Doesn’t

BuildBetter by BFG

May 13, 2025

Habits are the compound interest of product. Variable reinforcement is the invisible architecture beneath that magnetic pull of many Web2 apps. Ignore it and you’ll ship a polite tool that users forge...

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PS2: And it’s also included among the famous frameworks that build billion dollar companies:

(2/2) The Frameworks That Built Billion-Dollar Products

BuildBetter by BFG

Jul 8, 2025

these are practical frameworks I collected over 20 years of building and selling products and services. At the right moment, they can transform how you approach product development, marketing, or UX d...

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You see people betting on elections or the price of ETH and you call it gambling. If that’s the extent of your vocabulary, you need a new word for “objective truth.”

I recently sat down with “Polymarket John,” a guy who treats these markets like a professional P&L. He isn’t there for the rush. He’s there to price the future and win.

Watch The Full Interview Here:

Here is the uncomfortable truth: Most of you are betting your beliefs, not the facts. And in a zero-sum game, that means guys like John are taking your money.

The Golden Rule: Prediction markets don’t care about what you want to happen. They only care about what is most likely to happen.

The Hard School of Objectivity

We all have biases. You want your startup to succeed. You want your candidate to win. You want the “good guys” to find the lost submarine.

Bias is a tax on your capital. John explained that the system forces you to be unbiased. If you bet with your heart, you lose your shirt.

Take the Titan Submarine case. While the world was watching the news and “feeling” hopeful, the market was looking at the rules. Most people bet “Yes” the second debris was found.

But the rules said they had to find the cabin.

John read the rules. Most didn’t. Guess who got “spanked”? (really, guess - it’s not obvious!)

The “Devil” in the Resolution: UMA

If you’re going to play in these markets, you need to understand the UMA Protocol. John calls it the most important topic nobody talks about.

Polymarket is decentralized, which means there’s no “boss” to decide who won. Instead, you have this optimistic oracle.

• The Court: When unclear, UMA holders vote on the outcome.

• The Risk: If the market is worth billions (like the US Election) but the value of the UMA tokens is magnitudes lower, the game theory gets shaky.

• The Reality: You aren’t just betting on the event; you’re betting on the integrity of the judge.

How to Use This (Without Losing Your Shirt)

If you want to move from a “gambler” to a “builder” of wealth in these markets, stop guessing and start calculating.

• Calculate Your Own Odds: Don’t look at the market price first. Look at the data, decide the probability, and then see if the market is wrong.

• Read the Specs: Clarity is expensive. If you don’t read the resolution rules for a market, you are essentially donating your money to the person who did.

• Watch the Liquidity: In the US Election markets, the odds move fast because the interest is massive. Don’t get swept up in the volatility of the “crowd.”

• Manual Over Hype: John does this manually. No bots. No high-frequency BS. Just human logic vs. market discrepancy.

The “Reality Bending” Pivot

Here is the mindset shift: Prediction markets aren’t just mirrors of reality. They are incentive machines. When you bet on a politician, you are indirectly creating a “head bounty” or a financial incentive for that outcome to manifest. We are entering an era where the predicting tool is becoming a reality-bending tool.

If you’re a founder, here’s is your lesson from this episode — unbiased analysis. Just as a trader loses money when they bet on the candidate they want to win rather than the one who most likely will win, founders often fail because they build and market the product they wish the world needed.

Let’s bring this home. You can keep following the “hype” and betting your feelings. Or you can get objective, read the rules, and start treating information like the asset it is.

TLDR Takeaways

1. It’s Not Gambling: (if you know what you’re doing) Some call it a truth machine that punishes bias and rewards objectivity.

2. Liquidity is Truth: Talk is cheap, but onchain bets provide very accurate signal.

3. Read the Resolution Rules: If you don’t know exactly what defines a “win,” you’ve already lost.

4. The Oracle Matters: Understand UMA. The judge is just as important as the game.

5. Information > Luck: Long-term profit in prediction markets comes from finding discrepancies, not catching a “vibe.”

That's it folks. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and maybe you'll give it a try.

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

In case you missed: My last essay about dopamine ladder for your content and product was a hit, read it here:

The Dopamine Ladder: Why Nobody Watches & Reads Your Content (How to Fix It)

BuildBetter by BFG

Feb 25, 2026

Your product and content aren't boring to the right people. Your content architecture for attention is broken. That's where the Dopamine Ladder comes in...

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Connect with me:
- on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/bfg
- on X: https://twitter.com/aka_BFG

And I recommend joining BuildBetter YouTube Channel (formerly Web3 Magic):
https://www.youtube.com/@BuildBetterHQ

Every piece of content you produce is competing for one scarce resource: dopamine. Skip a rung and the reader falls off — no matter how good your payload.

