How To Founder

What if most of what your marketing agency does could be done in an afternoon with AI?

Chris Franks, Stephanie Hays, and Anthony Franco pull apart the agency model in 2026. They debate whether the founder should own strategy or rent it, why packaged services quietly produce mismatched leads, and how "bro marketing" hype cycles pull shaky founders into spending that goes nowhere. They get specific about what AI now does as well as a ...

Your toughest competitor may not be another company. It may be a spreadsheet, a lawyer, an old internal tool, or the customer doing nothing.

In episode 202, Chris Franks, Anthony Franco, and Stephanie Hays break down competitive analysis without the usual founder panic. They cover why competitors can be useful sources of information, why obsessing over them turns mission into ego, and how to spot the alternatives actually stealing y...

The moment you start selling your invention, the clock to losing your patent rights starts ticking.

Anthony Franco, Chris Franks, and Stephanie Hayes break down intellectual property for early-stage founders — from why investors won't sign your NDA (and what that signals about you) to the difference between patents, trade secrets, and doing nothing at all. They cover when to file a provisional patent (before your first pitch),...

What if most of your roadmap is work that should not exist at all?

Chris Franks, Anthony Franco, and Stephanie Hays take apart Elon Musk’s five-step algorithm — make the requirements less dumb, delete, simplify, accelerate, automate — and stress test it against the reality of running an early-stage company. They dig into the Tesla fire-pad story that nobody could trace to an owner, why most founders run the sequenc...

Starting a company that works might be the loneliest thing you ever do. Not because nobody’s around—because everybody is, and none of them can carry what you’re carrying.

In this episode, Anthony Franco, Chris Franks, and Stephanie Hayes dig into the structural loneliness of being a founder: why you can’t share the real weight with your team, why your family didn’t sign up for the same ride, and why con...

What if hiring your first sales rep is the move that quietly kills your best deals?

Joel Miller has run The Sky Floor for seventeen years without a VC, retains clients for years, and refuses to hand his prospecting calls to a hire — and he can prove why. In this episode, Stephanie Hayes and Chris Franks dig into the authority a founder carries that a rep cannot replicate, the moment selling stops being a tax and becomes a tran...

What if the thing you're proudest of is the thing buyers pay you less for?

Founder-led businesses sell every day at multiples that quietly account for one number: how much of the company runs through you. Chris Franks and Stephanie Hays unpack the risk-adjustment math that decides exit valuations — why a $1.5M services business with $1.3M in expenses is worth less than an $800K one with $300K, why SDE and EBITDA reward opposit...

The dishonesty you keep finding is usually the system you designed working perfectly.

Most founders treat employee dishonesty as a hiring problem or a character flaw. The founders who've watched this play out across multiple companies see something different — a system pattern wearing a person's face. Anthony and Chris break down the two flavors of dishonesty, why founders almost always confuse them, and what changes when you ...

What if the launch checklist you're following is the reason you haven't launched?

Stephanie Hayes and Chris Franks tear apart the conventional first-hundred-days playbook, the one that says incorporate first, brand second, sell third. They argue the order is exactly wrong. Forty-two percent of startups die from no market need, not bad legal structure, and every hour spent on logos and LLCs is an hour not spent finding out whether an...

The fastest path to AI adoption in your company isn't hiring an expert. It's becoming one yourself.

In this episode, we sit down with John Kaplar, who left an 18-year software career to teach founders and designers how to integrate AI into real workflows. John makes the case that founders who delegate AI before they understand it can't manage the work, evaluate the results, or build on what's possible.

We dig into why agentic AI is t...

Your company's impact initiative has better odds of becoming a press release than a legacy.

In this episode, we sit down with Jim Tracy, who spent thirty years building companies across manufacturing, telecom, agriculture, and real estate on four continents. Jim has a simple test for whether your company's impact is real: if it's in your sales deck, it's a marketing tactic, not a mission. If it lives in the process, it lasts.

We dig ...

What if the smartest people in your corner are the reason you're stuck?

Founders build advisory boards by collecting impressive resumes: former CEOs, industry veterans, people who've been exactly where they want to go. Six months later, they're making the same decisions they'd make alone, except now four people validate them first. That's not an advisory board. That's an echo chamber with better titles.

Chris Franks and Stephanie Hay...

Your profit report says things are great. Your bank account disagrees. What's actually happening?

In this episode, e-commerce CFO Abir Syed breaks down the profitability paradox that quietly kills growing businesses: why strong margins and a healthy P&L can coexist with a genuine cash crisis, and how founders who don't model their cash conversion cycle find themselves on a treadmill of expensive short-term debt they can never es...

In this episode, we break down what user experience actually means — and it's not what most founders think. UX isn't your app's color scheme or button placement. It's the entire chain from first contact to renewal, and every gap in that chain is costing you customers you'll never get back.

Anthony Franco, founder of the world's first UX agency, joins Stephanie and Chris to unpack the most common UX mistakes founders make: buil...

You signed the papers. The wire hit your account. So why does it feel like grief?

In this episode, we dig into the emotional reality of selling your business, the part nobody prepares you for. Veronica Zora Kirin, serial founder, two-time TEDx speaker, and anthropologist, breaks down why exits mirror the stages of grief even when they go exactly right. We cover how to read the slippage signal before you've stayed too long, what earn...

Every option you keep open is silently billing you.

Most founders call it flexibility. Investors call it hedging. The founders who've been through it call it what it actually is: fear dressed up in strategic language. In this episode, Anthony, Chris, and Stephanie break down the optionality trap — why the instinct to keep doors open destroys more companies than bad products ever did.

They cover how to tell the difference betwee...

Your company already has a culture. You just didn't design it.

Every founder talks about building culture intentionally. But culture isn't built during the retreat or the values workshop - it accumulates in every decision you make under pressure, every behavior you let slide, and every pattern you carry into the office from your personal life. Lisa Johnson, co-founder of Been There Got Out, built her business through ten years in th...

Your team tripled. Revenue doubled. And somehow, you're slower, messier, and more dependent on the founder than you were at ten people.

In this episode, Chris Franks and Stephanie Hays dig into the specific mechanisms that cause growth to break good companies. Not the obvious failures, but the invisible ones: the informal communication patterns that disappeared when you added headcount, the profile mismatches that make your best ear...

The habits that made you a top performer at a big company can quietly wreck your startup.

In this episode, New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur Randy Gage joins the conversation to dissect the mental software founders carry out of corporate life, and why it's so hard to uninstall. From surrounding yourself with sycophants to building overhead too fast, the traps are predictable. So are the fixes.

You'll hear why the mos...