I help early-stage founders find PMF and build a successful go-to-market motion.
Salt Lake City, UT
Joined November 2009
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If you’re a technical founder who needs pipeline, you need a customer education plan.
The best part of it is already in your call notes.
You’ve talked to 30 people with the same problem. Each thinks their situation is unique. You know it isn’t; you’ve heard the same problem articulated over and over.
That’s a pattern, and only you can see it. That's gold and your customers want to hear that insight.
I created a free resource to help founders. DM me if you'd like it.
My bet is "the church" will never let the lake collapse. Grateful for this and all the other generous donations they've committed.
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These aggressive reeds consume twice as much water as native plants, obstruct natural water flows, degrade critical habitat for millions of migratory birds, and increase wildfire risk.
The funding will accelerate removal efforts and support long-term wetland restoration led by the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner and @DNR.
Together, we’re going to save the Lake.
If you’re an early-stage founder who needs pipeline, you need a customer education plan. Here’s how I’d build it in seven steps.
1. Define your "Desperate Who". Name the exact title at a specific type of company. “Robotics engineer at a non-warehouse robotics company deploying its first autonomous fleet,” not “robotics leaders.”
2. Define your "Desperate Why". What is the job they’re trying to do and what’s breaking.
3. Define the "Desperate Why Now". What happens to the business if nobody fixes it.
4. Founder credibility. Write out at least three stories of how you solved this before you started the company.
5. Mistakes. Three ways the Who gets it wrong today.
6. Patterns. Three themes you’ve noticed across every conversation with the Who.
7. Surprises. Three things that surprised you building and deploying the product for customers.
That’s 12 topics you already know. Cut out any topic idea you haven't lived or heard firsthand. No guesses. Also rewrite any overt product pitch.
Then post 2-3x per week from your personal account, not your company page.
Technical founders will rebuild an auth system over a weekend before they’ll post on @X
I’ve watched this for years now, across hundreds of seed-stage founders. Of everything that stalls a company between first customers and $1M, this is near the top of the list, and it’s the one founders least expect: the product works, a handful of customers are happy, growth is flat, and the thing that would fix it is the thing they refuse to do.
The stated objections come in a few flavors.
“Posting is cringe.”
“My audience is different.”
“My posts have to be perfect before I’ll publish one.”
Plenty of founders skip the objections and agree with me outright. They nod, they say they know they need to do this, and then three months pass and nothing goes out. Or four posts go out in week one, the engagement is modest, and the whole thing quietly dies.
My read on why: it’s the last thing on the list they actually want to do, so it sits at the bottom of the priority stack every single week, and the bottom of the stack never gets touched. Building is the default state for a technical founder because building is what they’re excellent at. Shipping a feature has a clear finish line and a dopamine hit. Writing about a customer’s problem has neither, at least not for the first month or two.
So the founder does what feels like the responsible thing instead and hires someone to run cold email. A few years ago that worked okay. Today it doesn’t. Reply rates have collapsed to 1% if you’re lucky, and paid ads aren’t the answer either; they reach the sliver of buyers already shopping, who usually have a vendor they trust by the time they search.
What’s working for pipeline today is educating your target customer before they ever search. And which companies are doing that well in your category? In most, nobody. That’s the opening, and it’s sitting there for the one person who knows the problem better than anyone on the buyer’s side.
What I tell founders: you don’t need a personal brand and you don’t need the post to be good. You need to describe one specific person’s problem so accurately that they stop scrolling because it sounds like you’ve been reading their Slack. Then do it again next week, whether or not the first one got any likes. Likes are noise; a post with eight likes and two booked calls beats one with forty likes and none.
The habit is the hard part, and it’s the whole thing. The founders this works for aren’t the best writers. They’re the ones who treated it like a standing meeting they weren’t allowed to cancel.
If you’re a technical founder stuck here, I’m happy to compare notes.
If an employee was at a startup for 10 years, promoted 6x, but the founder is out there giving them negative back channel references does that say more about the employee or the founder?
Doug Regner retweeted
Averaging all my different rankings for best overall state for families.
Ranked best to worst. Save this cheat sheet for your future.
Doug Regner retweeted
My takeaway from Anthropic rebuilding its source control for agent-scale work: the unit of autonomy has to be bigger than a coding task.
Writing a change is one step. A software factory has to carry it through integration, testing and release, then use failures to improve the next attempt.
The hard part is how changes interact. Two can pass separately and fail together. A passing result describes one version, not every version after it. With more agents, keeping that evidence tied to what ships gets harder.
I’d measure how much work reaches production correctly, how often engineers step in to fix or unblock the work, and how quickly the system recovers. Counting agents or generated code doesn’t tell me that.
Faster coding is valuable. The bigger leap is making the whole lifecycle capable of absorbing it.
Doug Regner retweeted
If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy. This sounds obvious, but surprisingly few founders do it, and it often yields valuable insights.
Initial (not ideal)
Customer
Profile
In the early stage your ICP ≠ TAM. Start winning narrowly focused and then expand.
Doug Regner retweeted
Be profitable and run your company with maximal agentic loops
You don’t need to sell more of your co anymore
$10M profit per year reinvested is like an annual Series A no dilution
The best startups do this now. No whinging about the Series A/B crunch.
You don’t need saving.
Series A and Series B are the hardest rounds for founders today.
Founders launch a vertical AI SaaS company. They reach $1M-$3M ARR in 2 years or $5M-$10M in 3-4 years.
They go out to market with their 1x-3x growth. Almost no interest from investors.
If it's not the right category or a deep, long-term conviction bet, most investors stay away.
Founders are stuck with large pref stacks and a market that doesn't value this growth. They are neither sustainable (at their current burn) nor venture-fundable (without growth).
The exit options (if available) don't leave much for the team. In most cases, founders are required to join the acquiring company (but they aren't interested).
I talk to many founders who have been misadvised, and they keep grinding without making progress.
The Series A or B that didn't happen won't magically happen in 1 year with a little more progress. If the market moves much faster than your company progresses, you will always be behind. If you are told today to hit some metrics and come back, the market will have already moved by the time you return.
Distribution and data
I'd expand the moats left to:
- Proprietary data or content: data nobody else has, or unique content you can create
- Network effects / community: users make it more valuable for each other
- Audience / distribution: you can get attention on demand
- Physical component: hardware, locations, real-world operations
- Capital: owning assets and investing (esp into the AI companies as they are and will suck up large parts of the economy)
- Regulatory: licenses and legal barriers
