Never Again
I meant it. So I did something about it.
“Never again.”
This has been playing on a loop in my head since December 2023.
23 days after my son was born, I got laid off. My wife’s pink slip was 5 days behind mine.
3 kids under 5, and in less than a week, 100% of our income stream fucking evaporated. And I didn’t have a backup plan.
Looking at my son, finally disconnected from the wires and tubes of the NICU and sleeping peacefully in his bassinet, that’s when the mantra started.
That was the starting point for what I’ve been building.
What I’m launching today.
What I Found When I Went Looking
At that point, I was pretty fed up with the corporate shit, so I decided to go look at alternative ways to build a life. Getting outside funding or investing in a business idea was out. Besides, that wasn’t really what I was interested in at the time. I had been writing, and whether as the main thing or a part of it, I knew that’d be prevalent in my next chapter.
The only problem was that for the last two years, all I had been writing was fiction.
The list of hyper-profitable post-apocalyptic sci-fi writers is pretty short, and nobody other than my wife and siblings had laid eyes on my work. Odds of me hitting it big...right up there with the Jets winning a Super Bowl.
So I needed to figure out how the hell to become a professional writer with no prior writing experience (if you don’t count lambasting unsuspecting candidates and harassing hiring managers who refused to return my fucking calls).
I found a number of great courses and even ended up joining a cohort that had a ton of value. But the assumptions were the same everywhere. You had large blocks of time to dedicate to courses, live calls, hot seats. You were going to follow one prescribed path toward one specific thing. You could fuck around all day in Slack channels and recorded call archives to seep yourself in knowledge.
And if you had no idea what you wanted to build yet [me], there was basically nothing for you.
Most of these courses were put together by people in completely different life circumstances. Young entrepreneurs who were smart to jump on digital creation early and got to teacher status in a fast sprint.
That wasn’t my life at all. I couldn’t move back in with my parents or subsist on a studio apartment on ramen and Miller Lite if my business venture didn’t work out. I have a wife. Three kids, including this 23-day-old little nugget who is going to need formula. A mortgage. I’m the kind of guy who had 10 hours a week to build if I was lucky — and at that point, they were the sleep-deprived hours that come with a newborn.
Nobody had built anything for people like us.
Realistically, by the time I was taking those courses, I was already behind, and I fucking knew it. I needed runway. The time to start building was two years ago.
What I Built
Still, I wasn’t just going to spend the next few months smashing Easy Apply on LinkedIn and having coffee dates, showing up in another goddamn Starbucks somewhere around Austin in a button-down and reeking of survival desperation.
So I took the courses. Went through all of the AI trainings, the prompts, the Notion pages and templates. I wrote copious notes. Filled notebooks. Journaled through the whole experience. Voice notes on walks and in the cold plunge. I did it all.
And then I went and built the thing I wish I could have handed myself two years ago.
The 2nd Act Launchpad is designed for people at our stage of life — leaders and seasoned operators who are good at what they do, but with real obligations and commitments. Smart people who see layoff after layoff and know they need to be building their life raft while they’re still on the boat. Like, right now.
The program is eight weeks long, but you can do it in four if you’re all in. Five one-on-one calls and a 21-prompt AI system that you work through between sessions, so you’re not waiting on me (or anybody else) to get shit done. Two tracks: one for people who have no idea what they want to build yet, and one for people who already know but can’t get it off the ground.
At the end of the eight weeks, you leave with a validated direction, a complete offer, a 90-day roadmap, a discipline system, and an AI brain tailored to your situation, designed to help you run your new thing.
The Honest Founder Truth
I would love to spend all of my time with my fellow builders, swinging a machete by their side, helping them out of the woods. But that’s not my reality. I have five spots. It’s legit all the time I have because I’m building this in my own 10 hours a week. I’m still all in on my day job. I’ve got a wife, kids, t-ball, jiu jitsu, the whole nine yards.
For everybody jumping in on the founding cohort, it’s a win-win. You’re getting a better price and more direct access to me. I’m getting honest feedback and a result I can point to.
And I’m guaranteeing that you get on your path. If you show up every day and document what you’re doing, it works — or you get your money back.
If you’ve made it to the end of this, you’re still reading because you already know. You know the moment is coming for you, or it already has. You’ve felt that stomach-dropping, shame-caked feeling of standing over your sleeping kid, unsure how much longer you’re going to be able to provide for them.
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt worse as a parent. Fear and uncertainty are a powerful fucking cocktail.
When you’re in that moment, you tell yourself the same thing I told myself:
Never again.
If you’re ready, head here: