Created from a single voice note with Agent Craft

Building six companies taught me something I got completely backwards…

Building six companies taught me something I got completely backwards for the first three. I used to think the founders who moved fast were the ones who trusted their gut. Skip the process, rely on instinct, ship it and see. That framing sounds good. It's also wrong, and it cost me real time and money before I figured out why. The thing is, "trust your gut" is only useful advice if your gut has been trained on enough relevant data. Early in a new venture, it hasn't. You're essentially asking a muscle to do work it hasn't built yet. So what looks like sharp intuition from the outside is often just expensive guessing. Here's the process I actually use now, across every company including Agent Craft. Start with an idea you genuinely find interesting. Not the idea you think will work. The one that pulls your attention, that sits in a space you want to spend time in. That matters because you're going to be wrong about a lot of things early on, and caring about the space is what keeps you moving through the wrong turns. Then get out and talk to people immediately. Not to validate. To learn. There's a difference. Validation is when you're looking for confirmation. Learning is when you're genuinely open to hearing that your idea is pointing at the wrong target. Most founders go in looking for validation and come back thinking they've confirmed something when actually they've just been polite to prospects who didn't want to disappoint them. Pay attention to the actual feedback, not the version that fits your original plan. This is where the process does something that intuition alone can't: it forces you to receive information that contradicts what you want to believe. At Agent Craft we started with one model and pivoted to a different one after talking to enough customers. The second version is significantly stronger than the first. That pivot didn't come from a flash of inspiration in the shower. It came from a pattern in the conversations we were having that I kept ignoring until I couldn't anymore. Which brings me to the thing intuition is actually good for: knowing when you've hit the pattern. When enough signals are pointing in the same direction, your gut is the thing that says "this is the one." But that moment only comes after the process has generated enough signal to train your instincts on. So the real answer isn't process versus intuition. Intuition without process is guessing. Process without intuition is analysis paralysis. You need the process to generate the signal, and you need your gut to know when you've found something worth committing to. One rule I've held since company three: if I don't know the answer, don't make a move. Wait until the process has given you enough to go on. Moving fast on thin conviction is just slow failure dressed up as decisiveness. The flip side of that is equally important. Once you know? Move quickly to take action. Don't sit on the learning. The window between "I've figured this out" and "my competitor has also figured this out" is shorter than it used to be. Get going. Learn fast. Be prepared to pivot. And don't make a move until the signal is actually there.