Communication

Triangulation

Cross-checking helps to determine distance, maneuver around obstacles, and identify rogue objects. Alongside the math, a triangulated team increases dependability.

Diversity of thought, talent, and real skills add synergy to accelerate progress and increase a team’s confidence when a problem is attacked from multiple angles. This nimbleness is leveraged as co-founders create a culture that makes each person feel significant.

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Building alone is easy.

Team up to make it fun.

On the prowl for co-founders? Consider triangulating a hipster (customer experience), hacker (technology), and hustler (business development). When these complimenting archetypes also blend hints of founder-market-fit, a timely curation gives any team exponential capacity.

To find missing links, connectors become connected. So show up and be quick to make interesting introductions. When the first degree of contact lacks obvious opportunity, remember it’s the second and third degree of connectivity that delivers precision. Over time, generosity in an entrepreneurial ecosystem expands and tightens engaged networks. Instead of forcefully recruiting co-founders, the open-ended activity of a serendipitist will have us colliding with friends we simply haven’t met yet.As teamwork begins, bonds that have formed naturally will support lasting collaboration with people you respect. That said, established trust is not an excuse to get complacent.

To nurture the power of triangulation be honest and transparent from start to finish. Every story ends, so don’t avoid difficult discussions. When structuring a business, agree on the terms, leave space for change over time, and maintain an operating agreement to ensure clarity with less tension. A commitment to abundant communication helps each team member remain attentive to details.

Professionals will take it further—inviting responsibility, then keeping the promise. For any idea maze, we take the blame, willingly give credit, and celebrate in style.

Lone wolves move fast but the expanded capacity of a team helps an odyssey go far. When a fun, long-term cast plays long-term games together, the chemical reaction can be an affinity toward work that feels like play. Cheers!

By Ben McDougal, ago

Atmospheric

Why do we insist on talking about the weather?

When there’s nothing else, atmospheric conditions offer an early bond between strangers.

It’s a safe way to avoid awkward silence. Weather is always changing and may be one of the easiest forms of small talk, but it’s just so shallow. Remain courteous to cordial strangers, but for anyone we already know, talk of the weather is weak and pointless. Now, there are meaningful topics like climate change, severe weather, and contingencies for planned activity, but sagacious leaders make it rain with thoughtful questions that draw out deeper discussions.

Breeze past the weather talk to respect people’s time, to show an interest in real progress, and to forecast more relevant bonds that last.

Brewed From Within
#43 📖 Leadership

By Ben McDougal, ago

ChatUX

Chatbots have a PR problem.

On one hand, conversational AI combines large language models (“LLMs”), vast data sets, and interesting influence layers to provide insightful ideas and answers to almost any question. Chatbots provide a personalized interaction with education, content creator, language learning support, financial advice, customer assistance, helpful reminders for important tasks, co-founder assistance, and even mental health therapy. These AI companions munch on mediocre and are always available to chat. ChatGPT is the most well-known example, but other content creation methods, bot building platforms, and layered tools, such as BEN BOT and ChatSpot, are being activated in creative ways.

On the other hand, when most humans hear the word “chatbot”, the word serves up a slimy aftertaste. We think of automated help desks that put us in circles, fake followers on social media, the search tool that can never quite find an question, or that lead generation form that only wants to guide you to the next sale. Even with the best intention, a history of hacks fuel mistrust and makes it hard to avoid the spammy connotation.

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Hallucinating is when AI confidently delivers inaccurate responses.

Chatbots may not be able to interpret complex interactions, decode user intent, express empathy, or keep up with the rapid pace of change in the world, but it feels naive to pretend that conversational AI is not efficacious.

As we continue learning how to interact with this innovation, we need a term that is more inviting. A term that evokes trust. One that describes an intelligent counterpart with no agenda. When the user experience is not misguided by motive and AI is truly conversational, “ChatUX” may be the term we seek.

ChatUX describes the interaction between humans and software, unlocked by conversational AI.

Chat is an informal conversation or to talk in a friendly and informal way. UX is short for User Experience, which describes how we interact with a product or service. It includes our perception of value, ease of use, and efficiency. “ChatUX” can help us understand how to interact with emerging technology, while also improving the chatbot’s image.

ChatUX is not spam. ChatUX won’t take your job, sell you something you don’t want, or take over the world. ChatUX requires ingenuity. It is translation technology designed to access endless insight, with an ability to communicate it effectively. It’s software that speaks our language while supporting a timely, interesting, accurate, unbiased, and meaningful experience for anyone curious and generous enough to build beyond the status quo.

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I’m hosting a new podcast! Stay tuned for more caffeinated conversations around technology, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, and community building.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Attention Traps

As early moves are sequenced, a few creative assets can help founders translate emerging insight into valuable snapshots of the business. One-pagers, pitch decks, and investor memos are additional types of attention traps that entrepreneurs can use to ignite interest.

One-Pager

The one-pager is a punchy asset built to describe the most important elements of your business. Concise is nice, as the goal is to create immediate intrigue. One-pagers should be made to be seen by anyone. This means you must find a balance in giving enough details to show substance and realistic potential without giving away the secret sauce.

