20 October 2025
This week's additions focus on mindset, leadership, and strategy, with new digests from Matthew Volkwyn, Cameron Herold, and Rob Walling. Highlights include Curiosity about the client's business beats any sales script. Your second-in-command should cover exactly what drains you as a founder
Showing 56 digests for 20 October 2025.
Closing techniques
YouTube
How copywriters can close clients on sales calls
Matthew Volkwyn
October 26, 2025
Closing techniques
9
Prospecting & outreach
6
Curiosity about the client's business beats any sales script.
Walk-away power — having multiple leads — removes desperation from calls.
BAMFAM: always book a follow-up call before ending the conversation.
Hiring & recruitment
YouTube
How to find and hire the right second-in-command for your company
Cameron Herold
October 26, 2025
Hiring & recruitment
9
Management
6
Your second-in-command should cover exactly what drains you as a founder
The right COO is stage-specific — one person can't fit every phase
Title inflation is rife; match title, role scope, and compensation precisely
Product-market fit
YouTube
Five Stages of Product-Market Fit: A Spectrum, Not a Switch
Rob Walling
October 26, 2025
Product-market fit
10
Long-term planning
6
PMF is a dimmer switch with five measurable stages, not binary.
Monthly churn above 10% means pre-PMF regardless of MRR.
Each stage has distinct metrics, priorities, and failure modes.
What Popular Business Books Get Wrong About Scaling
Ryan Deiss
October 26, 2025
Processes & SOPs
9
Hiring & recruitment
7
Unit economics
5
Systems must come before people — not the other way around.
Productivity is for employees; leverage is the owner's real job.
Purpose and great hires mean nothing without a working business model.
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
How a 23-year-old built a $20K/month app in 14 days with AI
Starter Story
October 26, 2025
MVP & prototyping
9
Growth hacking
8
User research
7
Onboarding drives revenue more than features for paywalled apps.
Define data structures before AI coding to eliminate guesswork.
Prove UGC content organically before committing paid ad spend.
How Dan Kwon Built $2.2M in Revenue From Viral No-Code Apps
Superwall
October 26, 2025
Case studies
9
Growth hacking
8
Product-market fit
7
Ride existing cultural cults — don't create demand from scratch.
One stitched viral video drove 150M views and $500K in a month.
Seven Instagram videos took Shepherd from concept to 75K MRR in two weeks.
Customer discovery
YouTube
10 AI SaaS startup ideas targeting the $6 trillion knowledge worker market
TK Kader
October 26, 2025
Customer discovery
9
Niche selection
8
AI tools & automation
7
AI is disrupting labor, not software — the real market is $6 trillion
CFO tools that audit and forecast will displace entire analyst teams
Start with jobs-to-be-done research, not ideas — problems come first
AI tools & automation
Podcast
How a CEO used AI to reclaim 20 hours a week
How I Work
October 26, 2025
AI tools & automation
9
AI strategy & adoption
7
Case studies
6
A custom GPT cut a CEO's workload by 20–25 hours weekly.
An AI writer's room challenges your writing without replacing your voice.
Over-relying on AI risks eroding the synthesis skills leaders need most.
Resilience & grit
Podcast
Ryan Holiday and his agent Steve Hanselman on building the Stoic Virtues series
The Daily Stoic
October 26, 2025
Resilience & grit
7
Identity & self-belief
6
Founder interviews
5
Believing you possess wisdom is the surest sign you do not.
The four Stoic virtues are inseparable — courage without justice is hollow.
An agent's Harvard Greek and Latin skills made the Daily Stoic possible.
Resilience & grit
Podcast
Seven stoic lessons on how to keep going
The Daily Stoic
October 26, 2025
Resilience & grit
9
Identity & self-belief
6
Perseverance means maintaining virtue while responding rationally to hardship.
Accept your fate and embrace struggle as proof of your true character.
Action and immediate response reclaim control; procrastination hands it to fate.
Five lessons from 500 millionaires and billionaires
KeyPersonOfInfluence
October 26, 2025
Business models
9
Identity & self-belief
7
Your words pitch reality into existence — positive and negative.
Income follows assets, not effort or time invested.
Wealthy entrepreneurs default to partnership, not transactions.
AI strategy & adoption
Podcast
How Block rebuilt itself as an AI-native company at scale
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
October 26, 2025
AI strategy & adoption
9
Management
6
Business operating systems
5
Reorganising into a functional org unlocked more productivity than any AI tool.
Non-technical staff, not engineers, are seeing the biggest AI productivity gains.
Code quality has almost nothing to do with whether a product succeeds.
Seven communication habits that signal you are not leadership material
Dr. Grace Lee
October 25, 2025
Communication
9
Identity & self-belief
5
Non-committal words are cheap — executives only trust those who carry risk.
Filler words impose a disfluency tax that lowers perceived competence.
Saying "I think" invites debate; deontic language grounded in logic wins.
Founder interviews
Podcast
Wisdom requires seeking it out: Ryan Holiday and Billy Oppenheimer on mentorship and knowledge
The Daily Stoic
October 25, 2025
Founder interviews
9
Resilience & grit
7
Identity & self-belief
6
Being very smart makes you more vulnerable to catastrophic stupidity.
One contrarian bet paying off can permanently distort your sense of reality.
Finishing your first book matters more than how well it sells.
CompoSecure: How a niche metal card maker dominates premium payments
Business Breakdowns
October 24, 2025
Case studies
9
Business models
8
Unit economics
6
80% market share in premium metal cards, growing 3-4x faster than plastic
A $12 card generates $1,000+ annual profit for issuers — unbeatable ROI
Dave Cote's M&A playbook could transform a niche manufacturer into a platform