Startup Founders: Quietly Freaking

Hey Founder,

You're probably quietly freaking out. It's a common theme I am hearing from founders at every stage of maturity.

Every other LinkedIn post screaming with ridiculousness. The founder who raised $30m in three minutes with AI, solo founders running businesses with 40 AI agents, MVPs vibe coded in a weekend with 100 customers and $22k MRR, the AI Marketing agency getting 82% conversion rates from emailing 3% of the world. AI video doubles auto-posting across founder socials while they sleep driving endless qualified leads. The comment startup, follow me, and hum a verse from Enya to get my 93 page playbook posts.

And then, right now, as I’m writing this, my phone sends me a Forbes notification: "SaaS is dead" (I mean… it’s probably true. But still.)

It's relentless. Mostly bullshit. Profoundly disheartening if you take it at face value. Everyone seems to just be doing it better, righter, easier, clearer, than you. And it creates a sickening feeling...

You might be doing everything right. And still losing.

This is the game right now. Everyone can build a product, hack distribution, spam out cold emails. The baseline for "effort" has shifted, speed used to be the edge. Now, speed is the floor.

So many founders right now aren’t confused, they have absolute clarity, resilience, vision, all the pre-requisites. They’re exhausted because the goalposts won't stop moving. And stopping to acknowledge it feels like it would be terminal.

You're shipping product. Talking to users. Fixing onboarding. Grinding at founder-led sales. Doing all the right things. You're in motion, people like the product, some people are paying for it, it seems to cross the threshold ish of some form of fit, some sort of problem people will pay for.

Yet. Quietly freaking out. Everyone is. Even the ones in revenue. Even the ones with VC $ in the bank. The game is changing in real time. The only predictability is AI will get faster, cheaper, and better.

This is where core principles rise up, this is newsletter seven of four thousand on trying to bring all the pieces together, of how you might think about thinking, this is not a "do all of this, i'm right, narrative, it's maybe something in here sparks the thing"...

• Your unique edge: Your early moat is you and your motion, not your product.
• Unreasonable effort: Pushing past "enough" to find the breakthroughs others can't.
• Building for the brain: Optimizing for human psychology, not just features.
• Questioning inherited labels: Ensuring your strategy isn't based on someone else's flawed map.
• Leveraging pressure: Turning overwhelm into your most powerful fuel.
• Precision in execution: Ruthless focus and completion in a world of vague motion.

So, what do you do when speed is no longer a competitive advantage? First, realize speed was never the objective. It was always velocity (speed in the right direction). Second, realize speed was never the objective 😄, it was clock speed (the quickest to release, observe, learn, iterate, release).

Then. Weaponize what others ignore. You go deeper. You get weirder. You move from what's possible to what's irreplaceable. Start thinking about what only you can do, your spin, your way, your view, your angle. It's about out-thinking, out-maneuvering, and out-lasting.

I know this reads like last week's Moat. It's kinda the same, just a different angle. Because what it really means is.. Don’t flinch.

The arena is real, the pressure is real, build for conviction. As everything feels louder never stop recalibrating.

...and when the noise creeps in, do the only thing you can.
Breathe. Focus. Keep moving.
I hope you are doing ok.

LFG,
-- James