do too much

• your gut feeling on what is acceptable or required is usually completely off

• your sense of “enough” comes from watching other people. But most people do almost nothing.

• so your gut is miscalibrated by default.

• you have to make a conscious effort to recalibrate

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sell before

• coding before you have paying customers is usually just procrastination

• you usually need a lot less to start selling than you initially assume

• selling then figuring out how to deliver is still the best strategy especially now that it became so much easier to code anything

going super-saiyan

• this feels very true to me

• every time I tried to do something or saw other people do something motivated by for example money or status little came out of it

• most projects that turned into something meaningful were driven by genuine curiosity and the desire to bring something cool into the world

looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking. It’s currently free here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

• commoditization of software is 100% real and not just a meme

• in the past months I’ve brought the 3 pieces of software we were spending the most money on in-house by vibe coding solutions that now costs close to zero dollars to run

• some software is certainly too complex but a ton of it is just glorified CRUD wrappers

b2b ads

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(b2bads.com sponsored this issue)

building the biggest thing you can

• are you working on the biggest thing you possibly can?

• if someone watched you for a week, would they think you’re serious about your goals?

transparency and accountability

• very useful question to ask: how can we make our systems more transparent and accountable?

• increasing transparency and accountability is virtually never a bad investment of time

A player myth

• this is one of these classic pieces of advice that sounds insightful until you try to do anything with it

• imo there is no such thing as A players, B players, or whatever

• everyone can be an A player or B player or C player depending on the environment you put them in

• this is maybe most obvious if you look at sports teams

• players that looked like unstoppable worldbeaters when put into a new team that doesn’t play to their strength

looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking. It’s currently free here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

• everything is changing so much faster right now. You can build features that took weeks in a single day using AI. Companies pivot fast and customer preferences even faster.

• the only way not only to survive but to strive is to stay agile.

• and the only way to stay agile is by keeping things simple.

• keeping things simple required insane discipline and commitment.

• naturally all systems become more complex. you have to clean the house all the time and ruthlessly say no and get rid of stuff.

dofollow.com

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(dofollow.com sponsored this issue)

get luckier

• This is one of the lessons every found eventually learns.

• No one can actually predict accurately how a market is going to respond to something you put out there.

• Trying to be more clever, researching more, thinking long about what to do is usually a waste of time. It’s better to use the energy and time you would spend considering options to just do all of them if there is obvious best choice.

quitting entrepreneurship

• a topic that’s come up a lot lately: how few people are actually built to be entrepreneurs.

• tons of business influencers act like anyone can do it if you just hustle hard enough (and buy their courses).

• in reality, you need a pretty weird mix of soft skills to have a real shot.

  and the only way to know is to try. way too many people already say “don’t bother, you’ll fail.” that’s useless advice.

• the key is being honest with yourself once you’re in it. if you find out you hate being your own boss, just stop. there’s zero shame in getting a normal job again.

• plus: almost no one has the full skill set. a co-founder who complements your gaps massively increases your odds.

irl

• I like being at home. I like my routine. I like cranking out 14 pomodoros a day.

• but I’ve never once regretted a workaction.

• the past three weeks I’ve been traveling. first visiting a friend in Korea who runs a business like mine, then meeting my Sales.co co-founder Ryan in Chiang Mai.

• we had conversations and came up with ideas that just don’t happen over calls.

• sign to do this: pick a place, text a few people “thinking about going to X, wanna join?” that’s usually all it takes.

looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

3. 📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking. It’s currently free here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

• good reminder that the number of already existing companies should never be a factor when deciding what to work on

• there’s always room for faster, cheaper, or simply less shitty

dofollow

• Get found by AI and future customers.

• SaaS teams use dofollow.com to rank on Google and in LLMs. In 2025, visibility belongs to brands with authority.

• Check it out here.

(dofollow.com sponsored this issue)

pricing psychology

• pricing psychology is so insanely counter intuitive and it’s always worth testing “dumb” ideas

• weekly pricing only seems to make sense if customers planned to use the product for a short time anyway and are looking for the cheapest price + quickest way to cancel

• but maybe I’m wrong and customers really to value flexibility at a huge premium

costco model

• speaking of pricing this seems like a fun model to think through

• softgen is one of the hundreds “build anything you want just by vibe prompting” platforms and their main differentiator is the pricing model: “$33/year. That's it. Only pay usage tokens when you're actively building. No predatory monthly subscriptions. No gotchas.”

indie hacking

• indie hacking is dead

• the issue with paid ads was always that you’re competing against established companies that exactly know their numbers and can easily outspend you plus VC funded startups that are fine losing a ton of money

• social was a channel that worked for a while but now well-funded companies have started to play the same game and it’s much harder to get attention

  

• indie hacking is so back

looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

3. 📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking. It’s currently free here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

I’m heading to Seoul and Chiang Mai for a few weeks. Send recs or hit me up if you're around.

pick your market

• factors like the market you are in have an unreasonable impact on outcomes

• founders usually don’t want to admit this. We want to think that we can bend the market forces if we just hustle hard enough. Spoiler: you can’t.

• you can paddle all day in flat water. Someone else catches the storm surge and ends up a continent ahead. Markets decide who moves.

