Breadcrumbs: Built for People in the Arena
Most founder newsletters are written from a stage.
Someone climbs up, tells you how they made it, and narrates the journey from a safe distance. It reads great. It's also useless the second you sit down to build something yourself, because you're not standing where they're standing. You're in the mud, mid-project, wondering if the thing you shipped this morning was a mistake.
That's the newsletter I wanted and couldn't find. So I'm writing it.
What Breadcrumbs is
Breadcrumbs is for people in the arena. Not the ones narrating it from the cheap seats. If you're building a business, shipping an AI product, or just trying to make something of your own without burning out, it's for you.
Here's the honest resume, because it matters: 1 business sold (Selling Signals, now 100k+ subscribers), 2 failed, 1 active (Flyletter, the AI newsletter platform I'm building right now). In between: head of growth at a funded startup, a GM seat, and a finance job at an ad-tech company. I've shipped enough to know what works, and broken enough to know what doesn't. Both come in handy.
I don't have it all figured out (nobody in the arena does). But I'm in the work every single day, and every week I learn something I wish someone had handed me earlier. Those are the breadcrumbs. A trail you can actually follow, instead of a highlight reel you can only clap for.
What you get, every week
Three pillars, because they don't split as cleanly as people pretend:
- AI - what I'm actually learning building an AI SaaS and wiring AI into my own workflows. Real prompts, real systems, zero slop.
- Business - battle-tested stuff from operating in the trenches. The math, the playbooks, the scar tissue.
- Self growth - the business kind and the personal kind, because it turns out you can't do one without the other.
No theory for theory's sake. No recycled LinkedIn wisdom. Every issue hands you something you can copy: a lesson from a decade of building, a framework to steal, a mindset shift, or a named system with the steps spelled out. If I miss a week, I'll tell you why. If I don't know something, I'll say so (which is more often than I'd like).
Why "Breadcrumbs"
Because I'm not handing you a map to a place I've already arrived. I'm dropping the trail as I walk it, one week at a time. You follow it, skip the parts I got wrong, and get where you're going faster. That's the whole deal.
It's free. It's weekly. It's built for you, whether you're deep in the arena or just climbing the wall to get in.
Your one thing this week
Subscribe, then reply and tell me the one thing you're building right now. I read every reply, and it's what tells me what to write next.
See you in the arena.
Evan
Writer, founder, and AI builder. Currently building Flyletter, previously sold Selling Signals (100k+ subscribers). 1 sold, 2 failed, 1 active. This post started as an issue of my weekly newsletter.