1. Stimulation → the visual stun gun (first 1–2 seconds)

2. Captivation → the curiosity loop (form a question, don't answer it)

3. Anticipation → the almost-answer (peak dopamine before the reveal)

4. Validation → the reader recognizes themselves in the content

5. Affection → trust transfers from message to messenger

6. Revelation → the "aha" that makes you the only one they trust on this

First 4 are about the message. Last 2 are about the messenger — you. Master all 6 and you don't just get attention. You get a fanbase that comes back without being asked.

Sooo, you shipped the feature. You wrote the thread. Made a video. You hit publish.

And nothing happened.

No engagement. No shares. No DMs from people saying “this changed how I think about X.” Just silence and a few pity-likes from your co-founder.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your content problem isn’t a content problem. It’s a neurochemistry problem.

Every piece of content you produce — a tweet, a blog post, a landing page, a pitch deck, a product demo — is competing for a scarce biological resource: dopamine. And dopamine doesn’t care about your roadmap, your features, or your technical superiority. It cares about one thing: is this worth my brain’s energy?

Most founders treat content like code. Logical. Sequential. Feature-complete. But human attention doesn’t work like a compiler. It works like a ladder. And if your audience doesn’t climb rung by rung, they fall off — no matter how good the payload at the top is.

This is the Dopamine Ladder — a six-level framework for engineering attention that actually sticks. It works for short-form content, long-form essays, landing pages, pitch decks, product walkthroughs, and community posts. Basically, anything where a human needs to get hooked and keep paying attention to you long enough to care.

And if you can get someone to climb all six rungs consistently? You create something Pavlov figured out over a century ago: a conditioned response. People will engage with your content before they even read it — just because it’s yours.

That’s the game you want. Let’s look at how it works. Let's break it down.

How Attention Actually Works (Hint: It’s Not What You Think)

Most technical founders think of attention as binary. Either someone is reading, or they’re not. Either they clicked, or they didn’t.

Wrong.

Attention is a progressive neurochemical journey. There are six distinct stages that release increasing amounts of dopamine in a reader’s brain. Each stage unlocks the next. Skip one, and the whole chain collapses.

Think of it like an authentication flow. Each level is a checkpoint. Fail one verification, and the session terminates. No retry. No error message. Just — gone.

The six levels are: Stimulation → Captivation → Anticipation → Validation → Affection → Revelation.

The first four are about the message — the specific piece of content. The last two are about the messenger — you, the founder, the brand. Master all six and you don’t just get attention. You get a fanbase that comes back without being asked.

You'd like that, wouldn't you?

Now, here’s why this matters more to you than to some random content creator: as a founder, you need attention to survive. Attention converts to users. Users convert to revenue. Revenue converts to runway. Every piece of content you put out is either climbing someone up this ladder or dropping them off the first rung.

Let’s walk through the first two levels — because this is where 90% of founder content dies.

Level 1: Stimulation — The Visual Stun Gun

Time window: the first 1-2 seconds.

This is pure subconscious brain processing. No comprehension. No logic. Just your brain’s survival hardware scanning for things that are different, bright, or moving.

Neuroscientists call it “bottom-up processing.” It happens in about 200 milliseconds — faster than conscious thought. Your reader’s eye catches color, contrast, motion, and pattern-breaks before their prefrontal cortex even wakes up.

This is why your beautifully written thread with no visual hook gets scroll-buried. This is why your landing page with a wall of gray text bounces people in 0.8 seconds. This is why your pitch deck with 12-point Arial on a white background puts investors to sleep before slide three.

Stimulation is not about beauty. It’s about contrast. Something that doesn’t look like everything else in the feed. (so it depends on the feed type and style, right!)

For founders, this translates directly:

Your landing page needs a visual pattern break above the fold. Not a stock photo. Not a generic gradient. Something that makes the eye stop. Your tweet needs a formatting disruption — a line break pattern, a bold opener, an unexpected visual structure. Your pitch deck needs a first slide that doesn’t look like the 47 other decks the investor saw this week. Your video needs a clear, colorful moving hook.

Here’s the counterintuitive part: if everyone copies the same visual trick, it stops working. The feed normalizes it. This is why having a distinctive visual identity — your own color palette, formatting style, layout rhythm — is a strategic moat, not a “nice-to-have.”

But stimulation is the weakest dopamine hit. It buys you a glance. Maybe two seconds. That’s it.

Which brings us to the level where the real game begins.

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Level 2: Captivation — The Curiosity Trap

This is where most founder content falls apart completely.

Captivation is the curiosity stage. It’s what happens when — after your visual hook earned those two seconds — the reader’s brain forms a question. An open loop. A gap between what they know and what they want to know.

The human brain is a problem-solving machine. It evolved to hunt for answers with the smallest energy expense. When a compelling question pops into someone’s head, dopamine floods the system — not when the answer arrives, but when the question forms. The act of opening the loop is itself the reward.

This is why “How to get more users” as a headline doesn’t work. It’s not specific enough to pop a real question. The brain goes: “Yeah, I sort of know the answer to that.” No gap. No dopamine. No captivation.

But “Why Stripe’s first 100 users came from a channel most founders ignore” — now there’s a gap.
The brain immediately asks: What channel? What am I missing? Could I do this too?

Two things make a curiosity loop powerful:

First, the question must be non-obvious. If the reader can guess the answer instantly, the loop closes before it opens. No dopamine. No attention.

Second, the question must be relevant to them. You can write the most curiosity-inducing headline in history, but if it’s about a problem your reader doesn’t have, they’ll bounce. Captivation without relevance is clickbait. Captivation with relevance is magnetic content.

See how the loop with the right positioning and knowing your customer closes here?

For founders, this is the hook of your landing page. The opening line of your essay. The first 10 seconds of your demo. The thesis statement of your pitch. If you don’t pop a question in your reader’s mind that they need answered — and can’t answer themselves — you’ve lost them.

Here’s a simple diagnostic: after someone reads your first paragraph, what question should be echoing in their head? If you can’t articulate it clearly, neither can they. And they’re already gone.

Now, if you’ve been reading closely, you might have noticed something.

I just used the first two levels of the Dopamine Ladder on you. The visual structure and formatting of this article was Level 1 — stimulation. The opening lines about your content failing and the promise of a neurochemistry framework was Level 2 — captivation.

And right now? You’re sitting in Level 3 — anticipation. You know the framework exists. You know there are six levels. You’ve seen two. And your brain is already trying to guess what comes next.

That itch you feel? That’s dopamine doing its job.

Level 3: Anticipation — The Art of the Almost-Answer

This is the level that separates forgettable content from content people can’t stop consuming.

Anticipation is what happens when the reader starts guessing the answer to the question you opened in Level 2. Their brain becomes an active participant. They’re no longer just reading — they’re predicting, theorizing, running scenarios. They’re inside a mystery novel that’s playing out in real time.

And here’s the neurochemistry kicker: the highest spike of dopamine doesn’t happen when you deliver the answer. It happens just before the answer arrives.

The peak is in the anticipation itself — in that moment where the reader thinks they almost know, but don’t quite have it yet.

This is why great product launches don’t just announce features. They tease them. They drop breadcrumbs. They show a blurred screenshot, a cryptic changelog entry, and “something big is coming” post. The product itself might be identical — but the anticipation architecture around it determines whether anyone cares when it lands.

Robert Sapolsky’s dopamine research proved this beautifully: when monkeys learned that a signal predicted a reward, the dopamine spike moved from the reward itself to the signal. The anticipation became the high, not the payoff.

Your content & communication should work the same way.

The tactical move is what some call the “ZigZag.” You give the reader enough information to form a guess. Then, just as they think they’ve figured it out — you redirect. You introduce a twist, a counterexample, a “but here’s what most people miss.” This resets the curiosity loop without breaking it. The reader forms a new guess. More anticipation. More dopamine. More reading.

Think about how this plays out in a pitch deck. Most founders present the problem on slide 2, then jump straight to the solution on slide 3. No anticipation. No tension. The loop opens and closes so fast there’s no time for the investor’s brain to engage.

Better approach: Problem → “Here’s what most teams try” → “Here’s why that fails” → then your solution. That middle section is the zigzag. It lets the investor’s brain cycle through anticipation, form predictions (because “they know”) about what the real answer might be, and feel the dopamine build before you reveal it.

Same principle applies to a blog post, essay, or video. Don’t open with “here are 5 tips.” Open with a question. Give context that makes the reader think they see where you’re going. Then redirect. Then deliver.

The key mechanic is this: the reader can only anticipate if they understand the clues you’re giving them. If your content is too jargon-heavy, too abstract, or jumps between unrelated ideas — the reader gets confused, not curious. Confusion kills anticipation.

Confusion is the anti-dopamine.

So the self-check is simple: based on the question your reader has in their head from Level 2, what should they be guessing right now? Are you giving them enough signal to form that guess? And are you then either delivering the answer or pulling a zigzag that resets the loop?

If yes — they’re climbing. If no — they’re falling.

Want Levels 4–6? Here's the Full Package 👇

Levels 4 (Validation), 5 (Affection), and 6 (Revelation) are where good content stops being content and starts becoming a fanbase. They're where readers go from "this is useful" to "I trust this person — what else have they written?"

