Building software is a solved problem. What next?
Anyone can build any software now. But building software is not the same as building a business. Here is what comes next for founders.
Real stories and actionable frameworks from 20+ years of building, failing, and learning. Explore by topic or start with the latest.
Anyone can build any software now. But building software is not the same as building a business. Here is what comes next for founders.
Anyone can build any software now. But building software is not the same as building a business. Here is what comes next for founders.
Being employed and an entrepreneur aren't mutually exclusive. Figure out what success looks like for your business, match it to the time you can realistically spend, and build both simultaneously.
I use four anchors to validate your business idea before you build: your specific primary user, the one job they need done, the exact context they're in, and the single metric that proves it works.
Stop waiting for perfect. Ship something good enough now, fail fast to learn, make time by defining what success actually means to you, build with almost no money, and hunt ideas by noticing what…
Stop guessing what to build next. Listen to what your customers are actually doing with your product, balance that against your own intuition, then ship it.
I spent 20 years learning what not to do. Now I'm helping people shortcut those mistakes and turn ideas into actual businesses. It's just as rewarding as building things myself.
Constant grinding gets you halfway. The other half is patience—building a real plan and letting it actually play out instead of constantly tweaking it.
Activity is up, engagement is collapsing — that's the Output Paradox. AI makes the easy work easier so people switch off, and your dashboards hide it. Fix the incentives, or apathy wins.
AI didn't ruin documents—bad incentives did. Organizations pressure people to produce faster, so they use AI to skip the thinking. We're losing the skill of actually sitting with information and…
An investor asked why I wouldn't call my company the best in the world. A wrestle with whether confidence comes before the work or after it, and whether going quiet is humility or agency you gave up.
When leaders call work a 'war,' they've usually run out of incentives and ideas. Why boardroom war talk is a lazy manipulation to make you work harder for less, and what to ask when you next hear it.
While everyone uses AI to sound like the average, you stand out by smashing your random interests together. How curiosity, self-efficacy and high agency make you more interesting, and more successful.
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The ideas on this blog come alive in Nic's virtual keynotes. Real stories, actionable frameworks, tailored to your team.