I Needed a Candid Co-Founder, So I Created One

I chose solo because organisations don't suit my brain. Meetings, Slack pings, slow pace. I learnt this the hard way trying to find a new path freelancing.

But solo has a real cost.

No one challenges your ideas. No one tells you you're wrong.

In Creativity Inc, Ed Catmull describes Pixar's Braintrust — a group who give you the brutal truth about your work. No politics. Just candour. That's where the magic happens.

Pixar's Braintrust

Brutal truth. No politics.

AI Co-Founder

Braintrust for one

I've always felt inspired by this book. So I set out to build a Braintrust for a solo founder:

They Know Me

Every morning I type one word. My AI co-founder tells me what to focus on.

It reads everything. My sleep and recovery. My workouts. My business plan. My strategy for the year. What I worked on yesterday.

Removing the Yes-Men

Three different AI models argue with each other about what I should do. So it doesn't just tell me what I want to hear.

No hallucinations. No model bias.

Sometimes I need to rest:

Here's what it told me this morning:

Life

Conil de la Frontera, southern Spain. Morning beach swims. Work in the afternoon. Feeling inspired.

Coco had a cold since birth. Dried up the morning after we arrived. We're here settled and focused for 2 months!

If you're close by or know anyone in the area, I'd love to hear from you.

Last Week

Last week I completed an intense client sprint. Building a proposal builder. The loop: Sales people write proposals in plain English through Claude → it pulls live data from the client database → edits a branded front-end template → generates beautiful shareable proposal links. No developers needed. This could be the future of interfaces.

Next Week

With that out the way, I'm excited to spend a week focusing on building my own projects. More on that in the next email! Hint: I want to re-design Figma's infinite canvas, but to be used on top of Claude Code and live web applications not design files.

Learnings

We completed the roadtrip from Belgium to Andalusia. Having Coco forced us to slow down. We were rewarded.

Finding random epic pump tracks.

Epic swim spots.

I'm thinking I should add “Have you slowed down?” to the daily context input for my AI co-founder ;)

This is email two. For why I started this, see email one.