Sean Johnson 🔥

How to grow ANY boutique professional services firm: This is the framework we use at Madison to help our clients grow. It's gone through several iterations, and I'm sure will continue to evolve over time: ✅ Get VERY clear on your Point of View. Who you serve, what you believe to be true about your domain, why you are unique, and how you approach your work. Put a stake in the ground and decide who you do (and don't) serve. Make sure every team member knows it cold. ✅ When possible, codify your thinking into frameworks that are easy to understand and create differentiation. ✅ Translate that Point of View clearly into your primary channels. Your website, LinkedIn page, etc. should help people understand immediately who you are and how you might be able to help them. ✅ Create a menu of solutions tailored specifically for who you serve (bonus points if they descend from your framework). Ideally they map to various stages of the client's work. Ideally you have some stuff that starts early and strategic, helping you earn the right to assist with implementation. Ideally some of them are recurring. ✅ For each, state clearly what problem it solves, when that problem tends to arise, how they currently try to solve it, and what solving it would mean for their business. Make sure every team member knows it cold. ✅ Become gratuitously helpful. Give away your best insights, your best ideas. Challenge your marketing team to start thinking like a media company. Look at firms like McKinsey & Company or Bain & Company as models. You certainly can't do all of what they do. But what's your smaller version of that? ✅ Teach your team to give away their secrets as well. Imagine if your 5 (or 20, or 100) partners all were regularly sharing their best ideas on LinkedIn with the people they seek to serve. Imagine if each of them became Trusted Advisors who immediately come to mind when buying windows emerge. The key to being top of mind is being helpful and consistent. ✅ Provide gentle ways to deepen relationship. Webinars specifically focused on major pain points. Lunch and learns in office where you show them EXACTLY how to solve the problem. At each step overwhelm them with value. ✅ Teach your team to be disciplined around nurturing relationships. Help train them on how to be insanely helpful 1 month, 3 months, 12 months in. Make sure they don't wing it - show them how CRM can help them build amazing relationships at scale. ✅ Nail onboarding. Knock your client's socks off during the first 30 days. ✅ Teach your team to systematically ask for referrals, in respectful ways, ideally mapped to key client success or inflection points. ✅ Pursue strategic partnerships. Find complementary businesses that think the way you think. Create partner-specific sales enablement tools so they know what to say when. What did I leave out? (P.S. If you need any help with the above, DM me.)

In adults, limiting smartphone functionality to texting and calls and blocking all social media and mobile internet for 2 weeks significantly improved attention, self-reported well-being and mental health. 90% of participants experienced a benefit.

Information and wisdom are not the same thing.

Messing with @karpathy’s knowledge graph thing and already running into something; It seems like it’s an exponential token cost issue, because each new note has to iterate through all the other notes to look for relevant connections. Did I just set it up wrong? (Probably)

The world tells you that changing your mind is bad. But changing your mind means that you’re learning. It means you’re capable of discussing big ideas with smart people without getting defensive. It means you value the truth more than your ego. Change your mind regularly.

The hole I see: If capital captures most of the gains, labor income still falls. Most folks don’t have discretionary income. You get a barbell economy. The wealthy buy these human-intensive, high-status services. Everyone else is stuck consuming cheap AI-produced commodities.

Grew MRR six-fold in 24 hours. From 49-299. Surely this trajectory will continue.

