Situation seven
I need someone invested-but-detached to work it out with.
Not a therapist, not a board, not a friend who has to be nice to you. Someone who cares whether it works and has nothing riding on which way you go.
In your words
Is this you?
“Incredibly lonely, because no one gets it. Absolutely no one.”
“Most of my conversations about my business are with ChatGPT, to be honest.”
“Your partner learns what is happening in your business by overhearing you tell somebody else at a party.”
“You have three calibrated answers to “how's it going” and you no longer notice which one you are giving.”
“I made my hobby my job, and now I hate both.”
“You cannot tell whether you are tired or the idea is bad. These produce identical symptoms and you own no instrument that distinguishes them.”
The diagnosis
What's usually going on
Everyone available to you is compromised, and you have run out of uncompromised people.
- Your team can't hear it. Doubt from you is not information to them; it is weather.
- Your investors can't hear it. Every conversation is also a performance review.
- Your partner can hear it and pays for it. Which is why you have quietly stopped.
- Your peers are also selling. Founder friendships run on reciprocal optimism and you both know the rate.
So you talk to nobody, and the thinking degrades, not because you are not smart, but because thinking is a two-person activity and you have been doing it alone for eighteen months.
This engagement is not encouragement. It is a standing appointment with someone who has read the numbers, remembers what you said last month, and will tell you when you are repeating yourself.
Scope
What this is not
- Not therapy, and not a substitute for it. If what you need is a clinician, I will say so.
- Not a coach with a framework. There is no model I am fitting you into.
- Not on-call. Twelve appointments, not unlimited access, the appointment is what makes it work.
- Not automatic renewal. Nothing rolls over.
How to buy it
Two ways in
lead option
Results Call
Pay what you wantup to 90 minutes, you set the length
What happens
One conversation. Your agenda, all of it. Some people do this once a quarter and never buy anything else, and that is a legitimate way to use it.
full engagement
The twelve-week block
$6,00012 weeks, billed monthly
What happens
Twelve weeks of standing appointments. Same time, same person, cumulative memory. You bring what is actually on top; I bring what you said three weeks ago and have stopped mentioning.
Weeks 1–2
Load in
The whole picture, including the parts you have not said out loud to anyone.
Weeks 3–11
The work
Whatever it is that week. Decisions, drafts, arguments, rehearsals.
Week 12
The handover
What changed, what you now know how to do alone, and whether this should continue.
What you get
A person who is invested in the result and detached from the choice.
And the running record, decisions, why they were made, what they were supposed to produce. That document exists because in month nine you will not remember why you turned left, and it will matter.
The price
Written as twelve weeks at six thousand, billed monthly, not as a monthly rate. It is a fixed-term block with a stated end. It does not renew by default; at week twelve we decide, out loud, whether to run another one.
Read this first
Before you book
There is a longer piece about what this work is actually like, written as conditions rather than problems, the things that are true of doing this at all, and the things that are true at your particular stage.
Not sure
If you're not sure
Take the call. This is the one situation where the free thing genuinely tests the paid thing. If the call is not useful, twelve weeks will not be either.
Peter on this page
(coming)
On camera
“Everyone available to you is compromised. Your team cannot hear it, your investors cannot hear it, your partner pays for it. That is not loneliness. That is the thinking degrading because thinking is a two-person activity.”
Start with a call.
Up to ninety minutes on one real problem, and you set the length. If it was worth something, pay what it was worth. If it was not, we shake hands and you owe me nothing.