Business / 2 min read
Founders: document the ugly middle.
Capture decisions, customer questions, and changing assumptions before the polished story replaces the useful one.
Record the decision before you know the outcome
A founder’s most useful lessons can disappear inside a clean retrospective. Once you know how a decision ended, it becomes easy to forget the uncertainty that made it difficult. Capture the moment while you are still inside it.
Write down the problem, the options, the evidence available, and the choice you made. Add what would make you reconsider. This gives your future self a record of reasoning, not just a sequence of results.
Listen for recurring customer questions
Repeated questions can reveal where your explanation is weak or your assumptions differ from your customers’ reality. Keep an anonymized list of the question, the context, and what your answer failed to address.
Do not copy private conversations into a public manuscript without permission. Remove identifying details, review obligations, and distinguish your interpretation from what someone actually said. Trust is part of the material you are responsible for protecting.
Turn observations into a working framework
After several weeks of notes, look for patterns. Which mistakes repeat? Which tradeoffs keep returning? Where did an apparently small operational change make the work clearer? Group related observations under a question a reader would recognize.
A framework does not need a clever acronym. It needs a clear explanation of when it applies, what a person should consider, and where its limits are. Test the explanation against a real example before treating it as a general rule.
Give the record a future reader
A private decision log can become a playbook, a business book, or a founder memoir. Those are different promises. A playbook helps someone act. A memoir makes a journey legible. A business book develops an argument.
Choose the form that matches the material rather than forcing every note into the same container. Founder to Author coaching starts with this choice: what do you know, who needs it, and what form would make it useful?
Put it into practice
Open a decision log with five headings: problem, options, evidence, choice, and review date. Complete one entry from this week. At the review date, add what happened without rewriting your original reasoning. That contrast between expectation and experience is often where the useful lesson becomes visible.