• luck is a major factor when it comes to market selection. Would have been insanely hard to predict the current AI wave and how it would lead to scraping products to take off. But one thing you can do is admit how little influence you have over outcomes once you zoom out and exit bad markets faster.

microns

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(microns sponsored this week’s issue)

detour

• had no idea that this is how Descript got started

• and I agree that I’d love to use this kind of app

• with AI + text-to-speech APIs it shouldn’t be that hard to build

sales metrics

• using metrics always sounds nice in theory but is so incredibly hard to do right

• no matter what metric you chose the cobra effect is always lurking just around the corner

social as soap opera

• this is an interesting reframe of social media

• it’s less about that one tweet that makes you laugh or cry or angry or that one big insight from some random account

• instead people get invested in the story arc of certain characters and that’s what makes them come back

• of course lots of people use social media to see random posts from random accounts that triggers all the right buttons in their brains

• I find this incredibly exhausting and care much more about posts from people I care about even if, by any objective standard, they aren’t nearly as “good” as banger posts from random accounts

• for an example of a platform using this insight well look at Instagram where afaik people just watch stories now to get little updates from people they care about.

• if you want to use content strategically these are your two options: optimise for reach by posting random stuff or craft a compelling character and take people along for the ride

music

🥰 Looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

3. 📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking. It’s currently free here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

• I’ve been re-reading 10x is easier than 2x by Benjamin Hardy and it remains one of my favourite business books (Benjamin’s new book is awesome too and covers a lot of the same ideas)

• paralysis-by-analysis is one of the biggest enemies of any founder and aiming for 10x is one of the few practical tools to get out of it

• most ideas will never get you anywhere close to where you want to go if you look at them honestly

• being serious about reaching a 10x goal means you have to say no to and get rid of almost everything else

• “10x requires you to become uniquely masterful in a narrowing 20 percent wherein you produce something innovative, valuable, and of rare quality. […] To make something 10x better involves deep, deep work. Innovation occurs as you break everything down and put it back together in a simpler, easier, and better form.”

• this also means there is much less competition since hardly anyone is laser focused on nailing just one thing

microns

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Here are the latest listings from the marketplace:

• Newsletter about business: $3.8k asking price, $3.2k/yr, 1.3k subs

• No-code website builder: $9k asking price, $2k/yr, 4 customers

• AI calorie-tracking app: $59k asking price, $14.6k/yr, 400 customers

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(Microns sponsored this weeks edition)

job board insights

• interesting thread by a guy running https://sustainablejobs.nl

• job boards always seemed to me like one of the coolest businesses you can build but are insanely hard to get off the ground

podscan ideas

• cool project by Arvid, he built a huge database of podcast transcripts and is now using AI to dig up business opportunities:

  https://ideas.podscan.fm

permission to change

• just a friendly reminder that just because you’ve been a specific kind of person for a while or were doing things a certain way, it doesn’t mean you have to keep going like this

• people will always try to push you towards the image they have of you. “but you’ve said…”, “but you’ve always…”, “I thought you’re not …”, “but since when do you…?”

• you’re allowed to pivot. You’re allowed to be inconsistent.

• in the words of Richard Feynman “You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago.”

music

🥰 Looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

3. 📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

• Adam is right.

• Data showing that your 7th followup email is producing results is attribution hacking no different from data showing that retargeting ads work

• In B2B specifically the volume of data you’re dealing with makes any insight coming from attribution data pretty much meaningless anyway.

• Fixation on attribution makes you neglect the stuff that works the best in 2025. All easily attributable stuff has been squeezed out to death.

counterintuitive founder ideas

• Counter intuitive idea number one is “don’t fund founders who don’t have an idea, because entrepreneurship demands you to have lots of ideas over the course of a company’s life; founders who don’t have ideas probably suck at idea generation and are bad picks.”

• There are only two kinds of people. People that produce a tons of ideas and people that don’t produce tons of ideas.

• There isn’t a third category of people that usually don’t have any ideas but then suddenly come around with that one big insight.

• All great ideas come from people with lots of ideas. Ergo everyone having great ideas also has tons of bad ideas.

• The good news is that idea generation is a skill you can acquire.

• Counter intuitive idea number two is “don’t provide a coworking space, because the best startup ideas seem dumb, and putting everyone together is the quickest way to destroy dumb-seeming ideas.”

• As mentioned last week “all the ideas that make perfect sense have been either executed perfectly already or have deep non-obvious issues”.

• So you best chance is to focus on ideas that kind of don’t make sense but still feel right. And then you have to protect them by hiding them until they’re ready. All great ideas are extremely easy to kill initially.

• One example of this is when Louis de Broglie in the early years of quantum mechanics figured out a much simpler framework to describe all the weirdness. But he presented it too early at a conference and quickly got shot down by all the big names. He was so devastated that he abandoned the idea completely. This set back progress in physics by many decades.

what’s your question?

• I like this framing a lot. Having a mission always sounds nice but also daunting.

• Pursuing a specific question, on the other hand, feels a lot more humble.

• Having clarity on the question you’re pursuing is extremely powerful. Questions filter, attract, drive, and distinguish.

• To quote a bit more from Packy McCormick’s excellent essay:
  

  

music

via Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong

🥰 Looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

3. 📚 Grab my book, Unfck Your Sales - A no-BS playbook for fixing your sales pipeline with first-principles thinking here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

• I’m prone to overthinking and lose a ton of energy pondering decisions instead of just picking a path

• Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese + Steve Jobs’ early mentor) encourages people to make decisions by throwing dice to overcome analysis paralysis and move fast.

• smart way to reduce the cost of indecision when options are roughly equal

• here’s how it works

  • list 6 options

  • assign each to a face of the die (1–6)

  • roll the die

  • commit to executing that option. no second guessing.

• similarly Elon: “If two choices and neither is obviously better just pick a path and do it rather than vacilitate endlessly on the choice.”

hoppy copy

• Hoppy Copy is the email newsletter machine that grows your business—on autopilot.

