Building startups? I’ve spent 18+ years starting, scaling & supporting them. 🎮 Founder @PlayLeeg 🚀 Helping founders grow at @LaunchpadIoM 💬 DMs open for collabs, mentoring, or partnerships.

I am curious... youtube.com/watch?v=keAEh70a…

Hiring a head of sales is the most expensive way to avoid asking why nobody is buying. Sales are short, so the founder hires. Six months on, nothing has moved, and the diagnosis becomes marketing. Before the job advert, write one paragraph on why sales are short, in a customer's words. A founder who can't explain the problem has hired someone to guess at it on a salary. #Startups #Founders

After the storm 🌝 #isleofman

What do you think of this? youtube.com/watch?v=2176dnVR…

A startup only spreads wealth if the people who build it own part of it. Give every hire shares. Then say four numbers out loud: the count, the percentage, what sits above them, the cost to exercise. Can't explain the fourth? You've handed out a lottery ticket and called it ownership. A startup that keeps the equity at the top has only moved wealth from one small group to another. #Startups #Founders

The product you built is rarely what your customers are paying for. Leeg licensed games anyone could play free. About 70,000 registered, ad then this 200 users. Not all, but they paid for the weekly tournament, not the game. Ask your last ten customers what they got. Price that. A startup that knows what its customers are really buying stops competing on features. #Startups #Founders

Calm before the storm 🍃 #isleofman

"I know a few people with money" is not a funding plan. A founder told me the round was step one. No product, no customer, investors not yet asked. Reverse it. One customer who paid. What the money buys that revenue can't. The date it runs out. A startup that plans the raise before the first sale has handed its hardest decision to someone who's never met its customer. #Startups #Founders

Hi all, I've built a tool that tells founders how much to raise and how long their money lasts based on my experience and learnings. Would you try it and tell me what's confusing? It's free and takes about 15 minutes. preseedhq.com

A startup's first product is trust. Something breaks and the founder goes quiet until it's fixed. That silence is what customers remember. Send the message first: what broke, what it means for them, the date they'll hear next. Signed by you. Customers forgive a startup's delay faster than they forgive finding out about it. #Startups #Founders

Working alone, your plan passes every test you set it. I've carried one in my head for weeks. Every test it took, I wrote and marked myself. Said it out loud once and it split into three decisions I'd been calling one. Find the person who asks what breaks it. Then write it down. A startup plan nobody has argued with is the founder's opinion, written neatly. #Startups #Founders

I've mentored many founders and never written down the problems they keep bringing me. The same few come up again and again. I answer them in the moment and move on. Meanwhile I've been planning my own work alone, from my own assumptions. That's the exact thing I tell founders not to do. So I'm doing 30 Days of @boardyai in public. Every day until Nov 30, @boardyai is my thinking partner, and I'll share what I learn here.

The week after a launch is the only week you can still see what went wrong. By month two, memory has rewritten it into the version that flatters you. Four questions, within seven days, everyone in the room: what happened, why, what we'd change, what we'll do next. A founder's review this week costs an hour. The one they skip costs the next launch. #Startups #Founders

A technical co-founder is judged on what they chose not to build. The best engineer in the room and the person who decides what the product won't do yet are two different jobs. Skip the competence question. Ask what they refused to build last month, and why. A technical co-founder who can't name what they refused to build is taking orders from the backlog. #Startups #Founders

A working demo no longer proves a founder can build a company. The build takes a fortnight now. Investors have stopped reading commitment off it. What they read instead is who paid, how much, and whether they came back. Open your next pitch with the customer. Show the product last. A paying customer proves you built something worth buying. #Startups #Founders

We have a sushi shokunin at home! 🍣 😁 #isleofman

Do you think the bubble needs to burst? youtube.com/watch?v=tGRB8ECy…

A finished product proves you can build, not that anyone wants it. Polish makes founders certain before any customer speaks. Write down what you believe that no customer has said out loud. Pick the line the business dies without and get one real buyer to confirm or kill it this week. A founder's confidence in a finished product is a feeling about the build, not a fact about the customer. #Startups #Founders

A founder who skips the hard customer work pays for it in the first investor meeting. The product can be built in a fortnight now. The customer calls still take months. Investors ask one edge-case question and listen for whether a customer gave you the answer. Write down the five hardest questions a customer has asked you. Under five, keep calling. #Startups #Founders

It was a great session and so much to learn from Liam 🚀