HeyJaredBen Sheppard
Ben Sheppard of Inside Startups on getting founders to their next customers, written from inside the work of building and selling.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Oct 1, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest issues
Anyone can build it now. That was never the hard part. (opens the original)
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There was a time when building a product was difficult, and designing one was harder still. That time has gone. Anyone can build something now. It is a message that has come through from almost every founder I have sat down with over the last 3 weeks, and it is something I have known to be true for some time.One founder put it better than I could. “I have the technical ability to do whatever I want, especially with AI. I can build whatever, really whatever I want.” He is right. And then, in the
If your boss hasn’t read your work, why is he critiquing it? (opens the original)
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Why the CEO who runs every decision through AI is creating toxic cultures, burning out experts and leaving a generation without good mentors.Some time ago I wrote about the different founder archetypes I meet, and later about the investor ones. This morning, walking back to the office after the school run, I found myself thinking about a new archetype that has appeared over the past year. I did not have a name for it, so I have given it one: the Borrowed Genius.The Borrowed Genius is a business
A team for ninety days, not a co-founder for life (opens the original)
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When a founder cannot build the thing themselves, the reflex is to find a technical co-founder. That reflex was formed in a world where building required a team, and it has outlived the conditions that produced it.The cost of it is rarely counted properly. You are choosing a permanent partner, usually in a hurry, usually from whoever happens to be available, and handing over a slice of the company that does not come back. It gets decided in a few weeks and it lasts for the life of the business.T
The First Mile, and why we built it (opens the original)
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Almost everything built for founders starts after the hard part. Investors want a product, users and revenue. Accelerators want traction. The big grant routes want a working product and real users. The distance between having an idea and having a product somebody will pay for is the least supported stretch of the whole thing, and it is where most founders actually are.We have built a thirteen week programme for it. This is sixty seconds on what it is, who it is for, and how it runs.Three places
The CEO Briefing Dashboard: What Broke, and What I Did About It (opens the original)
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My tool for connecting everything across the business together so I can visualise it in a useful way, apply different metrics, and see the health of the business, what the team’s doing, how everything’s performing by function as we continue to grow and scale Inside Startups.My last newsletter ended with what appeared to be a great success: building this platform using Manus AI , with a bit of help from Claude Code . Or at
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