• It writes and designs your weekly newsletters for you—tailored to your voice, audience, and offers.

• It pulls from your existing content (like your blog, website, or socials) to create stunning emails that drive more clicks and conversions.

• Just review and send in one click.

• For creators, coaches, and small businesses, this is the fastest way to grow your audience and revenue—and how email marketing of the future will be done.

• Check it out here.

what 80/20 misses

• the 80/20 rule makes a ton of sense and is a big insight that holds true in many areas

• but what’s usually overlooked is that for most problems there are already tons of 80/20 solution

• tons of people are willing to put in 20% to build vibe code something that is 80% there

• but all the big value creation happens when you go beyond that and build something that is actually great

don’t listen

• the best ideas usually don’t make much sense initially and can easily be killed if you talk to too many people about them

• all the ideas that make perfect sense have been either executed perfectly already or have deep non-obvious issues

failure p*rn

• maybe it’s just my timeline but I see much much fewer successes shared and a lot more posts sharing problems and struggles

• there used to be a lot more optimism ~2 years ago among bootstrap founders

• also a lot of people got projects to $1k-2k relatively effortlessly. A well executed Product Hunt launch and a few tweets often got you there.

• now it seems people have a much harder time to get anything going at all

• I wish I had a solution to but right now all I can offer is encouragement that if you’re struggling right now it’s not because you’re doing something wrong but because things are hard for everyone

log off

• This is 100% the result of social media.

• You see too many people posting fake numbers.

• You start believing the lies.

• You start questioning everything you do.

• This is easy for everyone why is it so hard for me? What am I doing wrong?

• Then you become paralyzed.

music

looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

On the menu this week: keeping people around, why fun > discipline, the return of ClickBank-core software, and pricing sweet spots.

Let’s get into it.

retention > attention

• entrepreneurial evolution means obsessing over building → distribution → retention in that order

• tons of people complain that some people have it so much easier because they got a big audience. But getting a ton of attention means nothing if people are not returning.

fun criterion

• the pendulum is swinging back, no more “discipline equals freedom”, “rise and grind” nonsense

• the new mantra that Mark Manson nicely articulates is “emotion is the best productivity tool” or “fun over discipline”

• similarly “If something you are doing or proposed to do isn't fun,” says David Deutsch “Then there's something unsolved. There is something that has to be answered.”

• "Trying to force yourself to do a task that is not a good fit for your current state of mind is not only a poor use of time but actually counter-productive." I wrote here

clickbank wrappers

• seeing a lot of primitive apps that are clearly inspired by old info products crush it

pricing sweet spot

• I would add for services the sweet spot it’s $1000-$2000/month.

music

• the F1 movie is absolutely fantastic

more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

On the menu this week: startup Twitter’s favorite delusion, a better micro-acquisition platform, smart risks incumbents can’t take, and an adult field trip idea.

Let’s get into it.

🤔 fantasy roadmap

• If there is one genre of tweets that needs to die it’s the pseudo-motivation “it’s so easy” posts.

• “just vibe code a saas get it to $50k it’s so easy.”

• “You just need 100 customers paying you $100/month and you have a $10k/month business!!!!”

• Building a profitable online business is difficult and a ton of hard work. Everyone who claims otherwise is a charlatan. Setting false expectations is not helping anyone besides the charlatans promoting a fantasy.

🫵 micro startups

Buying or selling a tiny startup? Most marketplaces are chaos. Tire-kickers. Fluff. Junk.

Microns.io is different. Vetted deals. Zero noise.

If you're serious, it's where you look.

👉 Microns.io

(Microns sponsored this weeks edition)

🤯 asymmetric bets

• This is a great blog post by the Ramp co-founder.

• I like it because it gives specific examples of asymmetric bets to take:

  • hiring for the slope not experience

    

  • working with up-and-coming vendors instead of established ones

  • build what users should want not what they tell you they want

• These kind of risks are exactly your advantage as an early-stage company.

• All incumbents are laser focused on capping their downside a la “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. If you try to copy their best practices there is no way you can win.

🤠 adult field trips

• Someone please build this.

• As more and more stuff moves online, all excuses to get out into the real world will boom.

🫨 Music I’m Scheming to

🥰 Looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

On the menu this week: a look at what gets lost when everything gets optimized, a way to break through growth plateaus, and a word-of-mouth lesson from a hidden omakase in Hamburg and a backyard jazz café in Kyoto.

Let’s get into it.

🤔 swing away from optimisation

• So much of modern life has been optimized to a point where not a single drop of soul is left.

• Once you start dissecting something, put it under the brutal microscope of optimization, and start measuring and maximizing every little detail, you inevitably start creating soulless pieces of slop.

• Games like chess, poker, and soccer are now dominated by boring robot-like characters that execute statistically-optimal strategies.

• Creators, marketers and entrepreneurs online no longer follow their curiosity and hunches but just work on whatever their spreadsheet tells them is most promising.

• Shows, content, and music pushed by streaming platform like Netflix, Spotify, and X are engineered keep the average consumer pretty satisfied. Excellent content that sparks strong reactions or challenges the norm gets buried, because the algorithm is scared of making the wrong people mad.

• This is a fantastic read on the topic.

• To quote from it “In business, the most successful people aren't the ones with the best spreadsheets. They're the ones who get invited to the interesting rooms. You get invited to interesting rooms by being interesting, not by being optimal.”

🤯 moat builders

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(Moat.builders sponsored this issue of Schemers)

🤑 breaking through plateaus

• I’ve written before about why every business ultimately hits growth plateaus. But regarding the best way to break through them I did not have a good answer.

