Essentialism for Founders

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For the last month, essentialism has been the idea in my consciousness. Every morning, I read a few lines from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. It gets my day started with just a few lines.

The book stays in my backpack and travels with me.

Four weeks ago, I read something that struck me: "Do only what is essential..."

His short, pithy statements usually give me something to meditate on.

This one messed me up; it generated some mental stress.

My brain started to overheat. (It happens a lot) It's not a great way to start the day, annoyed with the words of a man who died 2000 years ago.

How (personally) do I decide on what is essential?

Years ago, I worked at NPR with Jeremy Stark. We were deep into building an Agile team, which was still new. His advice was to write sprint tickets (for my team) so that the work could be completed in the sprint and deployed by the end, and the client would find immediate business value.

"Ticket to Customer Value in Two Weeks" - oopf.

I ignored his advice completely. It was a nice idea, but again, achieving essentialism was a very hard way. What about all the other stuff a development team does that needs to be done?

It's easy to write, share, and almost impossible to implement.

Low-Code is my Essentialism?

I am not the sharpest shovel in the kitchen, but I soon learned (with a little outside advice) that "Low-code" is my way to what is essential. I already had a solution, I was not connecting the dots (again, the shovel problem).

It's the outcome of a ton of startup pain.

Remove all the things we need for a startup technology stack. Strip it down, and then use only off-the-shelf solutions. Keep drilling down to the smallest solution, and do not use code.

Fight the urge to speak in the voice of the customers.

"Code" is tech debt; it's a capital expense, and it's a solution lock-in.

My code brain fights essentialism. I jump to a code solution so often to solve a problem that I log it (in retrospect) in my calendar.

Fix what you measure. I measure my backsliding.

Three times this week, I wrote HTML when I could have had Loveable.dev do it. I set up a CNAME to host landing pages with a GitHub repository when I could have done it in seconds. I used code where it was 100% not needed or called for. Even worse, because the landing pages were committed to a git repo, my partner could not change the copy.

Don't Do What I do/did?

I tell my fractional clients to mentally break the value proposition down, from mission to features, to the most minor feature, to the most trivial feature, and then vibe code on a specific feature.

Essentialism is like a nonstick pan; things slide out and around. I can be elusive, but it gives founders an edge, a way to outcompete incumbent solutions.

The small idea, the minor idea, the idea that a founder thinks, "No one will pay for this..." That's essentialism.

It's also the heart and soul of a new idea!

AI Accelerator for Non-Techies

So fast-forward to last Friday. I am partnering with Karen Kelly to launch an AI (Vibe) Accelerator. It's an outgrowth of five months of vibe code. I am not throwing things against the wall and hoping something sticks. I deploy code to production.

I have only written 1.2 days of syntax code since June 1st, 2025.

Our partnership grew out of essentialism, from the challenge of balancing what we want to build, what we think we should build, and what the client wants.

It grew out of the joy and clarity that founders experience when they step outside their current approaches and see their startups in a new light. The next year is going to test us all. Budgets are changing, and costs are going up. We want this program to help founders unlock approaches and solutions that would have been lost in the rush of work.

Mentored, crowdsourced essentialism.