Close the loop before you hire a salesperson
A first sales hire inherits the gaps between your tools, not your judgment. Make the acquisition loop run end to end first, then hire into it.
September 1, 2026 · 5 min read
Topic
On starting, and on shipping before you feel ready
Essays, mostly not about software. About the gap between deciding and starting, about shipping something with a wobble in it, and about why the quiet quarter you are waiting for is never going to arrive.
Start hereStraight answers · Pricing
13 articles
What Two People Can Actually Run
A two-person company has about one person's worth of attention for getting customers. Your tools decide how much goes to the work and how much to the gaps.
September 1, 2026 · 5 min read
Your First 100 B2B Customers, for Founders Who Never Sold
Getting to a hundred paying accounts is not a strategy problem for a technical founder. It is a loop with four moves, and most people quit at the third one.
September 1, 2026 · 6 min read
The Smallest Complete Acquisition Loop for a Solo Consultant
The famine month was decided eight weeks earlier, while you billed forty hours and nobody wrote to strangers. The smallest acquisition loop that keeps turning.
September 1, 2026 · 5 min read
Running acquisition for ten clients on one bill
An agency retainer is priced per client result, but its software is priced per client count. That mismatch is where the margin goes.
September 1, 2026 · 5 min read
Shipping Was the Cheap Part
Deploying is not launching. Turning a live URL into revenue is a different job, and one tool per step makes the founder the wiring.
September 1, 2026 · 5 min read
The Work Has No Mouth
Dev built something better than anything in his industry, waited a year, and got eleven customers. Most makers skip the half that gets the work known.
July 30, 2026 · 5 min read
Nobody Feels Ready, Including the People Who Look It
Terry bought the van and the logo, read a nine-hundred-post thread about clipper blades, then spent eight months not grooming a single dog.
July 29, 2026 · 5 min read
Everybody Decides. Almost Nobody Starts.
A man in Sheffield has owned his woodworking studio's domain since 2019. It still points at nothing. The gap between deciding and doing hides in activity.
July 8, 2026 · 5 min read
The Quiet Quarter Is Never Coming
Dale keeps a note of forty-one things he will do when work slows down. He started it in 2019. The slow week never came, and the waiting has a cost.
June 26, 2026 · 5 min read
Nothing Compounds Inside Your Head
Ray has fixed espresso machines for fifteen years and writes every job in a spiral notebook. Why almost nobody builds anything like it.
June 24, 2026 · 5 min read
Ship the Wobbly Stool
One man spent fourteen months building a perfect workshop and never made a chair. Two bays down, a woman sold a wobbly stool for forty dollars and got orders.
May 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Why Most Ideas Never Get a First Paying Customer
The path from idea to first paying customer is expensive, slow and fragmented. Rocketship puts finding buyers, following up and getting paid in one place.
April 13, 2026 · 5 min read
Other topics
- Getting your first customers as a startup
- Getting customers without a sales team
- Cold email for people who are not salespeople
- Lead generation for small business: finding the people who will buy
- Follow-up, speed to lead and booked meetings
- Finding customers on Reddit and in online communities
- How to get customers, business by business
- What a missed call actually costs
- Contractors, clinics and local service businesses
- Getting customers in a service business
- Comparisons
- Choosing the tools that get you customers
- What getting customers costs
- Practical guides for the phone
- Building the thing that runs the business