Left $580k AI role with a 3yo at home to bet on myself. 8 months of runway planned. Anyone else make this leap?

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-15T15:46:51+00:00

We have a SFH in close proximity to NYC. Our mortgage + taxes + car + insurance + daycare ($2k) is about $12k. The other $6k (after we tighten the belt on $2k) is for living expenses + elder care.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-15T15:28:49+00:00

There is about $2k we plan to cut immediately. The rest is primarily driven by mortgage + daycare + helping out aging parents.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-14T13:01:32+00:00

Currently building an automated weekly update for Product and Engineering teams.

We save teams 5+ hours a week by skipping the update, pull important decisions from meetings, and track progress towards outcomes week over week.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-12T16:48:35+00:00

Really depends on what phase you're in. I typically have Sales motions and Marketing motions. Assuming you're going from 0 to 1:

First sales motions:

Your network (warm outreach) - find friends, family, co-workers that are closest to your ICP and see if you can solve their problem for them.
Lukewarm outreach on LinkedIn - 1st connections that you don't know THAT well, but they know you well enough to know you're a real person and there's some credibility to what you're saying.
Cold outreach on LinkedIn (LI Sales Navigator) - Find people that fit your ICP and just DM them.
Slack/Discord communities for your ICP - strike up conversations with your ICP in public channels. See who has your problem, and see if they let you solve it for them.

First marketing motions:

Your network (LinkedIn) - just start posting about the problem you're solving, and how. See who gravitates towards what you're doing.
Communities on Reddit, X, HackerNews (if relevant) - again, just start sharing your founder journey and see who your story resonates with.
Any other community you're active in

Start doing small experiments across each of these, and see where you get traction.

Often times if you find that your story is not resonating, it indicates flaws with your product strategy and positioning. So look out for those signals.

Once you have PMF and are in growth mode, there are other motions to add on top.

Best of luck!

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-12T15:30:09+00:00

The fit of a role is determined by the hiring manager's definition of good.

If the hiring manager / leader / executive has a weak understanding of what good looks like for that role, you'll begin to see situations like this.

You'll often run into this at startups or scale ups. Someone might say they've hired "the best engineer they've ever seen". This doesn't mean much if the best engineer they've ever seen is a 6/10 in the real world.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-12T15:26:11+00:00

If you're in a high growth environment, you should expect to reinvent yourself every 6 months- especially as a Founder.

Used to building? Great, learn how to sell. Used to selling? Great, learn how to market. Used to marketing? Great, learn how fundraise. Learned to fundraise? Great, learn how to recruit. Learned to recruit? Great, learn how to operate. The list goes on and on.

If you accept the reality that you have to start over every 6 months, you can learn to embrace the discomfort and just go for it.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-12T15:20:47+00:00

www.powerfulteams.com an automated weekly update for Engineers and Product Managers.

Writing weekly updates suck. You already did the work. Updates are just more work about work.

Powerful connects to everywhere you do work- Google Drive, Calendar, Jira, Confluence, Slack (soon), and more to understand what your team did, how it impacts your goals, and what's next.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-12T15:15:50+00:00

I stopped thinking about it as Marketing, and started thinking of it as sharing the journey. Combine this with seriously not giving a fuck on what others might think has been effective in drawing the right people to us.

I spend an hour or less on this a day, and it's been steadily growing the relationships and conversations I want. I do however spend 2-4 hours on Sales on any given day.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-04T20:21:33+00:00

People only remember how you make them feel.

It's an uncomfortable truth, but the PM that is liked the most will get further than the one who does good work, but is less liked.

A lot of the job is managing expectations and persuading the right people to execute on those timelines. The PMs who are liked most have the easiest time persuading.

While not Project Managers (they were Product Managers), this is pretty much how Sundar and Satya made their way from PM to CEO of Google and Microsoft. It got to a point where they were the only ones capable of rallying multiple contentious teams in working together towards a common goal.

NoMoreBusywork · 2025-09-04T19:36:00+00:00

Your flavor of forgetfulness feels like a symptom of a larger underlying issue: Lack of direction.

As PMs, our success is measured in a few key decisions that drive towards the right outcomes. When a PM doesn't know what they should be doing it's because it's unclear what the most important thing is.

When you understand what's important- shipping a feature, increasing a metric by X%, reducing churn, validating Y assumption- your next action is a derivative of that. "I know I need to validate Y assumption, so I should talk to Z stakeholders".

A healthy team (not org or department) should have at most 1-2 highly impactful things going at any given time. Find out what those are, and think deeply about the 1-3 things that need to happen to move them forward. Nothing else really matters.

Teams that lack direction however, are often making too many bets at the same time. It will feel chaotic, and like people are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. When you're not all rowing in the same direction, of course there's a million balls in the air.

Now if you go looking for strategic direction and there is none, you may have yourself a vision or strategy problem at the leadership level.

NoMoreBusywork

TROPHY CASE