Why we built a company for the freedom we didn’t have.
Every founder starts with a dream. Ours was simple: what if we could build a business from day one that didn’t consume our lives?
We didn’t want another “successful” company that only worked because we were grinding ourselves into dust. We’d both done that. This time, it had to be different.
We were going to build something… Self-managing. Self-multiplying. True to the principles we’d both learned in over 20combined years in Strategic Coach. Something that would free us, not trap us.
The Story
In April 2020, right as the world was shutting down, we signed the paperwork to launch Superpowers.
The idea didn’t come out of a brainstorming session or business plan, it came from real experiences. Each of us had found an incredible assistant (Hi, Fern and Amber!) who helped us break through the noise and reclaim control of our time. People started noticing and asking how they could find “their own Fern or Amber.” Some even tried to hire them away from us! Or at least, they threatened to.
That’s when it clicked – maybe there was something here.
We imagined a world where entrepreneurs could delegate complex tasks through “recipes” – step-by-step playbooks that assistants could run behind the scenes. We even spent months building custom software to manage it all.
It flopped, bad.
The more we tried to systematize it, the more we drifted from what people actually needed. We doubled down on solving our
own operational problems, not our customer’s problems.
It turns out, nobody wanted recipes. Just like us, they wanted freedom – someone who actually understood them and could take things off their plate in a way that worked without micromanagement.
The Insight
There’s a difference between building something clever and building something people really need.
We were lucky – we stayed grounded in a few things that mattered:
- The entrepreneur is the hero. We’re just here to help.
- Our north star is helping our client achieve more freedomand more growth.
- And this company – we weren’t willing to build anotherbusiness that revolved around us. It had to be self-managing and, eventually, self-multiplying.
Everything else, we were willing to let go of. That’s what let usevolve instead of getting stuck in our first version.
The no-BS Takeaway
Hold your principles tightly, but your tactics loosely. Themarket doesn’t care about your clever idea – it cares whetheryou make their life better.
