I used to hate the word "founder."
It sounded like a fake-role. Some guy who read a book, raised a round, and started calling himself a visionary before he'd sold a single thing.
In the world I came up in, half the "founders" were ego with a Stripe account, monetizing an idea nobody actually wanted. The other half were successful, but there were horror stories how they lost their businesses to investors (or at least their vision).
But here's the awkward part… I'm one now.
And I got here through the exact thing I thought ruled me out:
I can’t stop starting things.
A decade of starting things that didn't work
New idea, full speed, before the last one is even finished. I've been like this since I was 19:
I talked my way into being a "rep" for a web agency, which mostly meant going to every friend I had back home and trying to sell them a website. It didn't work.
In university I co-founded an agency called Agence Guacamole and went door to door selling websites again. That didn't work either.
But there was always a next thing: a business competition, a side project or some extracurricular that lit up the same part of my brain. What can I build, what can I try, what's the new one?
For years it was failure after failure after failure, and a growing pile of half-finished projects my friends eventually stopped asking about. My shameful pile of ideas.
However, it really helped my career because I was treating my work as I would treat these projects, all gas no brakes.
The one rule that made it work
To me the pattern is clear:
→ Selling websites door to door at 20. Mostly failed. But it taught me GTM from the floor up, the hard way, no shortcut.
→ Quit a comfy corporate job to join a business development agency, trying to become a partner. Didn’t work, different views, but I learned the complex world of outbound
→ Launched my consultancy right before leaving for a 5 weeks trip to South America. Spent the first year regretting if that was the right move, but I learned how there’s many angles your business need to run properly.
That's the rule I stumbled into without naming it: do the boring work by hand until you know it cold, then build the system that runs it without you, then start the next thing.
Ten years of messaging and positioning by hand became a skill stack 200+ PMMs now run on their own launches. The competitive research I used to rebuild slide by slide is an agent that updates itself the week a competitor ships.
That's also where Simon came in, my cofounder. We were both tired of the solo grind, and we needed a system that took the boring pile off our plates.
Both working late on our consultancy and building agents.
The boring pile nobody wants to touch
Here's the part that's actually about you.
Every operator I talk to has the same pile. The follow-up they forgot. The proposal they meant to send Tuesday and sent the next Monday. The pipeline they never really tracked. The outreach they skipped because the calendar looked full enough (I’m sooo guilty of this one)
I lived in that pile for years. I ignored the pipeline until it dried up. I wrote off deals in my head that one follow-up would have won. The boring, easy-to-skip work is the work that quietly decides whether a business survives.
Nobody systematizes it, because it's not fun and there's always a fire that feels bigger 🔥
The part AI actually changes
You have plenty of ideas too:
The side project in your Notes app.
The thing you'd build with one free weekend.
The pitch you almost sent.
Most never ship it even if the idea's fine.
Shipping is uncomfortable and staying put is easy (breaking the fourth wall here to say that just hitting Sent here is making me uncomfortable)
So you keep running on work you didn't choose, and you settle into fine. And this is infinitely riskier: the mediocrity you agreed to without noticing.
AI is the first thing that lets a normal operator build the system instead of grinding the pile forever. Get the boring stuff off your plate, so your actual talent makes it through the door.
That pile is exactly what we built Lemon to take.
How Lemon actually takes the boring pile off your plate.
Lemon is a digital employee that runs the recurring operator work you keep dropping (the follow-ups, the pipeline, the outreach) so the business stops bleeding from the stuff you never have time for.
That way, you get to be the founder without being your own intern.
What it costs (the honest part)
The LinkedIn version of this is a lie, so here's the real one.
The restless brain has a tax and I pay it constantly.
I don't feel exhaustion until I'm already at the wall. My spouse sees the burnout before I do. Some weeks I'm the bottleneck I built the system to remove.
The system is the only thing between "three companies" and "a guy who burned out on his tenth idea." I'm not selling you the hustle. That's the warning that comes with the method.
You don't have to be the intern of your own company. If the back-office is drowning the part of you that's actually good 👇
If you’ve been feeling exhausted, whether by this crazy market, tough to handle clients, or the dreading quarterly accounting, you should check out Lemon.
I want to make sure you don’t struggle the same way I did all of these years.
Talk soon,
Gab