Grounded in real numbers
Every claim comes with the metric behind it — burn, CAC, retention curves, dilution math — laid out plainly so you can pressure-test it against your own company instead of taking it on faith.
Field notes for founders
Startup Blog
Honest, specific essays on starting up and shipping product — fundraising, growth, hiring, and the decisions that quietly make or break a company. No hustle-porn, just what actually worked and what didn't.
Why read here
Written by operators, not spectators
Most startup content is either recycled Twitter threads or war stories with the hard parts sanded off. These essays keep the specifics — the actual numbers, the awkward conversations, and the calls that looked wrong until they didn't.
Long-form, not takes
Generous line height, a measured reading column, and calm typography keep a 2,000-word teardown comfortable from the first paragraph to the last — the way a real argument deserves to be read.
Organized by category
Every essay is filed under a topic — fundraising, product, growth, hiring, culture, strategy — so you can jump straight to the stage or problem you're wrestling with right now.
Playbooks you can run
Frameworks arrive as checklists and templates, not vibes. Copy the hiring scorecard or the fundraising CRM setup, drop it into your own workflow, and use it Monday morning.
From companies actually built
Each post comes out of a decision that was really made and shipped — a pivot that worked, a raise that closed, a launch that flopped — with the tradeoffs kept intact instead of edited out.
Fast and findable
Server-rendered pages load quickly and are fully indexed by search engines, so the essay you half-remember shows up the moment you go looking for it again.
How it comes together
From rough idea to published essay
Writing here follows a simple, repeatable loop. The built-in editor handles the mechanics so the focus stays on the argument and the evidence behind it.
1 · Draft in the editor
Open the editor, write in familiar Markdown-style text, and drop in fenced blocks for checklists or metric breakdowns. A live preview shows exactly how the essay will read.
2 · File by category
Add a few comma-separated categories. The essay automatically appears under each topic on the categories page, so readers land on the exact stage they care about.
3 · Publish instantly
Hit publish and the essay goes live on the home page immediately — server-rendered, search-friendly, and ready to share with a clean link preview.
Latest essays
Fresh off the notebook
New essays as they're published. The pieces below ship with the starter — replace them with your own writing whenever you're ready.
From readers
What founders say
A few notes from operators who follow along. Swap these for real testimonials once you've published a while.
"The fundraising essay reframed our whole seed round. We stopped optimizing for the highest valuation and started optimizing for the investor who'd still pick up the phone at month eighteen."
"Finally, growth writing with the actual math in it. I took the retention-curve breakdown straight into our board deck and it held up to every hard question."
"I sent the hiring piece to every manager on my team. It turned our vague 'culture fit' debates into a real scorecard, and our first-90-days attrition dropped noticeably."
Questions
Frequently asked
A quick primer on how this blog works and how to make it your own.
Yes. The starter essays are realistic placeholders. Open the editor at /admin to write, preview, and publish your own — or delete the samples entirely from the manage list.
Learned something worth writing down?
Draft, preview, and publish an essay from the built-in editor — it's live on the home page the moment you hit publish.