I bundled them together with two practical tools so you can actually use the framework, not just read about it:

• ✅ Full article — all 6 levels, end-to-end

• ✅ Dopamine Audit checklist — 6-point scorecard to grade any piece of your content

• ✅ Dopamine Audit matrix — fix-it template for whatever rung is broken

🔒 Paid subscribers on Substack get it as part of their subscription. Everyone else can grab the standalone package on Gumroad: Dopamine Audit Guide + Matrix + Full Article.

It works. Run it on your last landing page, last pitch deck, last thread. You'll see exactly which rung you're losing people on.

And till next time, let's buildbetter! 😉

Pete (aka BFG)

Related Reads on Attention, Content & Distribution

• Why Infinite Scroll Wins and Your dApp Doesn't — Variable Reinforcement Theory: how variable rewards engineer engagement (and addiction).

• Market Sophistication — Your Market Has Already Decided How to Ignore You — diagnose your market's awareness before you write a single line of copy.

• Stop Building Communities — Build the Tools They're Missing — posting is the new branding. Why community alone isn't the future of distribution.

• The Twitter (X) Business Info Playbook — once you've earned attention, make yourself findable.

Connect with me:
- on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/bfg
- on X: https://twitter.com/aka_BFG
- on TG: https://t.me/BrightFutureGuy
- and I recommend joining BuildBetter YouTube Channel (formerly Web3 Magic): https://www.youtube.com/@Web3MagicPod

You’ve seen it. Maybe you’ve lived it.
You shipped something genuinely useful.
You tweeted about it once.
Maybe, got a few upvotes on Product Hunt.
Then watched the traffic curve flatten.
Then you moved on, blaming the fud, influencers, or short attention span.

That’s not a launch failure. That’s a design failure.

And it started the moment you wrote the first line of code before asking a single distribution question.

The Builder’s Trap

Technical founders have a dangerous superpower: they can build.
Fast, clean, and they can do it endlessly. The ability to ship is intoxicating.
So they ship.

But shipping without a distribution thesis is like opening a restaurant in an underground bunker and assuming people will find you because the food is good.

Consider Everpix. In 2013, it was the best photo organization app ever built — elegant design, smart auto-grouping, genuinely loved by every journalist and power user who touched it. The press called it “the future of photo management.” It shut down anyway.

The autopsy was brutal: they’d spent everything on product, almost nothing on figuring out how to reach normal people at scale. They had 55,000 users when they died. Dropbox had 100 million. Same category. Inferior product for photos. Catastrophically better distribution.

Peter Thiel said it plainly: “Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of startup failure.”

He wasn’t talking about marketing spend. He was talking about the absence of a deliberate, designed path from your product to the people who need it.
That path doesn’t appear after launch.
It has to be architected before it.
And it has to be improved continuously.

The market doesn’t reward the best product. It rewards the best-distributed product. That’s true even for the product your bot-slave will make for you!

History is full of technically superior solutions that lost to inferior ones with better reach. VHS beat Betamax. Facebook beat MySpace not on features but on a calculated distribution strategy — start with Harvard, expand to colleges, then flood the gates.

Distribution wasn’t an afterthought for Zuckerberg. It was the product.

Distribution Is a Design Decision

Here’s the mindset shift that changes everything: distribution is not a department you hire for later. It’s an architectural decision you make on day one — just like your tech stack.

When you decide who your user is, you’re making a distribution decision. When you choose which community to show up in, which language to use in your copy, which pain to name first — you’re making distribution decisions.

The founders who get this right don’t think “build first, sell later.” They think in parallel.
They’re asking: Who exactly feels this pain the sharpest? Where do they gather? What would make them forward this to a colleague without being asked?

Those questions aren’t sales questions.
They’re product questions disguised as sales questions.

Reid Hoffman talks about the difference between a product and a business: a product solves a problem, and a business has a repeatable way to reach the people with that problem. You don’t have a business until your distribution works — before that, you have an experiment.

The Day One Distribution Audit

Before you write line one of code, answer these three questions in writing — not in your head:

1. Who is the sharpest pain?

Not a persona. A specific person. Give them a name, a job title, a Tuesday morning problem. “B2B SaaS founders” is not an answer. “A solo technical founder running sales calls for the first time and losing deals they don’t understand” — that’s an answer.

2. Where do they already gather?

Not where you wish they were. Where they actually spend time right now. A Slack community, a specific subreddit, a conference, a newsletter. Your distribution channel already exists. You just have to find it.

3. What would make them tell someone else within 48 hours?

Not “it’s useful.” Useful doesn’t spread. What specific moment in your product creates a story worth repeating — a result they can screenshot, a number that surprises them, an insight they immediately want to share with their team?

If you can’t answer all three before you build, you don’t have a distribution strategy. You have a hypothesis — and hope is not a channel.

