You're receiving this email because you subscribed to my newsletter Founder Tonic (possibly through a past project like Krit or Startup Watching). I write about bootstrapped startups, mental health, and my attempts to lead a fulfilling life. If you don't want to get these emails anymore click here to unsubscribe, no hard feelings!

Hey friend,

A lot has changed since I sent my last newsletter, and some things are still pretty much the same.

I moved to Atlanta in July. I'm living here through the end of the year, then planning to spend next year traveling in Central and South America working on my Spanish. My first stop is Mexico City, after that, it's still open-ended.

We completely rebuilt MetaMonster, and we're up to 7 customers. It's slow-going, and we have a clear activation problem (people are signing up and not using the tool). But I still think we're on the right track.

My consulting work has shifted from a focus on product design and product management to marketing. I'm currently working with one client as a fractional CMO and I see myself continuing to lean in this direction for the next stage of my career. My strengths right now are product and content marketing, but I still have a lot to learn across the board.

I'm still trying to publish new episodes of Small Efforts as often as I can, and while I'm not writing consistently for my personal site I do have a couple of posts percolating and I am doing some writing for the MetaMonster blog.

I'd love it if you hit reply and tell me what's new with you!

Cheers,

Andrew

For bootstrappers

Anthony Pierri's LinkedIn feed

Positioning is one of the hardest things to get right in the early days of a startup and is absolutely critical to your success. And Anthony Pierri (plus the rest of his team at FletchPMM) put out the absolutely best content on positioning that I've ever seen. He answers questions in a clear, concrete way with lots of examples and awesome visuals. I love the way he breaks down positioning into types of anchors and takes a stance on things like VC backed companies should position as if they were bootstrapped or your home page is the ideal place to document your positioning.

This agentic workflow platform post-mortem

Lots of people are building AI workflow automation platforms right now (you could argue that I am working on two) so I found this post-mortem from the Plumb team really interesting. Especially point number 3 on what they got wrong: "We didn’t pick a vertical, function, or high value set of tasks to solve on day one - instead we spent way too long playing with “nice to have” flows that were technically interesting but not operationally valuable."

Aaron Dignan @aarondignan major life update: we are shutting down @useplumb after several years of hustling on agentic workflow automation, we have decided to hang it up what we got right: ✅ Agentic Workflows > Agents - determinism and the ability to debug still matter guys (even Open AI gets this 2:5 PM • Oct 8, 2025 69 Retweets 1035 Likes Read 99 replies

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MetaMonster prompt library

We published all of the prompts we use in MetaMonster and adapted them so that you can use them with whatever tool you want. If you're doing any SEO work I highly recommend you browse the library, I can almost guarantee you there's a prompt in here that will make your life easier.

From me

Travels in Washington, launching the new MetaMonster UI and a possible Chartjuice revival?!

In the latest episode of Small Efforts I talk about seeing Saturn through a telescope, launching MetaMonster's new UI, and struggling to get users to activate! 🔭 We're getting 1-2 daily signups with zero engagement. Sean presents his Michelin star agency framework and we debate reviving Chartjuice. Plus: could web design agencies be a better fit than SEO agencies?

For fun

This transcription tool

The team at Every launched a transcription tool called Monologue and it's become one of my most-used AI products. My current workflow for creating new sales pages or rough drafts of most blog posts is to open a project in Claude, hit the right option key to open Monologue, then brain dump all of my ideas out loud to my computer. From there I take the draft and manually edit it, but often it's good enough on the first try.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

I've seen this series recommended a bunch on YouTube and reddit, and finally got around to reading it. I've loved it so far. It's weird (one of the main characters is a talking cat named Princess Donut), nerdy, and action-packed. I've been reading a lot of rom coms lately and this has been a nice, fun break from that although there's plenty of darkness in here too. Highly recommend.

Naked & Famous

A friend just brought me back a bottle of yellow chartreuse from Italy, and these were the first cocktails I made with it. One of the most famous (pun intended) riffs on the Last Word and for good reason.

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