tell me, what are you getting done this week?

I see that it is Xmas vibes, people are out, emails are bouncing, office is emptier.

This might be one of the reasons I don't like winter, particularly New Year's and Christmas.

The traditional conventions making you stop when you don't want to.

Or perhaps I hate admitting Xmas is filled with conversations like this:

Tension & Weekends

So let me take you to last weekend, starting Friday night and extending to Sunday.

We have been experiencing churn in GodmodeHQ.

We also have been having difficulty in matching customer expectations to what we can deliver.

In short the problem is that, our product is expected to deliver bookings and replies. Magically. This is valid in surface.

However, the variety of the factors that have an effect into a realised sale are just too wide. Website, messaging, PMF, pain point and more. Of most of which we do not have control over.

This creates a tension between usage and what we can provide.

If you are using Hubspot or Apollo, you write the message and send it.

If you are using GMHQ, we write the message (with your prompts) and send it.

Hence from the eyes of the customer, we are responsible to get the booking. Not them.

So I sat down Friday night and started drinking (caffein). In an attempt to resolve this.

Purpose was to figure out a way forward. So I did, because I had to.

We started cooking the next evolution and version of GodmodeHQ.

Surprise: It is a workspace run with AI agents.

Slack with and for AI agents.

We are working on this with a set of early customers who are pretty excited.

(if you are curious on how and what exactly we arrived at, DM me, otherwise I won't bore you)

Recently getting almost weekly chat requests from aspiring founders, some of them younger and some of them older than myself.

They are all exceptional people that I am lucky to know.

Yet if historical performance is an indicator, 99% of these amazing people will fail.

Why?

To find this out, I went back to the memories and notes I held from these conversations. I was reminded of this interview: Video

Jensen was talking about how building Nvidia was 1000x harder than he thought it would be.

Which brings me back to why many of us fail:

It is because we really cannot estimate how hard it is. At one point, it becomes so painful that rationally speaking, quitting becomes the logical and healthier choice.

So you end up as a Product Manager in a Series C company and people drop comments like "Excited" and "Congratulations" .

I will leave you with this.

Cheers to you if you are irrational.

Are customers churning? Good.

Did some of your engineers quit? Good.

You are almost out of money? Good.

Not bad. Good.

Do something about it.

In short:

If you are going to eat shit, don't nibble. (Source)

Unfaithfully yours,

Mert