Howdy Founders 🤠 

This is Founders Only — a weekly-ish newsletter discussing literally anything related to the life of a founder.

Today we’re focused on “Connectedness”

• My Hampton review after 1 year

• All your AI stuff in 1 place

• Offering my help implementing AI into your business

• Facilitating Connectedness — a Poll

Facilitating “Connectedness” is considered a health intervention ❤️‍🩹 

It’s pretty well documented at this point that a lack of belonging to a community leads to poorer general and mental health.

While building Stonks / Sandhill Markets, I was pretty busy all the time and accepted the simple fact that all my friends would eventually give up on trying to keep up with me. I wasn’t making time for them, why would they drop everything to make time for me?

What I DIDN’T realize is that losing these connections would impact me deeply. At first, I didn’t know what I was feeling. It didn’t feel like depression, it felt like loneliness. “But how is this possible, I still had my Co-Founder, my team, and my wife!?”

The answer is that by losing track of my friends, I lost my connectedness to my community. HUGE mistake. Fortunately, somewhere near my lowest point, I found Hampton.

My saving grace was this community of people who spoke the same language as me and had the same problems as me (both at work and at home).

One year later

I’ve been a Hampton member for 1 full year now so it felt appropriate to give you a review of my experience.

Easy Answer — I’ve loved every day of it. I’ve had SO many amazing conversations and I’ve attended SO many amazing events that putting a deserving review together would be quite difficult.

Hampton operates with a core set of rules called C.O.R.E.

For the most part, it feels like the rules are strictly obeyed. This makes every conversation feel like a safe space within a safe space. It’s not out of the ordinary for someone to tell you the closely guarded hard-won secrets of their industry if they think it will help you get ahead in your business.

If you’re ready for this kind of community, go check out Hampton. If you apply, let me know and I’ll try to put in a good word 🤝 (I won’t get anything but it might help). Time to find your tribe 😄.

All your AI stuff in one place 💻️ 

What if you could access GPT, Claude, and Gemini, all in one place?

This is NOT a sponsor. I don’t know anyone at TypingMind. I’m just blown away by what they’ve built.

I’ve only been using TypingMind for a couple of days and I already can’t believe I was using GPT and Gemini in completely separate UIs. It seems so old-fashioned.

TypingMind is one place where you can manage ALL of your chats, build custom agents, manage a prompt library, or use the community library. All that for like $30 a month 🤯 .

I would go as far as saying that even if you only use GPT, TypingMind is still worth using, over the OpenAI UI.

Go check it out! —> TypingMind.com

A note about AI implementation 🗒️ 

Let me help 🤝 

I know for some, it can feel like the clock is ticking to figure out how to incorporate AI into their business. Whether it's building/integrating internal tools to increase efficiency/profitability, or figuring out where AI fits into your product/service offering.

If this sounds like you (Or maybe you're overwhelmed with optionality and don't know where to start), sometimes hopping on a 30-minute call with me can help. I don't charge for this (yet) and genuinely enjoy helping founders in this way.

I’ve been learning a little bit about the various tools and implementations every day for 12 months (which I know not everyone has time for) so I might have seen something that can work for your unique situation.

Hit me up if you'd like me to look at your business and offer some suggestions on where AI might be useful. Just reply to this email and tell me a little bit about your business and I’ll see if I can be helpful.

I want to help facilitate “Connectedness” 🤗 

How should I do it?

Below is a poll that’s pretty important to me. If you’ve made it this far and have an opinion on this, I would greatly appreciate you taking 1 minute to answer this poll honestly.

THE END

Short one today. I hope you’ll try to stay connected to people this week 😃 

Thanks for reading.

— John