• Now a few years later I think Christian Reber (founder of Wunderlist) is ultimately correct.

• There is only so many flaws in your product you can mask over focusing on growth. Churn will quickly destroy every little glimpse you get of what life beyond the current plateau feels like.

• The only way to sustainably reach the next level is by improving your product.

• This will fix churn, kickstart word-of-mouth flywheels, and lift you to the next level.

🪝 word of mouth hooks

• Last weekend I went to a quite expensive omakase sushi restaurant in Hamburg. When we arrived at the address there was no sign, the entrance was full of trash. The only sign that we were at the right location was a handwritten note for delivery companies written on cardboard.

• We had already paid for the menu in advance. Otherwise we probably would have turned around at this point.

• After we went in, we had to walk through a chaotic basement, then up some stairs that looked like they desperately need some renovations.

• But once we went inside the room housing the actual restaurant it quickly turned into the five star sushi experience we had been hoping for.

• They could easily clean up the doorway, buy a proper sign for the restaurant and improve the first impression. But they don’t do it intentionally because it creates a word of mouth hook that is working super well for them.

• The contrast between the intentionally bad first impression and the actually great sushi is just very storyworthy.

• And even though I think they do this intentionally it didn’t feel forced. The restaurant is relatively new and run by three young guys who are still very much figuring things out as they go.

• This article on “Backyard Coffee And Jazz In Kyoto” is getting at something similar.

• When you’re running a small café, don’t even try to compete with Starbucks. You will never beat them at the “polished café experience”. Instead, it makes far more sense to lean into the fact that you’re running a small and maybe a little bit weird business.

• I would love to see more of this online too. Instead of everyone trying fake act like they’re a big company offering a polished experience, why not lean into your smallness and weirdness. Not every website and UI has to look as polished as the Monday.com’s or Airtable’s.

• If people want a boring bland experience there are already plenty of options. And you will never beat them at this game.

• But there is plenty of ways to win if you decide to play a different game. One where personality, imperfection, and charm matter more than polish.

🫨 music

🥰 looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

It’s 6:52 am and I’m typing this on the train to Hamburg right now.

At 6 a.m., it was completely empty. Just me and dozens of storefronts.

And for the first time, I noticed how much of it is an illusion.

The shopping street is huge with dozens of stores. But it’s really just a handful of stores repeated over and over again.

On the one hand, you of course got all these brands that seem like competitors like H&M, COS, Monki, Weekday, & Other Stories but they’re all owned by the same company.

On the other hand, zoom out further and you realize: it’s not just the same brands.

It’s really just the same handful types of stores repeated over and over again: fashion, coffee shops, phone stores, barbers, fast food restaurants.

Sometimes you see a creative new type of shop open. A kombucha bar or whatever. But they always close after a few months again.

The market doesn’t reward originality.

What usually sticks is something people already understand just done better, faster, or with a slight twist.

🤔 quote

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” - Mark Twain

This is how I think about sales calls.

Don’t perform. Don’t pitch.

Just be honest.

Be curious about what they actually need. Say what you do, how you do it, and why you think it might help — if it actually does.

I see this done wrong all the time. People slip into “sales mode” — pushing, persuading, trying to close.

Everyone can feel it. It kills the vibe and it doesn’t work.

🤯 ghost yapping

My friend Pete Codes writes LinkedIn posts for founders.

In a world flooded with AI slop, undifferentiated SaaS, and noisier ad channels, having a real founder brand is one of the few levers left.

If you want to grow your audience but don’t have the time — or just don’t want to think about content — Pete will do it for you. Quietly, and well.

He’s not an agency. It’s just him. Which means your posts actually sound like you, not like a recycled growth hack thread.

If you want to take LinkedIn seriously without making it your job, learn more about Pete’s service or email him directly: pete@highsignal.io.

(Pete sponsored this issue of Schemers)

🏄‍♂️ surfing the web

🫨 music I’m scheming to

🥰 looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow! Interested in a partnership, tap here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

Some people move fast and build things.

Others stay busy for years and barely move.

It’s not intelligence. It’s not effort or talent. It’s how they move through the world.

There are three modes: Sleepwalking. Zigzagging. Straightlining.

Sleepwalkers don’t realize they can just do things. They coast. They react. Nothing happens.

Zigzaggers know what they want. They even start. But as soon as things get hard, they stall.

They rethink everything. Abandon the plan. Chase “clarity.”

Tell themselves they need to think more before acting.

Then they drift again.

Straightliners don’t do that.

They make a plan. Then they follow it.

Even when it’s boring. Especially when it’s boring.

No self-negotiation. No content binges. No waiting for the vibe to feel right.

I’ve been all three. And the output difference is absurd.

When I’m zigzagging, I lose 90% of my energy to indecision and overthinking.

When I’m in straightline mode, I get 10 days of work done in one.

And here’s the kicker: it doesn’t require anything new.

No supplements. No new routine. No environment change.

Just a choice:

Decide what matters.

Make a plan.

Stick to it.

🤓 B2B Growth Insight

Have a look at this cold email:

Hey Xavier,

Quick question: if you could publish 30 SEO-optimized articles every month (automatically written, keyword-targeted, and auto-published for you), would that be useful?

We built a tool that does exactly that.

Happy to show you how if you're interested.

Best,
Jakob

Now read this one:

Hey Xavier,

Ever wish your blog could create content on its own? We built a platform that generates articles based on what your audience cares about. All powered by AI.

Curious to learn more?

