A friend started a new company. It’s not a tech company; he makes physical products to sell to consumers. The products are traditionally sold through big box retailers as the main method of distribution (think Walmart or Target). This poses an interesting problem because consumers don’t interact with my friend’s company. The big box retailers sell tons of stuff, and they aren’t going to spend time trying to understand or get insights from their customers who buy my friend’s products. They’ll share information like sales metrics, and if my friend’s products aren’t selling they’ll tell him that, but they won’t be able to tell him why.

My friend recognizes that not being connected to the end consumer will be an issue. He wants his finger on the pulse of his customers so he can adjust as needed to keep his products relevant to them. Otherwise, their tastes could change, and he wouldn’t know it until his sales at big box retailers decline materially. Even then, he wouldn’t know why.

So, he’s considering adding someone to his team whose entire job is to be the voice of the customer. They’d be responsible for staying in touch with end users of the products, gleaning insights from them, and translating those insights into data that their team can use to make decisions.

I’ve heard of voice-of-the-customer-type roles in software and tech, which I think is much easier to accomplish. There’s often a direct relationship with customers because they’re buying from your website. And there are plenty of tools that help you gauge how customers are using (or failing to use) your products. But I’ve never considered how you keep a finger on the pulse of customers who buy physical products through retailers like Walmart.

I’m really curious about this and can’t wait to see how this plays out for my friend. I think he’s on the right track with his voice-of-the-customer role.

When I was in college, I took a course that was 100% based on group presentations. The goal of the class was to turn people into better team members. The idea was that if you work better in a team, your chances of success in most careers rise. But one thing they had to solve was helping people understand where they stood. Am I a good team member and just need to stay the course? Or am I a not-so-great team member who needs to make serious changes?

Their solution: stack ranking.

At the end of each project, every team member had to rate the rest of their team. The catch was that we had to order group members from best to worst. Each person submitted something that looked like this:

1. Sue
2. John
3. Bob
4. Mary
5. Tim

Sue got the most points, and Tim got the fewest. After several projects, you began to see a pattern. If you were consistently ranking low, you had to look in the mirror and ask yourself why your peers were consistently giving you low ratings. Your class grade was heavily dependent on your overall ranking at the end of the semester.

That experience was eye-opening. It showed me the power of group members stack ranking each other. Getting a low rating from a teacher was different than getting one from your peers, with all your peers seeing it. The latter felt much worse, partly because it was public but mostly because it came from peers, not an authority figure. No one wants their peers to think less of them. So, what happened was that the stack ranking caused people who weren’t great team members to change their behavior and try to become better team members.

The stack ranking also fostered a competitive dynamic that elevated the effort of the entire class. There could be only one person in the top spot, so everyone dialed it up a notch, hoping to become #1. Ranking highest was a direct result of your ability to be a better team member than everyone else. If someone was ahead of you, you had to try harder. The other person would then try harder too, hoping to hang on to their position. The result was a bar that was continually being raised by group members.

I’m a fan of stack ranking and publicly displaying the results in group settings. It’s a great way to raise the quality of the group effort, and it gives members feedback that’s hard to ignore.

Today, I read an article about a 19-year-old college freshman who sold the start-up that he and his friends started two years ago while they were in high school. Its product is a calorie-tracking app that allows you to take pictures of food to track the number of calories you consume. The founder says the company has a $50 million annual-recurring-revenue run rate. It’s reported that it generated in the neighborhood of $30 million last calendar year. This founder embraced AI technology early and used savvy social media marketing to get customers. All while being a full-time student.

This story isn’t the norm and likely won’t become the norm, but I think it demonstrates that we’ve entered a new era of entrepreneurship. Building a product and distributing it have gotten many times easier (though still not easy).

Entrepreneurs who are driven and understand how to best solve a painful problem can now build a solution faster than ever with AI. You don’t have to be technical to build a software- or internet-based solution. If you can describe the problem and the solution, AI will literally write the code to build the product and will do it quickly, perhaps in just a few minutes. To get customers and distribution, entrepreneurs can create content that resonates with their potential customers on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X using a smartphone (fancy equipment isn’t necessary). If they’re successful, their company can scale rapidly.

Now, to be transparent, the stickiness of customers of AI solutions and the durability of AI revenue are yet to be determined. Regardless, it’s clear that starting and scaling a company rapidly is now a viable option for anyone considering entrepreneurship.

