CONVERGENCE
Join Convergence, a movement among startup technical founders & operators who are done with scattered tactics & ready to install the growth systems, decisions & leadership that move revenue.
The AI readiness gap your ERP vendor isn't talking about
Reader, The other day Andy Park told me about a friend who runs a mid-market manufacturing company. The guy has Epicor running from a server closet at his plant. Products ship on time. His team knows the system. Everything works. Then the vendor starts pushing him to migrate to the cloud version. Three times his current annual spend. No direct migration path. A full reimplementation. His question is completely reasonable: Why would I spend half a million dollars and risk my entire operation...
Your pricing model is your org chart
Hi Reader, Fact is, most founders optimize the wrong variable when they're trying to scale. They focus on shipping faster, hiring more engineers, closing more deals. But the pattern I see in fast exits? It's not about velocity. It's about pricing structure + hiring discipline. I've helped consultancies go from zero to $750K enterprise contracts in 4 months. The companies that scale fastest don't charge by the hour. They charge by the outcome. Case in point: Algoage (built and sold in under 2...
Old colleagues closed more deals than 1000 OSS members" (B2B reality)
You're building in public, Reader Your GitHub stars are climbing. Contributors are active. The community Slack has real conversations happening daily. So you assume this will convert into customers. It doesn't. Mrinal Wadhwa built Ockam with hundreds of contributors and customers like AWS, Databricks, and Snowflake. Then in 2024, he pivoted to build Autonomy, a platform for long-horizon AI agents. I wanted to understand what he learned about the gap between community building and customer...
New course: Automate 10hrs/week with Custom GPTs (no code)
Hi Reader, Every technical founder on the face of the planet knows about ChatGPT. They've tried it. They probably even use it daily. But when I ask "What have you automated with it?" The answer is usually: "Uh... some drafts?" Here's the pattern I see after training 2M+ people: The gap isn't knowledge. It's knowing which tasks are worth automating, and how to build something reliable without becoming a prompt engineer. That's why I built Automating Your Work with Custom GPTs (No Code...
AI is killing the hourly-billing revenue model (here's the fix)
Reader, When Gwen Griggs finished law school, she was ready to solve problems. She knew how to think critically and get to answers fast. Then her law firm gave her the real goal: 2,200 billable hours per year. "The skills that I had learned to solve problems quickly weren't the same skills that made you successful in a law firm," she told me. She wasn't describing a personal failure. She was describing a structural problem baked into the business model itself. The firm wanted maximum hours....
When your customers keep asking for the wrong product
She was 3 years into building a language learning platform, Reader 3 long years... Customers kept asking for document translation. Daphne Tay kept saying no. After all, she'd already spent 3 years researching domain-specific vocabulary. Legal terminology in French. Financial jargon in Mandarin. Compliance language across a dozen European dialects. Thousands of hours building databases of technical terms that didn't exist in standard translation tools. Then customers started asking for...
Your GTM infrastructure is leaking leads (here's how to fix it)
I watched a validation project burn ~$40K in two months because of broken web and form infrastructure (this happens to 7-figure companies) Get this, Reader - I opened Teams to find the message every fractional CMO dreads: “The sign-ups aren’t showing up in the product.” We were two months into active PMF validation. Landing page built. Ads running. Traffic coming in. Retention rates looked good, but conversions were far too low. The problem? Website architecture was leaking conversion events...
Hiring a freelance technical editor
Hi Reader - Quick note today because we are growing and I need the right support in place. I am currently hiring a Technical Editor to work on content related to machine learning, analytics, applied data topics, and doing data science with AI tools. This role is for someone who has substantial experience in these areas and who also cares deeply about clarity, structure, and strong editorial flow. This is for the 4th edition of Data Science for Dummies which is due in May 2026. The work...
The 10:1 burn ratio investors wince at (your spreadsheets won't show you this)
They had spreadsheets. Lots of them, Reader... Organic traffic trending (slightly) up. Demo forms capturing emails. Social metrics climbing slowly. Every vanity metric you could want, updated weekly and color-coded for executive review. What they didn't have? Enough customers. $500K annual burn. Less than $50K in revenue from fewer than 20 paying customers. A 10:1 burn ratio that would make any investor wince. When I asked to see their dashboard, the founder pulled up more spreadsheets. Not a...
The scope creep solution that took me ~20 years to discover
I’ve been consulting technology and engineering companies since 2007, and this week I discovered that I’ve been solving scope creep the wrong way, Reader 🤔 A founder hires me to build an outbound system. Two months, clear deliverables. But three weeks in, they realize they also need messaging fixed, the website rebuilt, and partnership strategy sorted out. All valid. All important. None in scope. For years, I handled this sort of thing case by case, renegotiating as we went. It worked, but it...
Join Convergence, a movement among startup technical founders & operators who are done with scattered tactics & ready to install the growth systems, decisions & leadership that move revenue.