Best,
Jakob

Which one performs better?

Answer: Variant 1.

300 emails sent.
Variant 1 = 6 positive replies.
Variant 2 = 0.

Why?

Variant 1 hits fast with a vivid picture: 30 articles, SEO-optimized, auto-published.

You can see it. Imagine it. Want it.

Variant 2? It’s just noise that could describe tons of different tools. No angle. No outcome. Nothing to grab onto.

The lesson? The more vividly you describe the outcome, the less work the reader has to do.

And the less work they have to do, the more likely they are to say yes.

Applies to everything: cold emails, ads, landing pages.

🤔 Quote I’m Pondering

I’m writing this while drinking the most overpriced coffee in all of Denmark.

It’s a simple, small filter coffee and costs roughly $6.

Just a few meters away, at McDonalds, you can get a filter coffee for $1.5.

And yet I come here every day and pay far too much for my cup of coffee.

Why?

Because the place is amazingly designed. I feel inspired the moment I sit down.

There are tons of people paying 2x-5x for a haircut because they like the vibe of the place.

The exact same thing is true for software too.

People keep using shitty software like Notion because they like the design.

The way a product, or service, or software makes people feel is a huge and largely overlooked factor.

The surroundings you put a feature in can make it look like art or total trash.

🤯 Surfing the Web

🫨 Music I’m Scheming to

🥰 Looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 40+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week using my AI-powered cold email software. And the best part? You only pay for results. Click here to learn more.

2. 🤠 Get In Front Of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, I’ve already helped dozens of partners grow. Interested in a partnership, tap here.

That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Jakob

I paused this newsletter because I didn’t want to send noise.

Now I feel inspired to write again.

Also: name’s changed. “Business Brainstorms” always sounded like a whiteboard session that goes nowhere.

Schemers.co was available — so I grabbed it.

Feels cleaner. More honest.

This has always been for people who think in plays.

Nothing else is changing.

Still raw ideas, frameworks, under-the-radar trends — only the stuff that might actually move the needle.

Let’s get into it.

🤫 Sunday Scheming

The hardest part about entrepreneurship is that it's so fun to bathe in possibilities.

You could build this, you could do that.

Actually shining the harsh light of reality on ideas is no fun.

Especially once you realize that building a real business requires far more stamina than social media makes you believe.

The success odds are pretty much the same for everyone:

3-5%.

That means almost everything you try will fail.

Only one in thirty attempts might work — might.

The odds for huge successes are much, much lower.

A fancy morning routine or watching a YouTube video titles 27 frameworks of wealth or whatever won’t make any difference.

Early on, you tell yourself the odds don’t apply to you.

You’re different. Smarter.

But they do.

And once that realisation sinks in is when most give up.

The real challenge of entrepreneurship is managing yourself and your expectations.

Even years in, I catch myself pretending the rules don’t apply.

In the heat of day-to-day operations trying 5 things to grow your business feels like you’re doing a lot.

But with 3% odds, you're barely scratching the surface.

Remember: one in thirty things might work — might.

Trying five and calling it quits isn’t failure. It’s math illiteracy.

The winners are the psychos who keep swinging after the bat’s broken and their hands are bleeding — because they know one clean hit makes the pain worth it.

They’re not chasing dopamine or doing what feels right.

They’re running a process.

You don’t need motivational short-form content or some secret framework.

You need a spreadsheet and the humility to know you’re not special.

🤔 Quote I’m Pondering

I see it every day.

Founders running SaaS businesses generating millions in revenue that barely understand how their own software works and why people use it.

Guys running agencies on autopilot, outsourcing everything to cheap labor, barely pretending to care.

It’s not the exception. It’s the default.

The bar is shockingly low.

You think you’re competing against killers.

You’re not.

You’re competing against people who barely care and barely try.

🤯 Trends

🤑 Brags

🫨 Music I’m Scheming to

If you have any thoughts on the reboot, the new name or whatever, hit reply and lmk!

Jakob

• Copycats usually fail because they don’t understand really all the innerworkings of the company they’re cloning. And if you get even just one tiny detail wrong, you’ll fail

• They also fail because they don’t have the necessary stamina to keep going when things get tough since they’re just chasing a quick win.

• Cloning a product is usually the easy part. Cloning everything else is the real challenge.

🦄 Lead Booster Pro

• Turn every form into a lead magnet with Lead Booster Pro, the AI-powered form builder.

• The first 100 sign-ups get 30 free days!

• Boost conversions by signing up today.

(LeadsBooster sponsored this issue of Business Brainstorms.)

🙊 The Law of Candor

• Listerine “The taste you will hate twice a day”

• “The 1970 VW will say ugly longer”

• “Avis is the No 2 rental company” (so they will try harder)

🙉 Gigantic Somnambulant Sloth

• When writing sales emails or marketing copy always remember you talk to just one person, not some big organisation. You’re not on stage giving a big sales presentation. You’re talking one-to-one with people (even though the communication is async).

• Secondly, always assume you’re dealing with people with unbelievably high activation energy.

• You have to remove all friction. Don’t say “let me know when you have time next week for a call”. This requires them to check their calendar. Far too much friction. Instead, say “just reply yes and I will take care of everything”.

• You have to give people an extremely compelling reason to take action. Vague language never works.

🦧 Meetup Replacement

• 100% agreed. In most cities all listed meet-ups are virtually dead.

🦍 Software Selection

• Software selection is a billion dollar market and yet fundamentally broken.

• G2 and Capterra are thinly veiled ad catalogues.

• Use LLMs it should be possible to build something truly unbiased.

