🤠 Howdy Founders,

I hope everyone’s 2026 is off to a fantastic start. Statistically by now you will have failed or abandoned your New Years Resolutions, but as a Founder, that failure probably will teach you something very important. In fact, you’ll probably come up with a brilliant way to tackle the problem different next year.

Mine were:

1. Don’t come up with any pivot ideas for any of my businesses: ❌

2. Make a plan by end of January for at least 3 quarterly vacations: ❌

3. Drink fewer IPAs: ✅ (Note: This doesn’t say “no IPAs”)

Vacation is a weird thing

I’ve shared this sentiment with so many Founders over the years and I often hear the same thing: Vacation = Guilt. Sometimes the guilt even starts during the vacation planning phase.

Sometimes the angle is “I’ve raised VC money and I don’t want to take a paid vacation on someone else’s money that I’ve been entrusted with.”

Sometimes it’s “My employees need me to set the tone and lead by example. If I take off to Mexico, they’ll think it’s okay to slack off. They certainly won’t work hard while I’m gone and my business could be really hurt.”

They might want (or need) you to go

The VC invests in YOU with the belief that you’ll bring your best and most capable self to the business. Do you really think the best version of you after 120 straight days of grinding on your business is going to be the one that grinds for ANOTHER 120 days with no break? Almost certainly not.

Your employees will survive (and get their work done) without you as well. Want proof of this? GO AWAY!

You’re not abandoning the company when you take a vacation. You’re stress‑testing whether it can live without you.

🎙️ Introducing: The Founders Only Podcast

Just kidding, that name would suck. (Name TBD)

I’ve written this newsletter (Very inconsistently) for 4 years now. I know that any given issue will have ~6,500 readers. I find that super odd. Why are you reading this?

Many of you know very little about me and I certainly know almost nothing about most of you. Maybe we could get to know each other better?

I don’t use this newsletter to make money (Hence the inconsistency. This isn’t a business and I have real businesses that need my attention). I use this newsletter to make friends.

The community that has popped up around me since starting this newsletter has been amazing, and I’d love to kick that up a notch by getting to know a bunch of you. SO, I’ve decided to try my best to record and upload one podcast every week.

1 hour long conversation with someone who reads this newsletter. All of you are interesting in your own way, and I want to learn about you and your journey and I’m sure there are people reading this that will be fascinated and inspired as well.

So, will you come on my podcast?

If you’re down to chat, just hit reply and tell me about yourself! As of right now, I have 0/50 guests booked for this year so who knows, you might be my first 😃 

🤝 Friend Corner

Friend of the week = Jason Shafton

Jason is the brilliant operator behind Winston Francois which is a super expensive high-powered multi-disciplinary agency that helps scale businesses. You may remember him if you saw me on his Founder Mode Podcast a few months ago.

Anyway, Jason did something last month that got me really excited. He launched Frank which is a scaled-down agency meant to leverage the expertise and brains behind Winston Francois, but for the specific purpose of growing your startup with Meta/Google Ads at actual startup-level pricing.

GOOD NEWS:

Jason has offered a special super sweet deal for Founders Only readers. Go check out Frank, pick the Meta + Google Ads package, and get 25% OFF for 12 months by using the code “FOUNDERONLY” at checkout.

This isn’t some affiliate arrangement. This is my brilliant and talented friend offering us a discount because he loves us. Also, he’s pretty sure you’ll be a customer for life until you eventually graduate to being a client of Winston Francois, so I guess it makes sense for him in the end. Sweet!

💡 Business Idea of the Week

Be the “Agent‑Friendly” Lead Finder Tool

As AI agents suck up more and more of the grunt work in sales, there’s a quiet platform shift happening: tools will increasingly compete not on their UI, but on how well they serve as backends for agents.

The idea here is simple: more founders, marketers, and sales teams are going to say to their AI SDR, “Go find me 500 qualified leads that match this ICP and start outreach.” There are lots of ways to do this today (Instantly’s B2B Lead Finder, Apollo, Sales Nav + scrapers, Clay, etc.), but almost none of them are built primarily for AI agents as the user.

That’s the wedge: build the best possible way for AI agents to find leads.

Instead of optimizing for human workflows (dashboards, filters, CSV exports), you optimize for:

• Clean, well‑documented APIs that are simple for agents and agent platforms (Lindy, custom copilots, internal tools) to call.

• Composable “recipes” that agents can chain together: “search ICP,” “enrich with firmographics,” “verify email,” “dedupe against CRM,” “push to Instantly campaign.”

• Pricing and quotas that make sense for autonomous, high‑volume usage, including clear limits and smart defaults to stop agents from accidentally burning the whole budget.

• Agent‑readable explanations and metadata (“why this lead,” confidence scores, source attribution) so the agent can decide whether to keep or discard leads without a human in the loop.

Practically, your product could look like:

1. A lead data platform with a modern API, clearly structured around the jobs an AI agent needs to do: define ICP, search, enrich, verify, sync.

2. Native or dead‑simple integrations into outbound tools like Instantly, plus webhooks for “on new lead, automatically enroll in campaign X.”

3. A “playbook library” aimed not at humans, but at agent builders: pre‑defined flows like “Scrape LinkedIn Sales Navigator results → enrich with your database → validate → push into Instantly as a new campaign,” all exposed as single API calls.

You don’t have to beat Apollo or ZoomInfo on raw data at the start; you have to be the easiest thing for an AI SDR to reason about and plug into. As more companies adopt agentic workflows, the tooling that “just works” with agents will quietly become the default infrastructure layer.

Monetization is straightforward: usage‑based API pricing for lead lookups, enrichment, and verification, plus higher‑tier plans for enterprise features (custom schema, dedicated instances, private data connectors, compliance). Over time, you can layer on marketplace dynamics: agent platforms listing you as the default “lead finder” integration, or even rev‑share with AI SDR products that sit on top of your rails.

If you believe that “every company gets an AI SDR,” then there’s a missing piece in the stack: the lead finder that treats agents, not humans, as its primary customer. That’s the opportunity.

Sometimes I don’t know why I give these solid gold ideas away for free. Let me know if you think you’re going to build this and I’ll cheer you on.

THE END

As always, thank you so much for being here. I know it’s not your typical newsletter and I appreciate you for sticking around and giving it your consideration.

I love you,
— John Hancock