Start With the Market, Not the Code

The best technical founders I’ve seen operate with this principle: fall in love with the problem and the channel simultaneously. They obsess over who they’re reaching and how — with the same rigor they apply to architecture and system design.

Your product’s value is only as real as your ability to put it in front of the right person at the right moment.

Build with that in mind from day one. Not day ninety.
Distribution isn’t a growth hack. It’s a founding decision.

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

In reality, founding a company is more like wearing a rotating set of hats. Some days you’re a philosopher. Other days, a recruiter. Occasionally, a therapist. Frequently, a firefighter. And always the person who can’t walk away when things break.

The founder’s job is to hold together the invisible architecture that transforms an idea into reality.

Some people feel and do this naturally; it took me some years building companies to fully understand it — founder must play multiple roles simultaneously, each critical to survival.

Let’s break them down and see if you are neglecting any …

The Vision Keeper

Every company begins with a story about the future. At first, that story feels obvious. Exciting. Inevitable.

But when you’re walking a thousand miles, the first steps look impossibly small. The hundredth step feels futile. The five-hundredth makes you question everything.

This is where founders earn their keep.

Someone needs to stand there and say: “We’re one step closer. The goal exists. It’s not a mirage.”

This isn’t motivational fluff. It’s a structural necessity. When everyone else is buried in the weeds — drowning in bugs, customer complaints, and burned-out Saturdays — you’re the one who holds the long view.

You remind people why this matters, where you’re going, and that it’s possible to get there. Without that voice, every setback feels existential.

The vision isn’t static. It evolves. But someone needs to be its custodian, its reiterator, its defender against the entropy of daily operations.

Without this role, companies don’t pivot — they drift. Seeing many such cases, aren't we 😉

The Recruiter

Here’s the truth most people won’t tell you: recruiting is your most important early-stage job.

Not product. Not sales. Not fundraising.

Recruiting.

Because everything else flows from who you bring through the door. Get ten insanely great people together early, and something magical happens — the group becomes self-policing. They won’t let mediocrity in. The bar maintains itself.

This is how culture actually works. Not through ping-pong tables or mission statements, but through the molecular-level composition of your team.

The best founders spend 30-40% of their time on talent (see examples at the end). They’re always recruiting, always watching for excellence, always building relationships with people they might not hire for years.

Why? Because great people compound. They attract other great people. They raise standards. They ship faster, think deeper, and care more. You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg recruiting. You may have read Dan Romero’s 15-year mission of building startup relationships.

Your hiring decisions are your company’s DNA. Recruit like your life depends on it.

The Customer Advocate

The easiest way to explain it is — Founders love ideas. Engineers love technology. Investors love markets. But none of those actually pay the bills. — Customers do!

Even though it’s so simple, most founders get this backwards.

They fall in love with technology, then try to find someone to sell it to. They build the solution before understanding the problem and the person with that problem. Because don't get me wrong — many of us believed that we understood the problem, but we never understood the person who had it. Because we thought it was us.

The correct sequence is the opposite: start with the customer, and her experience, and work backwards to the technology. The founder’s job is to obsess over the human on the other side of the screen. Because if you don’t, nobody will.

This isn’t obvious when you’re technical. When you can see the elegant solution, when the architecture is right there, it’s tempting to build it first and ask questions later.

But that’s how you accumulate scar tissue.

Your job as a founder is to be the bridge between what customers need and what your team builds. You translate frustration into features. Pain into priorities. Confusion into clarity.

This means spending time in the customer’s world. Not just reading surveys — actually watching them struggle, listening to their complaints, feeling their friction.

The best products aren’t born from genius insights. They’re born from deep, almost obsessive attention to how people actually live.

The Chief Editor

Focusing isn’t about saying yes. — It’s about saying no. That’s what Steve Jobs always said.

And this truly might be the hardest role because it goes against every instinct. When you’re building something new, you want to pursue every opportunity, chase every lead, and build every feature.

But optionality is the enemy of progress.

Your job is to be the editor-in-chief of your company’s story. You decide what makes it into the final cut. What gets built. What gets shelved. What gets killed.

This requires a particular kind of courage — the courage to disappoint people, to leave money on the table, to trust that depth beats breadth.

Apple became Apple because Jobs was willing to say no to thousands of good ideas to say yes to a handful of great ones. The iPhone didn’t have copy-paste at launch. It didn’t have apps. It barely did anything except make calls and browse the web.

But what it did, it did better than anyone else.

That’s the power of focus.

The Example Setter

Here’s what’s often missed about culture - what you tolerate becomes culture. And everyone is watching you even when you think they're not.

And it’s not what you say. It’s what you do when things get hard.

You can talk about quality all day. But when the deadline hits and something’s “good enough,” everyone watches to see what you do. Do you ship it or do you fix the extra bug?