• The economics should be flipped so incentives are properly aligned. Buyers should pay for recommendations not sellers. As long as sellers fund all the recommendation systems they will remain flawed.

• Software contracts are costly decisions so it should be viable for buyers to pay for, say, an unbiased, CRM expert that gets on a call with you, learns about your business and helps you figure out what truly is the best option.

End Note

And as always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

And whenever you're ready, here are a few ways I can help:

🚀 Need an agency to help with your lead generation?

🎯 Looking to validate a new B2B project?

👋 Interested in sponsoring this newsletter?

📖 Download my book A Skill Called Luck

Have a great week,

Jakob

PS: Want to share feedback anonymously? 🙋‍♂️

• All the stuff about “sorry you can’t watch/use this because you are in the wrong country” feels so ancient.

• Definitely feels like someone will build this and in a few years we will wonder how we ever worried about this at all.

💰Accountants

• Whoever finally figures out how to disrupt accountants will get extremely rich and do so much good for the world.

• Accountants tend to charge outrages rates, always only do the absolute bare minimum, and rely on you for double checking their work.

• So much creative energy is wasted by people worrying about dumb tax stuff.

🧘 Peaceful Content

• Seems like there is some serious appetite for more mundane content.

• I always thought it’s a bit ridiculous that so much entertainment is centred around a tiny subset of human experiences (murder, breakups).

• Getting a glimpse into normal lives provides a much richer experience than the same old plot lines for the hundredth time.

• The movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a good example.

🤒 WordPress

• Open Source always sounds great but oftentimes is just a term used for marketing purposes.

• Tons of VC funded companies use this playbook: build “open source alternative” to X → make it hard/confusing to self-host → make tons of money selling hosting services

• WordPress, for a long time, seemed like an exception to this rule. There were many hosting providers and hosting a Wordpress site isn’t particularly complicated.

• Things seemed to have changed since Automattic, the company owned by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, raised a fat $300M Series D round.

• Recently Matt decided that he should try to extort a “licensing fee” from competitor hosting company WP Engine.

• Turns out open source only means so much if there is one guy holding the keys to the kingdom.

• This post is the best summary of the recent drama. Also see this previous drama where Matt made it very clear that rules apply to everyone but him.

• Thus while Matt failed to execute the standard open source playbook, he’s now convinced he found the lever that allows him to revenue-maxx. The crux of the matter is that all plugins are centrally hosted on WordPress.org, a site solely owned by Matt Mullenweg. So when he decides to block someone from accessing the site, automatic plugin updates/installs no longer work which leads to huge security problems.

• I hope this ends with WordPress becoming more decentralised (WordPress.org mirrors emerging with an easy way to switch between them) and competitors not controlled by a dictator getting new users.

• Imo most sites nowadays should just be collections of static files. A dynamic system like WordPress is much harder to keep safe and performant. And there isn’t really any reason for using a database for most sites. E.g. no one uses website comments anymore.

• Hosting static files costs virtually nothing and the attack surface is much, much smaller.

• Hugo and Jekyll are interesting options but still too hard to use for most people.

• I think there is huge potential for a WP admin like UI that can be used to create posts and manage the design etc. But when you click publish, it simply deploys the whole site as static files.

😿 Product Hunt

• Speaking of companies losing the plot….

• For a long time, ProductHunt was a cornerstone of the startup/indie maker ecosystem. It’s where everyone went to announce they created something new. The “Product of the Day” label held a lot of weight.

• For the most part it was a fair competition. Anyone could post new projects. Users voted. The most-voted projects surfaced to the top. If you had an audience you could ask them for support and increase your chances a bit to get one of the top spots. This worked within limits. You could give your project a little boost but ultimately projects only stayed near the top when people outside your audience upvoted them too. There were always people trying to game the algorithm but often they were caught and banned. Unnatural voting patterns were usually visible in the upvote distribution charts. Interesting new projects were posted almost every day.

• This changed rapidly after ProductHunt was acquired by AngelList in 2017.

• Their main concern became clear quickly: steer the focus away from indie makers towards VC-funded startups. This is the community AngelList is selling to. Also these are the companies willing to pay ProductHunts outrages ad rates ($55 to show your ad to 1000 people with zero targeting). After all, they are spending other people’s money.

• So all kinds of rules were introduced to keep indie makers away.

• I’m sure this boosted revenue numbers for a few quarters.

• But now things seem to come crashing down. Traffic numbers are declining fast, the comment section is dominated by bots.

• The people currently in charge seem out of touch with the ecosystem. The CEO hired a buddy as CTO who doesn’t even know who Pieter Levels is. That should be evidence enough.

• They don’t seem to understand that the lines between “indie maker” and “startup founder” are blurry and always have been. Brian Armstrong was shipping all kinds of silly little side projects before starting Coinbase, to name just one example. Most founders do.

• Silly little side projects were always was kept ProductHunt fresh and interesting. There was always free value. People building and shipping things just for the sake of it with no grand monetisation plan; or any plan really. That’s what made people coming back day after day. There was a real sense of community.

• Now the feed is just a list of polished products. It’s roughly as exciting as browsing a category page on Capterra.

• People have always tried to build ProductHunt alternatives but now it feels like finally the time has come where a serious alternative emerges.

End Note

And as always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

And whenever you're ready, here are a few ways I can help:

🤔 Looking for specific advice or an outside perspective to help you get unstuck?

🚀 Need an agency to help with your lead generation?

🎯 Looking to validate a new B2B project?

👋 Interested in sponsoring this newsletter?