While you may know a lot about your business, the goal is to guide others through new layers of understanding. As you consider what content to include and how to format so much goodness into such a tight document, focus on creating curiosity to keep conversations flowing.

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The FliteBrite one pager from 2015.

 

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My guest column on consistency in the Business Record.

With a one-pager ready to share, invite feedback as you build confidence by sharing it with strategic investors, partners, and those who may kindle fresh progress.

Pitch Deck

Slide decks support a verbal presentation. Pitch decks add more information to help recipients (often investors) learn about your venture. With 10–15 slides, present the story of your business with eye-catching visuals, data-driven details, and links to more supportive content. Keep this asset concise and entertaining. Do so while identifying the market, problem, solution, signals of traction, moat-digging differentiators, team, competition, the ask, compelling calls to action, and contact information.

Knowing this attention trap is most often needed by founders raising financial capital, even if it’s in a closing appendix, it’s good to include more data-driven details to show research-based comprehension. Like back slides that support Q&A portions of a verbal pitch, market research, conservative financial projections, how money will be spent, and customer discovery results are all ways to prove you understand your business plan and how the numbers work.

That said, don’t numb readers. Avoid small font and word salads. Incorporate imagery that supports a captivating story. Translate your mission while making it clear how this venture will deliver serious returns. Like the one-pager, pitch decks are not crafted to secure an investment. They are designed to fuel interest and more conversation.

Investor Memo

Commanding an influential investor memo keeps people informed with the ongoing progress of your company. Along with sections you include in a pitch deck, investor memos create space to highlight the evolving details of your fundraising campaign, key performance metrics (KPIs), data visualizations, recent milestones, multimedia, needs of the team, and future goals for the company. Online platforms make it easy to manage dynamic, accurate, and interesting investor memos. The quick-to-digest but also real-time information is why investor memos are popular among well-articulated founders raising venture capital.

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If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. -Albert Einstein

With these attention traps set, alternate versions of each asset may help you share impactful details with the right audience. For example, a pitch deck for local angel investors may be different than a pitch deck for a global venture capital firm.

Connecting everything adds efficiency but maintaining a well-organized data room is not for the faint of heart. As any company expands, so will the need to update different types of attention traps that support an evolving story for a growing variety of onlookers.

 

BACKGROUND CONTEXT
We had spent all month exploring early moves to evolve business ideas into reality. Using our time dedicated to no-code wireframing, actively listening to others, telling customer stories with a colorful business model canvas, and escorting execution with business plans, to translate emerging insight into snapshots of a business. The one pager, pitch deck, and investor memo are distinct types of attention traps entrepreneurs can use to connect with those who care.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Melting Momentum

Once something melts, it’s never quite the same.

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Inspiration is perishable.

From the moment we decide to start building an idea into reality, the force required is geared toward finding and then maintaining momentum.

Meaningful momentum is awakened in endless ways. Early momentum might mean showing up at an event for the first time, researching the competitive landscape, testing an early hypothesis, leaning into customer discovery, recruiting potential co-founders, building product, and eventually activating a launch sequence. Once a project is launched, the need for momentum never fades. If anything, it only becomes more important. There are many more examples, but growing the business, achieving milestones, and celebrating progress are all forms of valuable momentum. Even in later stages of a company, momentum drives activities like succession planning, navigating a successful exit, and considering how your human, financial, cultural, intellectual, and network capital can be recycled back into the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

No matter where you’re at in your own journey, if momentum is maintained long enough, the result can be a flywheel effect that feeds on itself. Anything you want to grow will always require endless work, but with less friction, momentum delivers more time, understandings, and space for different activities emerge.

On the flip side, if momentum is melting, it’s difficult to recapture. These are moments to consider when and what to quit. If there’s enough energy to keep writing the story, it’s neat how there’s always the option to keep building. A few sparks that can help regain momentum come to mind. For instance, (re)connecting with the startup community, learning something new, saying “yes” to unlock adventure, saying “no” to create space, travel, revisiting customer discovery, building a new feature, considering a pivot, onboarding new customers, and adding to the team.

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Need help regaining momentum?

The longer stagnancy lingers, the harder it will be to realign momentum. Tactics to maintain a creative state of kamiwaza, even when momentum is melting, starts with communication. Keeping honest communication consistent adds clarity and is the easiest way to appreciate the realities of slowness. Reducing the weird by exposing the why, also keeps different stakeholders on the same page, even during more lethargic times. By reducing the tension that quietly brews in silence, teams may be able to run at lower speeds. If left unattended, this can devolve into a lack of urgency that brings new challenges, but at a lower speed, perhaps less movement is needed to regain/retain the sense of shared momentum.

When we play long-term games with long-term people, momentum is crucial, but set your own pace by exploring the type of momentum you need at different stages within the work. This awareness helps you quit chasing momentum and sets us free to forge better art, at a sustainable speed. This helps us multiply mass and velocity, which equates to momentum when, where, and how it’s needed to keep building.

By Ben McDougal, ago