Values aren’t policies. They are behaviors under pressure.

As a founder, you don’t create culture through documents or all-hands meetings. You permeate it through example. Every decision you make, especially the difficult ones, broadcasts to everyone what actually matters here.

Stay until midnight to fix something that only three people will notice? That’s your new standard.

Your team is always watching. Always calibrating their own behavior based on yours.

This is exhausting. It means you can never really clock out. Every action carries weight, sends signals, shapes the company’s DNA.

But it’s also leverage. When you embody the values you want to see, you don’t need compliance systems. The culture enforces itself.

Why This Matters

Because — before you can play any of these roles, you need the right reason.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: money is a terrible reason to start a company. It’s not strong enough to survive the pain. Startups are too volatile, too uncertain, too emotionally taxing to be fueled by financial goals alone. When things get hard — and they will — extrinsic motivation evaporates.

The founders who persist are the ones who feel like they have something they must express. Something that won’t leave them alone. An idea that nags. A problem that irritates. A future they can’t stop seeing. Sometimes you start a company not because you want to, but because nobody else will build the thing. That’s the difference. In an ideal case — founding isn’t chasing upside. It’s answering a calling. It's scratching your itch.

Soooo, one more time

As a founder — you can’t outsource any of these roles. You can’t delegate them. They’re inherently founder-level work.

The good news? Once you understand these roles, you can get better at them. You can build systems. You can create leverage. You can find what you love within the chaos.

Because that’s the final truth: you’ve got to love this work. Not the idea of being a founder, but the actual grinding, impossible, beautiful work of building something from nothing.

If you don’t, you’ll quit when it gets hard.

And it always gets hard.

Now let’s look at some real examples. These people didn’t start by knowing it all, nor doing it all well. Yet, here we are watching them build empires that inspire. 👇

And till next time — let's build better!
Pete

Real-World Examples

The Vision Keepers

1. Elon Musk (SpaceX): When SpaceX failed three rocket launches in a row and was nearly bankrupt, Musk’s role was to convince his team that the fourth launch would work — and that Mars colonization wasn’t a fantasy. He kept reiterating the vision even when the evidence suggested otherwise.

2. Brian Chesky (Airbnb): During the 2008 financial crisis, when investors called them “the worst idea ever,” Chesky held the vision that people would open their homes to strangers. He kept the team focused on the future even when revenue was coming from cereal boxes.

3. Reed Hastings (Netflix): In 2011, when the Qwikster pivot nearly destroyed Netflix, Hastings maintained the long-term vision of streaming while navigating short-term chaos. The vision of becoming HBO before HBO became Netflix kept the company alive.

The Recruiters

1. Steve Jobs (Apple): Jobs personally recruited John Sculley from Pepsi with the famous line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” He spent weeks recruiting key engineers for the Macintosh team.

2. Larry Page (Google): In Google’s early days, Page interviewed every candidate himself and maintained a hiring bar so high that he’d rather keep positions open than compromise. This created the self-policing culture Google became known for.

3. Jensen Huang (NVIDIA): Huang has been known to personally recruit top AI researchers and chip designers, spending years building relationships before hiring. He views recruiting as his primary competitive advantage.

The Customer Translators

1. Jeff Bezos (Amazon): Bezos famously leaves an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer. He reads customer complaint emails and forwards them with a “?” to executives, forcing the company to work backwards from customer experience.

2. Drew Houston (Dropbox): Before building Dropbox, Houston spent months in coffee shops watching people struggle with USB drives and email attachments. He built the entire product around observed customer frustration, not technical elegance.

3. Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble): After experiencing toxicity in dating apps, Wolfe Herd started with the customer experience of women feeling unsafe and worked backwards to the technology of women-first messaging.

The Chief Editors

1. Steve Jobs (Apple): Jobs killed dozens of product lines when he returned to Apple in 1997, focusing the company on four products. He said no to the Newton, the Cube, and countless other “good” ideas to focus on great ones.

2. Mark Zuckerberg (Meta): Despite pressure to monetize early, Zuckerberg said no to advertising for years, focusing solely on growth. He’s consistently said no to features that would complicate the core product.

3. Jan Koum (WhatsApp): Koum famously said no to ads, no gimmicks, no games — just messaging. He maintained radical focus on a single use case even as competitors added feature after feature.

The Example Setters

1. Satya Nadella (Microsoft): When Nadella became CEO, he didn’t just talk about “growth mindset” — he publicly admitted Microsoft’s mistakes, shared his own learning journey, and modeled vulnerability. The culture shifted because he embodied it.

2. Tobi Lütke (Shopify): Lütke codes regularly and commits to the main repository, showing engineers that technical excellence matters at every level. He spends weekends building side features to stay close to the craft.