📖 Download my book A Skill Called Luck

Have a great week,

Jakob

PS: Want to share feedback anonymously? 🙋‍♂️

• Useful reminder that being “innovative” is the last thing you should be worrying about as a founder.

• Building a business is already difficult enough without constraints like this.

• Just find something with proven demand and offer it slightly better or cheaper.

• You might not become a billionaire this way but your odds of being able to stay in the game indefinitely are 100x higher.

🦄 Enty

• Finances on Enty is an easy-to-use tool for managing your company’s financial data with detailed insights.

• Set up in a few clicks: share your website link and connect your bank account to create a customized financial dashboard. Control all your bank accounts in one place, track your cash flow with live data from connected accounts or uploaded bank statements, and get more knowledge about your finances with the built-in AI Assistant.

• Finances is fully free now and comes under the same subscription with invoicing, contract creation, and e-sign solutions, try Enty now!

(Enty sponsored this issue of Business Brainstorms.)

🪦 RIP Social Apps

• Thinking about this makes me sad but this means there is probably some truth to it.

🍇 No More Low Hanging Startup Fruit?

• Is the era of startups that require minimal capital over? No more “Airbnb for dogs” and instead “build a better quantum computers”?

• Maybe it’s just my personal bubble but it seems like it’s harder than ever for bootstrappers/indie hackers, not just startups, which points in the same direction.

• Fewer newcomers find any form of sustainable success and progress has become stagnant for many.

• 10 years ago you could make decent money building something as simple as a Bingo Card Generator. Now there are dozens if not hundreds of competitors in all standard SaaS niches.

• The only exceptions are products built on top of new technologies like AI.

☕ Localization

• For many years “globalisation” and “standardisation” have been the name of the game.

• Chains like McDonald and Starbucks became huge because they deliver consistency across every store around the globe.

• But as always, each trend breeds a countertrend. Here the countertrend is localisation.

• Kopi Kenangan, an Indonesian coffee chain, customises their products to each local market. A Kopi Kenangan latte in Singapore will taste different from a latte in Indonesia.

• This strategy seems to be working given how fast the chain is growing.

End Note

I’m traveling to Singapore and Bali next week. It’s my first time there, so if you have any recommendations, let me know!

And as always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

And whenever you're ready, here are a few ways I can help:

🚀 Need an agency to help with your lead generation?

🎯 Looking to validate a new B2B project?

👋 Interested in sponsoring this newsletter?

📖 Download my book A Skill Called Luck

Have a great week,

Jakob

PS: Want to share feedback anonymously? 🙋‍♂️

• Line extension is a marketing strategy that uses an existing brand to introduce a new item into the same product line.

• Almost every successful company starts at some point launching more and more products under the same brand.

• This is always short term positive but bad long term.

• Brand recognition leads to quick adoption of the new product and hence a revenue boost.

• However at the same time the brand as a whole becomes weaker since it no longer stands for one thing.

• Also: more products = more complexity. The more complex a business the harder it is to scale.

• The leader in any category is the brand that is not line extended. What is the world's largest beverage company by market cap in the world? Moutai. Virtually all their revenue comes from one product (“fire water”).

• This doesn’t just affect product businesses but also service businesses.

• Every time I talk to friends running agencies they talk about introducing new services and offers.

• Besides the short term revenue boost this is also tempting since it introduces novelty.

• But imo this is always a net negative. It dilutes the focus of the company, introduces an unmanageable amount of complexity, and turns the agency into yet another generic marketing agency. And the more generic an offer the harder the sell.

• No one believes you can be good at everything.

• The proper way to roll out new products and services is under a new brand. But hardly anyone does this because it requires more effort and the payoff is much slower.

🤝 Validate B2B

• Cold email is the best channel to validate B2B products fast and reliably.

• With paid ads, you quickly wind up a $2,000 bill with nothing to show for it. Targeting is largely a black box and there is no negative feedback besides no results.

• Feedback from your personal network is always biased and says little about the long term potential of your business.

• With cold emails, you get unbiased direct feedback that helps you understand how strangers react to your offer.

• However, running cold email campaigns that actually reach the people you’re trying to reach is expensive and requires a ton of expertise. Did your campaign flop because you made a deliverability mistake? Or maybe your copy was too confusing? Is the data bad?

• That’s why I’ve started offering cold email validation campaigns as a service.

• You can test new products, new messaging, and if cold email is a viable channel to grow.

• Each campaign leverages all the learnings + infrastructure from my agency where we’ve run 1000+ targeted cold email campaigns for 200+ B2B companies.

Learn More

• (At my agency we only work with established companies that have a clear understanding of their ICP and a proven sales process. There is a 3-month minimum commitment and we say no to early stage companies that want to work with us. Our main focus is helping companies scale, not validating new projects.)

🤑 Private Wealth Managers

• This seems like a huge opportunity.

• Rich people want access to exclusive investments but all the standard solutions overpromise and underdeliver.

• My friends at Alts.co are one example of a startup trying to provide a better alternative.

🥖 No Plastic Grocery Stores

• Problematic side-effects of plastic have reached mainstream awareness.

• At the same time, most grocery stores use ridiculous amounts of plastic. Single cucumbers are wrapped in plastic.

• There are a few ‘zero waste’ supermarkets already in Europe but they are too inconvenient for most people, e.g. because you have to bring your owner containers.

📉 Death of SaaS

• This might be primarily a signalling move from Klarna but I’m convinced more and more companies will realise how simple the features of software they’re paying thousands of dollars for every month really are.

• SaaS companies were printing money for many years. But it only worked because companies are charging ridiculous margins for what really is just a bunch of CRUD operations.

