I walked off a bus into about 50 cameras and straight back into the trenches.
Camera crews followed me from then on. It felt a bit like going back to school, and the strangest feeling was noticing I’m the oldest here by a good few years.
These days my work is mostly strategy and managing people. It’s the natural progression of founders with a successful business. But here it’s like being back at square one: finding first customers, getting on sales calls and working out what a good pitch looks like.
At the same time I’ve got someone looking over my shoulder judging me on it in real time.
It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed when you’re constantly under the microscope.
Being scrappy is a skill you need to maintain
I’ll be honest, before I said yes to Stan Launchpad I was dreading it. You don’t know how you’ll be scripted or what story arc you’ll be given (you know how these shows go), and for my personal brand that’s a lot of risk.
But Finn, my co-founder, and I are launching Heading, an AI search tool, and launching a new business is hard. Cementing a place in the current attention economy is harder than ever. A show where you build live in front of a mainstream audience was too good to ignore.
What I’ve found is that all of us as founders lose that scrappiness as we grow. What was once being in the trenches, putting out fires as they come, turns into managing people, teaching, leading and guiding with a bird’s eye view.
Being scrappy is a muscle, and it withers if you don’t use it.
Balancing on the edge of the rules
Scrappy isn’t the same as cutting corners, but they’re on the same spectrum.
When you’re judged in real time and the pressure’s on, the line between the two gets thin. Cutting corners then becomes bending rules, plausible deniability, and ultimately unwanted consequences: it’s a slippery slope.
The organisers here caught on and are adjusting how points are scored. Some teams who thought they were moving in the grey may find that they stepped out of it.
And while it all sounds dramatic (great for TV by the way), I find it’s all a bit of a microcosm of the realities of running a business on the outside.
That’s the risk we all take when we get back in the trenches. The urgency is useful but it can push you towards shortcuts that can end up costing you. The hardest skill can often be knowing which corners can be cut and which are necessary.
Go and do this
So by Friday, put a week in the diary with your co-founder. It doesn’t need to be two weeks on camera. Join the sales calls, sit in a team member’s seat, get scrappy again. If nothing else, that adrenaline rush of being in the weeds will remind you of why you started your business in the first place.
Finn and I have got closer because of this, and we’ve figured out how to get the best from each other. There really is nothing else like it.
Help us in the competition
We get scored for how much interest we get in our product. So there’s a direct way you can help us.
What is our new business Heading?
When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI which brand to go with, you’re either in the answer or you’re not. Heading shows you where your brand turns up in that hierarchy, who’s getting recommended instead, and which sources the AI is pulling from. Then it gives you the tasks to work on to fix that, with the evidence attached.
And optimising AI for this purpose is already incredibly important for businesses. Seer Interactive released a study that shows AI-referred shoppers are up to 9x more likely to convert than regular visitors.
So if you run a brand, or an agency it’s definitely worth a look, or you’re likely leaving huge amounts of revenue on the table.
We are running a webinar for Heading this Friday, 16th October, at 1pm so you can find out exactly what Heading can do for your business. I’ll be there with Finn so we’d love to see you.
Next edition will be on Sunday, speak then.
- Luke
P.S. Know someone else who’d find Heading useful? Send them this! Every sign up really does help us in the competition.
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