3. Sara Blakely (Spanx): Blakely tested every product herself and shared her failures openly with the team. When she made mistakes, she celebrated them in meetings, creating a culture where experimentation was valued over perfection.

Till next time ... 😉

PS: “My name is Pete (aka BFG), and I can help you fix your distribution.😉"
(see, I learned from my own article)

Connect with me:
- on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/bfg
- on X: https://twitter.com/aka_BFG
- on TG: https://t.me/BrightFutureGuy 
- and I recommend joining BuildBetter YouTube Channel (formerly Web3 Magic): https://www.youtube.com/@Web3MagicPod

• Not hate.

• Not objections.

• Not competition.

Confusion.
Confusion is the silent killer of growth.

Someone lands on your website.
They squint. They scroll.
They try to decode what you do.

Three seconds later, they leave.

Not because you’re bad, but because thinking is expensive!
And nobody wants to spend mental energy on you.

The uncomfortable truth

You’re too close to your own business.

You know every detail.
Every feature.
Every nuance.

So you think you’re being clear.
But you’re not.

You’re speaking fluent insider. Your customer speaks survival = time to understand.
Those are two different languages.

And survival always wins.

My brain doesn’t care about your brand

Here’s something most founders miss.

Your customer’s brain isn’t trying to appreciate your clever copy.
It’s trying to conserve energy.

Biologically. Literally.

Your brain burns hundreds of calories a day just processing life:

• Notifications.

• Traffic.

• Work problems.

• Family logistics.

• 5,000+ ads screaming for attention.

So the brain has a ruthless filter:

• Does this help me survive or thrive?

• No?

• Ignore.

That’s it.
That’s the whole algorithm.

Not aesthetics.
Not storytelling awards.
Not brand voice.

Just:

“Is this useful to me right now?”

If the answer isn’t obvious in seconds, you’re invisible.

The paradox of smart founders

The smarter you are, the worse your messaging tends to be.
Because smart people over-explain.

You want to show nuance.
You want to sound sophisticated.
You want people to “get the depth.”

So you say things like:

• “We build holistic ecosystems.”

• “Empowering the future of digital transformation.”

• “Reimagining human potential through technology.”

These sentences sound impressive.
They say nothing.

Nobody wakes up thinking:

“God, I really need holistic ecosystems today.”

People wake up thinking:

• I couldn't sleep

• I need more customers

• My back hurts

• I’m broke

• I’m stressed

• I’m wasting time on stupid videos

Real problems. Concrete problems. Survival problems.

If your words don’t connect to those, you lose.

The two mistakes almost everyone makes

After working with enough founders, you start to see the same patterns repeat.
Different industries. Same errors.

Mistake 1: You’re vague

When someone asks what you do, you say: “It’s kind of hard to explain…”

That sentence alone is a red flag.
If it’s hard to explain, it’s hard to buy.

Remember simple slogan "Clarity scales." Complexity doesn’t.

Look at Amazon.
Their site is ugly.
But you buy in seconds.

Why?

Because everything screams:

• what it is

• what it costs

• whether it’s good

• how fast it arrives

No poetry. No "hard to explain.” Just a few points to make it clear why you should buy.
And that clarity prints money.

Mistake 2: You talk about too many things

Founders love options. — Customers don’t.

You want to be known for: (this could apply to me too!)

• strategy

• growth

• brand

• community

• partnerships

• content

• AI

• Web3

• consulting

• coaching

Your brain says: “We’re multi-dimensional.”
Their brain: “I don’t get it.”

You only get to own one thing.
Not three.
Not five.

One.

Because memory is limited. Ask yourself:

• When you think of KFC, what comes to mind? — Chicken.

  Not “fast casual operational excellence ecosystem.”

  Just chicken.

Simple wins.

The sentence that fixes everything

If you only do one thing after reading this, do this.
Write one sentence.

Not a manifesto.
Not a pitch deck.

One sentence.

Here’s the structure:

I help [specific person] solve [specific problem] so they can [specific outcome].

That’s it.
No cleverness allowed.

Examples:

• I help founders clarify their messaging so they can grow revenue.

• I help busy professionals sleep better so they wake up focused.

• I help small creators monetize their audience without ads.

Boring?

• Yes!

Effective?

• Extremely!

Because it answers the only question people care about:

“What’s in it for me?”

Why story works (and why most marketing doesn’t)

There’s a reason movies hold your attention for two hours, but websites lose you in ten seconds.

Story.
Story turns off the brain’s “ignore” filter.
Because story mirrors how we think about life.

Every good story has the same structure:

• A character wants something

• They face a problem

• They meet a guide

• The guide gives them a plan

• They succeed (or fail)

That’s every movie you love.
And it’s exactly how your business should be framed.

