Knowledge
Start with what you are trying to figure out.
SOE knowledge is built around real founder problems - research, lived experience, frameworks, guides, questions and practical material that help make the next question clearer.
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Go straight to the part of the work you are in.
The library
Useful before impressive.
How do I price?
A method for pricing that respects the work and the buyer.
When Should a Founder Trust Intuition Instead of More Data?
A practical framework for deciding when founder intuition is useful, when evidence should take over, and how to test the signal without mistaking confidence for accuracy.
How Do You Know When Your Business Is Actually Profitable?
Revenue tells you what the business sold. Profit tells you what remained after the costs of producing and running it. The two numbers answer different questions.
How Should a Founder Assess Product-Market Fit?
Product-market fit is a pattern of customer behavior, not a badge a startup earns once.
How to Build a Cash Flow Model That Helps You Make Decisions
A useful cash flow model shows when cash enters, when it leaves, and where timing can create a shortfall.
When should I hire my first salesperson?
Prove the sale is repeatable, then hire.
When should I discount?
A discount is a message. Make sure it says what you intend.
Monthly Budget Template
A simple spreadsheet template for tracking burn, revenue, and runway every month.
Offer Canvas
The shape of an offer that answers the question a buyer is actually asking.
Sales Tracker
A practical sales tracker framework for founders and small sales teams: stages, evidence, next actions, stale deals, forecasting and loss learning.
How Much Cash Should a Small Business Keep in Reserve?
A practical, evidence-backed way to set a cash reserve using protected outflows, cash-buffer days and the business’s realistic risk window.
Cold Email
A practical cold-email drafting and review template built around research, relevance, a small ask and respectful follow-up.
Proposal
A practical proposal template connecting the client problem, proposed work, deliverables, scope, pricing, assumptions and next step.
What Should a Founder Do When a Customer Pays Late?
A late invoice is a cash-flow problem first. Diagnose the cause, protect the relationship and change the payment system without turning every overdue invoice into a confrontation.
How Should a Founder Decide What to Keep In-House and What to Outsource?
A practical decision test for choosing between employees, contractors and outside specialists without treating cost as the only variable.
What Should a Founder Do When a Key Employee Leaves?
A key employee leaving exposes whether the business has systems or only people who remember how everything works.
Founder Story Template
An evidence-first template for turning a founder's decisions, turning points and lessons into a truthful, useful story.
How Should Founders Balance Experience and Evidence?
A practical guide to combining founder experience, evidence and reversible experiments without treating either instinct or data as universally superior.
When Should You Fire a Customer? A Profitability and Fit Test
A practical test for deciding whether to repair a customer relationship, change the terms, or end it without confusing revenue with value.
Role Design Template
A template for writing a role description that attracts the right person.
Finding First Customer
A two-week window that changed the shape of a business.
When Should You Pivot or Persevere? A Practical Evidence Test
How founders can distinguish a real business-model signal from a bad experiment, sunk-cost thinking, or temporary discomfort before changing direction.
When Should You Stop Saying Yes to Custom Work?
A practical test for deciding when a customer request should be standard work, re-scoped, re-priced, treated as an experiment, or declined.
Which Customer Requests Should You Actually Build?
A practical way to separate a useful customer signal from a one-off request before it bends your roadmap.
Is Your Business Valuable Without You?
A practical test for finding the parts of a business that still depend on the founder-and what to change before that dependence becomes a growth or exit risk.
When One Customer Carries Too Much of Your Business
A practical way to measure customer concentration before a large account becomes a business-wide risk.
If Customers Cannot Easily Leave, Your Subscription Problem Is Bigger Than Churn
Retention should come from customer value, not unnecessary exit friction.
Your Business Bank Account Is Not a Personal Wallet
Separating business and personal money is not just an accounting chore; it improves financial visibility.
The Email Looks Real. The Decision Is the Trap.
A practical founder-level system for verifying urgent payment, credential and sensitive-data requests.
Cash Is Coming In. So Why Does the Business Still Feel Short?
Revenue can grow while cash stays tight. The problem may be timing, not sales.
Positioning Canvas
The sentence people say when the room goes quiet. Built from their words, not yours.
Weekly Founder Review
A fifteen-minute weekly practice for checking your clarity, energy, and direction.
Pricing Memo Template
A one-page document that forces clarity about what you charge and why.
Structuring a Small Team
Most small teams do not need a hierarchy. They need a clear decision-making process that does not depend on the founder being present.
This week, a founder explains why she shut it down.
After six years and forty-one employees, Maren Olsen turned the key for the last time. She wants to be clear: it was not a failure. It was an ending.
The lamp was still on when I left.
A late-stage founder on the night her co-founder resigned, the silence in the office that followed, and the spreadsheet she could not bring herself to close.
The workbench years.
A small-batch furniture maker on the decade he spent before anyone called him a founder, and why he is suspicious of the word now.
Standing in the doorway of the second one.
He sold his first company at fifty-two. He opened the second a year later, smaller, on a quieter street. A conversation about what is left to prove.