If you’re interested in reading what the founder said about the sale, see his post on X here.

You can read more details about the deal and the CEO of the company that acquired the students’ app here.

This past week, I had the chance to attend a celebration. It was an “exit” party. My friend recently sold a majority stake in his company for over $1.5 billion and threw a party to celebrate the milestone. It was a ton of fun, and one thing he shared with the guests has been replaying in my head.

He had over 600 employees at the time the transaction closed last month. He shared that over 160 of them became millionaires when they received their proceeds from the transaction. That’s an amazing statistic—it’s life-changing money for over 160 Atlanta families. It’s also a testament to working for a great company that’s selling a product or service in a fast-growing market and getting equity (i.e., employee stock options, restricted stock units, etc.) in the company.

I’m delighted for my friend and his employees. I especially tip my hat to him for sharing the pie with his team, which isn’t something all entrepreneurs embrace. Some have an I-want-it-all-for-myself mentality, which, in my opinion, limits their ability to attract and, more importantly, retain high-quality people. My friend took the opposite approach and was able to create a tremendous amount of wealth for himself alongside a great team who also became wealthy.

This week I caught up with a friend, an entrepreneur who sold his company and has advised founders for over a decade. He pointed out something that differentiates entrepreneurs from others. Entrepreneurs get excited by the potential of an idea and how big the end result could be. That’s enough to get them started. They’re totally focused on the end and the one next thing they can do to move forward. That’s it. That’s all they need to press go.

When they talk with non-entrepreneurs, they can become frustrated because many non-entrepreneurs focus on something different. Non-entrepreneurs can’t wrap their head around the end result because the path to it is unclear or has imperfections. They want to labor over details, achieve clarity, and resolve imperfections before they even think about starting down the path or think about how big the idea could be. The entrepreneurs feel like they’re being dragged into the details and asked questions they can’t answer and that don’t matter yet. They want to talk about the big, high-level opportunity, but they’re being beaten up over the small details of the plan. It’s annoying.

I agree with my friend. I’ve been in this situation many times. Someone asks me detailed questions about something I want to do, and I get frustrated because I don’t think the things they’re asking me matter yet. They’ll be figured out in due course.

A lot of the disconnect is in how entrepreneurs approach getting things done. They’re problem solvers by nature and often must do things they haven’t done before. The way they do that is by focusing on their next action, not all the actions or steps they’ll need to take. They know that with every step they take, they’ll learn something (good or bad) that will help them figure out what the next step should be. Then they’ll act again. This continual process of acting, learning, and acting is essentially an iterative approach to reaching the result they want without starting with a clear path or plan.

When entrepreneurs are asked to provide a detailed plan or path, they become frustrated because they know it isn’t necessary. Things aren’t likely to go as planned, even if there is a plan. Solutions to problems will reveal themselves along the way. The best way to reach a big goal is to get started on it and figure things out along the way.

Recently, I caught up with the founder of a high-growth company. The company exploded in growth over the last few years, and now they’re planning for the next twelve months. The founder mentioned that one of his focus areas is maturing the organization. He wants to add more process and structure so they can continue to scale rapidly without the wheels falling off.

When growth is crazy, you normally see a lot of hiring. Things are happening so fast that no one has time to delve into problems or the things holding them back, so they throw bodies at them and hope the smart people they hire will figure it out. The result is continued growth but a lack of process and structure.

When the leaders start planning for continued growth over the next few years, they realize they can’t get there by doing what they’ve been doing. They want more visibility into what’s happening operationally below them, more operational consistency, and assurance that their operations can scale as the company continues to grow.

It’s a cycle I’ve seen before: growth, efficiency, and then more growth. I like to think of it as the company catching up to the expectations implied by its revenue growth. For high-growth companies, it’s part of their normal cycle.

This week I spoke independently with two early-stage entrepreneurs who were trying to figure out problems their respective businesses were facing. During our conversations, I realized they didn’t understand the real problem. They just knew they had a problem and wanted to solve it, but they couldn’t articulate it or tell me the root cause. This made it harder for me to help them as I wasn’t sure what I was helping them with and don’t have enough context because I’m not in either business day-to-day.

