This week features a battle-tested lesson from Rory Sutherland’s book, Alchemy, game-changing AI tools, and the news that matters most to your business. Let's dive in!

Imagine it is the late 1990s and you are tasked with creating a new beverage to compete with Coca-Cola. If you consult the market research, the "logical" path is obvious: consumers say they want a drink that tastes great, comes in a massive bottle, and costs less than Coke. So, you build a massive, delicious, cheap soda. And you get crushed.

Then, an Austrian entrepreneur named Dietrich Mateschitz enters the market with Red Bull. He does the exact opposite of what the data demands. He creates a drink that tastes slightly medicinal. He packages it in a tiny, eight-ounce silver can. And he charges twice the price of a Coke. If you looked at this through the lens of pure business logic, it was a recipe for instant bankruptcy.

But Red Bull wasn't playing by the rules of logic; they were playing by the rules of "Psycho-Logic." Humans do not evaluate the world like spreadsheets. We evaluate the world through signals. Because Red Bull was expensive, came in a tiny dose, and tasted bizarre, consumers' subconscious minds jumped to a powerful conclusion: “If it tastes this medicinal, comes in a restricted size, and costs this much, it must be incredibly potent.” A delicious, liter-sized Red Bull is just another soda. Its "flaws" were actually its features. The harsh taste and premium price were simply a psychological tax consumers paid to convince themselves the energy boost was real. They weren't buying a beverage; they were buying a premium placebo.

For founders, the lesson is not to make your product worse on purpose. If you sell basic supplies, normal logic applies: the cheapest and fastest option wins. But if you sell a major result or high-level advice, people do not buy with pure logic. They look for signals to see if they can trust you. In these cases, a consultant doubling their price is not just making more profit; they are proving to the client that they are a top-tier expert. A private group that makes it hard to join is not losing sales; they are making the group highly desirable. When your business relies on trust, your goal is not to be the cheapest option. Your goal is to control the message you are sending to your customer's brain.

While you master the psychology of your pricing and brand, let these AI tools handle the cold, hard logic of your daily operations.

AI inventory optimization for volatile supply chains

Static safety stock fails when demand or lead times shift. Flowlity models uncertainty directly, generating probabilistic forecasts instead of single-point estimates. It connects to ERP systems, tracks supplier reliability and stock levels, and dynamically adjusts safety buffers based on real risk.

The result is a clear trade-off between service level and working capital. Fewer stockouts. Less excess inventory. Decisions backed by math, not averages.

Visit: flowlity.com

Revenue-first analytics for founders and e-commerce operators

Most dashboards highlight traffic. DataFast tracks money. By integrating with payment processors and storefront platforms, it ties every sale back to its originating campaign and full conversion path.

Instead of guessing which channels work, you see revenue per source and exactly where users drop off. Budget decisions become financial, not emotional.

Visit: datafa.st

Unified cybersecurity for small and mid-sized businesses

MSPs and IT teams often manage disconnected security tools. Guardz consolidates endpoints, email, cloud apps, and identities into one platform, correlating signals to detect real threats.

It automates responses, reduces false alerts, and includes phishing simulations to strengthen employee awareness. Enterprise-grade structure, without enterprise-level complexity.

Visit: guardz.com

Of course, internal efficiency won't protect you from external shocks, which brings us to the macro forces shaking up the market this week.

The Supreme Court struck down sweeping federal trade tariffs, opening the door for U.S. importers to seek roughly $160 billion in retroactive refunds. Days later, the executive branch responded with a new 15% global surcharge under a 1974 trade statute.

For businesses, the situation is clear: pursue refunds through customs channels while recalculating costs under the new surcharge. The legal fight shifted, but pricing uncertainty remains.

Of the $30 billion invested at the start of the year, about 80% flowed into AI startups, much of it in $100 million-plus rounds. Capital is concentrating heavily around one theme, leaving non-AI founders in a tighter funding market.

Funding for female founders has dropped back to roughly 2018 levels, capturing about 1% of total venture dollars. The question is whether this reflects durable innovation or short-term momentum.

AI tools are now embedded in daily workflows, but oversight is lagging. Companies are encountering “workslop,” low-quality or inaccurate AI-generated output entering real operations.

The issue is governance. Firms that set clear AI usage standards early reduce risk. Those that do not risk productivity loss, compliance exposure, and reputational damage.

With venture capital concentrating and market uncertainty rising, your best strategic move isn't waiting for perfect conditions; it's getting a bare-bones product out the door immediately

This week we're looking at a fantastic Y Combinator talk by Michael Seibel called "How to Plan an MVP"

The core message is surprisingly simple but notoriously hard for many of us to accept: your primary goal should be to launch something "bad" as quickly as possible. An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) isn't supposed to be a polished realization of your grand vision. It’s simply the most basic tool you can give to a small, targeted group of users to see if you can actually deliver value and solve a core problem for them.

Seibel points out that massive tech giants like Airbnb, Twitch, and Stripe all launched with incredibly bare-bones, feature-lacking products. For instance, Airbnb's first version didn't even have a map view or a way to process payments! By getting a simple product out into the real world fast, you can start gathering actual feedback instead of just guessing what people want in a vacuum.

Here are a few practical hacks from his talk to help you build and launch your MVP quickly:

This mindset of ruthlessly stripping away the non-essential to find your core value is actually a reflection of a much deeper, mathematical law governing the universe.

About 6% of everything you read or say is the word "the." The second most used word, "of," appears exactly half as often. The third appears one third as often. This bizarre pattern is called the Zipf Mystery. Variations of this same power law pattern show up in almost every language ever spoken, even ancient languages we have not deciphered yet, but it does not stop at linguistics. It also appears in city populations, earthquake magnitudes, and website traffic. It reveals an uncomfortable truth: the universe does not distribute things evenly. It clumps them.

This natural law of extreme imbalance is the hidden force driving your business. In the corporate world, we know it as the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. Human systems evolve the same way natural systems do. Success compounds. Attention compounds. Advantage compounds. Just as our language is dominated by a tiny fraction of words, your business is dominated by a tiny fraction of inputs. In many businesses, a small minority of customers generate the majority of profits, and a select few products drive most of the sales. You will often find that a massive chunk of the actual work is completed by a highly effective minority of your team. Capital, talent, and attention naturally flock to what is already working.

Yet as leaders we constantly fight this reality by spreading our time equally across every initiative. Because a few words dominate our speech, nearly half the words in any book are used exactly once. Linguists call these rare words hapax legomena. Your business has them too: minor tasks, low margin clients, and endless email threads. They take up space but do not move the needle. To build a resilient company you must stop treating every problem equally. Find your "the" and your "of" by identifying the vital few actions that structurally dictate your success and pouring disproportionate resources into them.

What are your thoughts? If you audited your calendar for the last seven days, would you find leverage, or would you find maintenance?

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