But most founders get this backwards.
They position themselves as the hero.

Wrong move.
You’re not the hero.
You’re the guide.

Your customer is the hero!
You’re Yoda, not Luke.
Gandalf, not Frodo.

People don’t pay heroes. They pay guides.
Because guides help them win.

That's how Donald Miller frames simple “what I can help you with” story in his Story Brand book:

A mental reframe that changes everything

Stop thinking:
“How do I explain my product?”

Start thinking:
“How do I reduce thinking for my customer?”

Marketing isn’t persuasion. It’s simplification.
You’re not trying to impress. You’re trying to remove friction.

Every extra sentence is friction.
Every abstraction is friction.
Every clever metaphor is friction.

Friction kills sales.

A practical afternoon reset

If your business feels stuck, here’s a simple reset you can do today.
Not theory. Execution exercise to test.

Step 1 — The clarity test

Explain what you do to a 12-year-old.
If they don’t understand instantly, rewrite.
Children are brutal clarity filters.

Adults are polite and pretend to understand.
Kids don’t.

Use that.
Not for final copy, for fixing your bloated message.

Step 2 — Fix your homepage header

Your headline should not be inspirational.
It should be obvious.

Bad:

Empowering tomorrow’s possibilities

Good:

We help freelancers get clients without cold outreach

One makes you sound smart. The other makes you money.
Choose well.

Step 3 — Pick your “one thing”

If someone remembers only one sentence about you, what should it be?

Write it.

Now delete everything that doesn’t reinforce it.

Yes, it will feel uncomfortable. That’s normal.
Focus always feels like loss.
But it’s leverage.

I know all about it. Guilty as charged. Just check Lab2094.com.

Step 4 — Create repeatable phrases

The best brands are boring on purpose.
They repeat the same message for years.

Think:

• Just do it

• Eat more chicken

• Clarify your message

Short. Memorable. Repeatable.

You want people finishing your sentences.
Not asking what you mean.

The ego problem nobody talks about

Here’s the part most founders won’t admit.

We avoid clarity because it feels… small and limiting!

We want to sound deep.
Sophisticated.
Multi-layered.

But customers don’t reward depth.
They reward usefulness.

Being simple isn’t dumbing down.
It’s respect.

It says: “I value your time enough to make this obvious.”

Clarity is empathy.
Confusion is ego.

A founder’s advantage

Here’s the upside.
Once you understand this, you gain a huge edge.
Because most people refuse to simplify.

They hide behind jargon.
You won’t.

So you instantly stand out.
Not because you’re louder.
Because you’re clearer.

And clarity feels like trust.
Trust drives revenue.

The quiet compounding effect

When your message is clear:

• conversations get shorter

• sales calls get easier

• referrals increase

• hiring improves

• partnerships click faster

Everything compounds.
Because people finally understand what to send your way.

If they can’t explain you, they can’t refer you.
And word of mouth dies.

Clarity fuels distribution.
Distribution fuels growth.

Distribution for ideas, products, art, …

The rule I live by

Here’s the heuristic I use for every project I work with:

If someone lands on this page for 5 seconds,
can they say what we do?

If not, it’s broken.
No exceptions.

The bottom line

Your business probably doesn’t need:

• a rebrand

• a new logo

• a prettier website

• more features

It needs fewer words.
Sharper words.
More honest words.
Words that connect directly to survival and progress.

Because at the end of the day, buying is simple.
People pay for things that make their lives better.

It may be — Faster. Safer. Easier.

If you can say how you do that — clearly — you win.
If you can’t, you lose.

So don’t try to sound smart.
Sound useful.

That’s the game.
And it’s winnable in a single afternoon.

TLDR Takeaways

1. Stop playing the Hero: You are the Guide. Your customer is the Hero who needs to "win the day".

2. The Survival Association: If your product isn't clearly tied to the user's ability to survive or thrive, they won't buy it.

3. Clarity over Cleverness: "Cute" marketing is a luxury for those who like being poor. Use "survival soundbites" instead.

4. Repeat the Soundbite: Marketing is an exercise in memorization. Use short, repeatable soundbites until they stick.

5. The One-Page Habit: If it doesn't fit on one page (or one canvas), it’s too complicated to scale.

I hope this gave you some hints for clearer thinking about your brand message.

Till next time, let’s build better businesses!

Pete (aka BFG)

PS: “My name is Pete (aka BFG), and I can help you fix your distribution.😉"
(see, I learned from my own article)

Connect with me:
- on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/bfg
- on X: https://twitter.com/aka_BFG
- on TG: https://t.me/BrightFutureGuy 
- and I recommend joining BuildBetter YouTube Channel (formerly Web3 Magic): https://www.youtube.com/@Web3MagicPod

I still have a LinkedIn in case you're that old.