• As the cost of software development and maintenance goes down thanks to tools like Cursor and Zed, SaaS companies will face more pressure; from an increasing number of competitors and from teams building internal tools.

End Note

As always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

And whenever you're ready, here are a few ways I can help:

🚀 Need an agency to help with your lead generation?

🎯 Looking to validate a new B2B project?

📖 Download my book A Skill Called Luck

Have a great week,

Jakob

PS: Want to share feedback anonymously? 🙋‍♂️

• Specifically when it comes to health stuff there is a ton of potential since so much stuff is not affordable or accessible for normal people right now. E.g what Prenuvo does with affordable full body MRI scans.

⚒️ Things worth checking out

• Grow your Twitter account faster and spend more time running your business with Pete Codes' ghostwriting services. Read how it works.

• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. A wild ride through many scientific discoveries and their consequences absolutely no one could have predicted and the effect they had on their discoverers minds.

• This is a cool database of companies working on robotics, autonomy, and robotics-related products.

(Pete Codes sponsored this issue of Business Brainstorms.)

📢 AIO

• AIO = AI Optimisation = SEO for AI = manipulating the data companies use to train AI models to make specific outputs more likely.

• SEO is a huge market and so will be AI optimisation. There’s just too many money to be made if you can actually figure out how to boost a companies visibility in popular model’s outputs.

🫨 The Technological Richter Scale

The Richter scale was created by the physicist Charles Richter in 1935 to quantify the amount of energy released by earthquakes.

It has two key features that I’ll borrow for my Technological Richter Scale (TRS). First, it is logarithmic. A magnitude 7 earthquake is actually ten times more powerful than a mag 6. Second, the frequency of earthquakes is inversely related to their Richter magnitude—so 6s occur about ten times more often than 7s. Technological innovations can also produce seismic disruptions.

Let’s proceed quickly through the lower readings of the Technological Richter Scale.

Technological innovations can also produce seismic disruptions. Let’s proceed quickly through the lower readings of the Technological Richter Scale. A TRS 1 is like a half-formulated thought in the shower. A 2 is an idea you actuate, but never disseminate: a slightly better method to brine a chicken that only you and your family know about. A 3 begins to show up in the official record somewhere, an idea you patent or make a prototype of. A 4 is an invention successful enough that somebody pays for it; you sell it commercially or someone buys the IP. A 5 is a commercially successful invention that is important in its category, say, Cool Ranch Doritos, or the leading brand of windshield wipers. It’s about when you get to a 6 that an invention can have a broader societal impact, causing a disruption within its field and some ripple effects beyond it. A TRS 6 will be on the short list for technology of the year. At the low end of the 6s (a TRS 6.0) are clever and cute inventions like Post-it notes that provide some mundane utility. The impact escalates quickly from there. A TRS 7 is one of the leading inventions of the decade and has a measurable impact on people’s everyday lives. Something like credit cards would be toward the lower end of the 7s, and social media a high 7. An 8 is a truly seismic invention, a candidate for technology of the century, triggering broadly disruptive effects throughout society. Canonical examples include automobiles, electricity, and the internet. By the time we get to TRS 9, we’re talking about the most important inventions of all time, things that inarguably and unalterably changed the course of human history. You can count these on one or two hands. There’s fire, the wheel, agriculture, the printing press. Finally, a 10 is a technology that defines a new epoch, one that alters not only the fate of humanity but that of the planet. For roughly the past twelve thousand years, we have been in the Holocene, the geological epoch defined not by the origin of Homo sapiens per se but by humans becoming the dominant species and beginning to alter the shape of the Earth with our technologies.

- from On The Edge by Nate Silver

🪄 Rebuild

• StumbleUpon, Delicious, Google Reader, Digg, and Google Search from like 2012 would be high on my list.

End Note

As always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

And whenever you're ready, here are a few ways I can help:

🚀 Need an agency to help with your lead generation?

🎯 Looking to validate a new B2B project?

📖 Download my book A Skill Called Luck

Have a great week,

Jakob

PS: Want to share feedback anonymously? 🙋‍♂️

😐 Big IDGAF Energy

🤝 A Team Overseas

• Kevin Galang started as software dev but recently took the leap and founded A Team Overseas, a boutique agency that specializes in connecting seed-stage founders and bootstrappers with amazing EAs.

• If you're looking for a low risk way to get a great remote executive assistant, give it a try.

(A Team Overseas sponsored this issue of Business Brainstorms.)

☝️ AI Friends

• I do believe AI “friends” will become a big thing.

• Humans often act irrationally, self-sabotage, and commit logical fallacies.

• Having someone observe all of your behaviours and then regularly nudge you in the right direction or call you out on your bullshit behaviour will have a massive, positive impact on humanity.

• Privacy concerns will be overcome with encrypted, local-only models.

↗️ Expand

• One of the most powerful self-reflection questions is: "Am I expanding or contracting?”.

• By default humans have a tendency to contract but a good life is one of continuous expansion.

• This is an area where imo technology could do a lot more to nudge people in the right direction.

🪄 Rebrand Woo-Woo

• Sign me up for ecstatic dance without the woo please.

• Oh wait, isn’t that just a daytime rave?

↕️ Invert Zero to One

• Once more the opposite of a good idea is also a good idea.

• Zero to one might be a good framework for some people.

• But most people are better off doing the exact opposite.

End Note

As always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

If your B2B business looking to systematize and scale your outbound efforts, my agency Sales.co might be able to help.

You can learn more about sponsoring Business Brainstorms here.

Have a great week,

Jakob