Both experiences made me think of Kidlin’s Law, a simple but powerful law:

If you write a problem down clearly, then the problem is half solved.

A powerful aspect of this simple law that many overlook is its writing component. It doesn’t say figure things out in your head or describe the problem out loud. It says you should write the problem down. You don’t have to think clearly to sound good when speaking, but writing demands clarity. When you speak, your brain can gloss over unclear steps and still produce a convincing narrative. Writing exposes those gaps. Writing a problem down forces you to evaluate each step of your thinking and understand the problem deeply. It also forces you to figure out the best way to communicate the problem clearly (and preferably concisely) to others. Once you’ve written it down in a way that others can understand, you’ve cemented your understanding of the problem in your brain and made it easier for you to speak coherently about the problem, with extreme confidence, to people who can help you. It should also make it easier for you to articulate precisely how they can help you, which increases the probability that they will help you (if people have to figure out how to help you, they usually don’t bother).

I’m a fan of Kidlin’s Law. It’s something simple that anyone can do, but most people won’t. For those who do, it improves the chances that they’ll solve whatever problem they’re facing.

Today, I had the privilege of participating in a conversation about how to add value to founders in the Atlanta ecosystem. There were suggestions to create educational tracks that address common problems founders face, such as fundraising. All of them were valid and would add value. But they wouldn’t resonate with all entrepreneurs—only those who are experiencing a problem related to that track.

When I think about what resonates universally with founders, two things come to mind:

• Peer community – Entrepreneurship is lonely. Entrepreneurs want to be around other entrepreneurs who are going through the same things—people who can relate to the struggle. And if they’re ambitious and trying to build a company that can grow fast, they want to be around others who are trying to do the same. I once read “Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” Founders want to be around other entrepreneurs they can compete with—entrepreneurs who’ll sharpen them.
• Peer accountability – Execution is what matters most in entrepreneurship. Founders want to get stuff done, but they’re human. Sometimes they need a friendly nudge. Sometimes they need to be held accountable by peers they respect, don’t want to let down, and compete with (in a friendly manner).

When I thought about how to present these ideas as a value proposition that would quickly resonate with entrepreneurs in the Atlanta ecosystem, or any ecosystem for that matter, I came up with this:

• Community for high-growth founders
• Facilitated accountability groups of peers at similar stages

Offer those two opportunities to entrepreneurs, and I’d bet most would jump at the chance to be part of something like that, even if they don’t know all the specifics of how it works.

Today brought a good thought exercise. I’m glad I was a part of it because it got me thinking about what value prop would resonate with ambitious entrepreneurs. I think the above would be something entrepreneurs would instantly get and want to be part of.

Today I had a conversation with a friend and entrepreneur about how he works. He described his system, which relies heavily on an AI assistant that he chats with daily. He graciously showed me what he built and how it all works.

I won’t get into all the specifics, but a few things stuck with me:

• MCP – He’s using model context protocol (MCP) to connect all his various tools to Claude’s AI assistant so the assistant has proper context around what’s important to him.
• Database – He stores everything—contacts, goals, etc.—in a Notion database, which Claude accesses via MCP.
• 10 items max – In any given day, Claude gives him no more than 10 action items to focus on getting done.
• Specialization – He built a different AI assistant for each part of his life (work, personal, etc.). Each acts according to specific instructions and accesses the appropriate data in a Notion database.
• Update permissions – He gives Claude update permissions so it can update his calendar, his Notion database, and other systems it has access to.

I was impressed with his setup. He’s leveraging AI to manage various aspects of his life and help him pinpoint what to focus on every day.

Last week, I shared (see here) that I was curious about how entrepreneurs learn to work. My thesis is that many don’t know how to work, and the ones who do are self-taught out of necessity. In the last few days, I’ve talked to a few entrepreneurs and asked these point-blank questions:

• How do you decide what to work on each day?
• What did your last workday look like?
• What did your last workweek look like?  
• How did you learn how to work as a founder?

The first three questions are to understand how they work. The last question is the most important one.

I’ve done only a handful of these sessions, but so far, the answer is that they learned over time by piecing together what people shared with them. Also, the forcing function was stress and anxiety, which made them realize that how they were working was a big problem.

It’s early days, and I’m curious. I’ll have more of these conversations with entrepreneurs. This might be an overlooked problem that many entrepreneurs face.