As a start-up founder, your first focus is usually getting some sort of Minimum Viable (or Minimum Lovable) Product out the door. Something that solves a meaningful customer problem which at least some of your potential customers—your early adopters—would be willing to try, however basic.
Getting media coverage for your startup is like dating. If you come on too strong, you’ll scare them away. If you make it all about you, they’ll lose interest. And if you slide into their inbox with a generic pitch, well… let’s just say ghosting is the most likely outcome.
I was recently asked to join a local conference panel about what investors are looking for in 2026. The session ranged from angel and seed investing to scale-up capital, bank lending and company valuations. But the question I kept coming back to was narrower: what has changed over the last 12 months, and why does the old early-stage fundraising playbook feel less reliable than it used to?
A quick search for “startup books” will surface the usual classics: The Lean Startup, Crossing the Chasm, Blitzscaling, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. They’re thoughtful, often inspiring, and occasionally sobering. But when you’re in the messy middle of building a startup — trying to land your first customers, work out why growth has stalled, or decide what to do next with limited time and money — inspiration isn’t the thing you’re short on. Clarity is.
One of the quiet failures of most startup books is that they assume founders have time to read them. The reality is that most founders consume ideas in the cracks between everything else. On the morning commute. While walking the dog. At the gym. Audiobooks fit that reality far better than a hardback ever will, which is why I always planned to release an audio version of The Growth Equation.
Every designer has felt it: that pang of frustration when you’re asked to make a product worse. Maybe it’s hiding a feature behind a paywall. Maybe it’s adding extra steps to the sign-up flow to capture more data. Maybe it’s cramming in additional ads in places you know will annoy people, just to squeeze out more revenue. It can feel like the opposite of what we signed up for. We’re here to improve things, not to degrade them.