This was super interesting, so went kinda deep into the weeds: - Surname sharing (Stone, IFS 2026): Couples who don't share a surname divorce ~50% more often and ~30% faster than those who do. But Stone admits the effect "reflects very large selection biases." Most of the gap probably disappears with proper controls. - Partisanship and marriage (Wilcox/IFS): Married Republicans are 7 points more likely than Democrats to report being "very happy" in their marriage. But when restricted to married people only and measured by ideology vs party, the happiness gap largely disappears. - Religious attendance and divorce (VanderWeele, Harvard): Weekly religious attendance associated with 50% lower divorce risk over 14 years. Women only. Mostly Catholic/Protestant, in their 50s at enrollment. - Nominal vs. practicing religion (Wilcox): Active conservative Protestants who attend regularly are 35% less likely to divorce than the unaffiliated. Nominal conservative Protestants are 20% MORE likely to divorce than secular Americans. - Shared prayer and happiness (Wilcox & Wolfinger): Couples who pray together weekly are 17 points more likely to report being "very happy." Shared prayer is the single strongest religious predictor, stronger than race, education, age, sex, or region. - Gender asymmetry in attendance (Wilcox & Wolfinger): Couples where both attend, or only the husband attends, are happiest. Couples where only the wife attends are the least happy, lower than couples where neither attends. - Who initiates divorce (Rosenfeld, Stanford): Women initiate 69% of divorces. Among college-educated women, ~90%. Divorce initiators' well-being improves; non-initiators' worsens. Women regret divorce at 27%; men at 40%. - Exercise and divorce (no landmark study): No prospective cohort comparable . But what does exist: marriage reduces women's fitness; divorce increases men's fitness; spouses influence each other's exercise habits when they stay together. In short: The strongest consistent predictor of marital stability is sustained shared religious practice. But probably because it bundles community, shared ritual, values alignment, behavioral norms, meaning, and social support. Note: "low divorce rate" is not a clean measure of marital quality; it blends quality with exit costs.

No better feeling than getting those first paid customers.

C.S. Lewis gave a sermon at the beginning of World War II. He urged people to “not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is.” And he offered a couple exercises to help combat anxiety and fear. Possibly helpful these days:  “The first enemy is excitement — the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in war and peace. We must do the best we can. The second enemy is frustration — the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say “No time for that,” “Too late now,” and “Not for me.” But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.2 Do you allow the enemies of excitement and frustration to interfere with the work God has called you to do? Let us leave futurity in God’s hands and work from moment to moment “as to the Lord”.

What’s the single highest ROI thing you can do as an individual to get ahead of this from a personal opsec standpoint? My mind goes to hardware 2fa. Anything else?

Appreciate the intellectual honestly. Also seems like he's had other major benefits (microplastics reduction chief among them).

Train Dreams is beautiful.

Fixing user-reported bugs on our CRM while my wife shops inside fancy stores in Rome. Claude Code on mobile is wild.

2 flaws (I think) in this: 1) The assumption that founders actually executed the method. I taught in entrepreneurship at Kellogg for 9 years. There are a very small handful of founders I encountered who actually ran the playbook. Those that did either rapidly iterated their way to something that worked, or killed the idea quickly enough to avoid raising in the first place and wouldn’t show up in these statistics. 2) It assumes startup advice is causally powerful enough to shape outcomes at scale. To suggest that following a playbook (of any kind) would mitigate any weaknesses in execution quality, addressable market, ease of reaching said market, competitive dynamics, team quality, ability to fundraise, etc. feel a little reductionist. colossus.com/article/we-hav…

A trend several friends have noted in their companies: - 20 year olds are all in on AI. - 40 year olds are all in on AI. - 30 year olds are the most resistant. Are you seeing that?

@pittman021 Lots of gaps for sure - birth certificates are almost impossible. The most coverage came from census reports every 10 years, showed how families evolved, and then grave sites, and then church records. But I had nothing before now :)

@intentionally This is awesome and I wanted to let Claude loose on the hunt for broken chains in my family tree. But it seems lots of the information are behind closed doors: city clerks offices, hospital records. Curious how you overcame this.

Ashamed to say I knew almost nothing about my ancestry. That is, until 3am last night That’s when I closed my laptop, and had an Obsidian vault with an unbroken chain, on both sides, going to the mid 1800s on one side and the 1700s on the other. Marriage certificates, draft papers, gravestones, census records, photos, obituaries. Living in the future is pretty incredible.

@startupstella Was honestly shocked how much we have still.

@startupstella That’s what my wife said about Poland and Italy. We’re gonna try anyway

What struck me: Didn’t realize how many of them were drafted. Didn’t realize we had been in the US as long as we had. Don’t realize how many kids people had. Didn’t realize how many died young. Didn’t realize how much less common it was to leave the area where you were born.

How I did it: