The Distill - Stale Strategy

Greetings Pioneers,

We’ve been relatively quiet in the first 4 months of 2026, compared to 2025 that is. What have we been up to you ask? Building our startups at the block. The long hours, days, nights and weekends have been poured into scaling on the home-front. While we haven’t lost sight of KYX, our mission, and how we get there, we agreed the best thing we could do for startups in this city was building in public, leading from the front. So here we are. let’s catch up. first up - swell.

-jack

Swell, Speed, Signups

Every time someone asks me how I've been, I answer how Swell's been instead – because I'm a founder, and it's hard to detach self from the thing I think and act about more than any other single thing.

We're doing well, right? Still in the game. Still growing – though that depends what measuring stick we're using, because we pivoted away from our core business six months ago. New revenue is up from where it was pre-pivot but ARR isn’t quite there yet and we have no idea what churn is going to look like. Pivoting killed the single number we used to point at. Now “doing well” is a more complex picture.

There's a lot I don't know. I was fundraising for so long that my messaging on strategy became more and more solidified. It made it harder to face the strategies that didn't work and change.

I believed we could scale up to thousands of customers using variations of the same strategies that got us our first few hundred. We had tons of signal that it would work, but it didn't matter, because it didn't work. I knew in my gut the whole time we were missing an opportunity with self-guided – but I was so on-message and so scared to turn around and do something completely different than we'd planned. It took me 7 months after our raise was over to stop tweaking the broken strategy, re-evaluate the market, and commit to a different direction.

I regret those months. So this year has become about change and rapid iteration to a much greater degree than it's been before.

In October we left telehealth and started pilots with police and fire departments. By February we’d begun testing other markets and secured our first large contract. By March we'd thrown out our muffin-man strategy to get to scale and decided to move to an outbound email system. By April we'd decided to test consumer and released our app to the public. We started a UGC campaign to get the word out, now we're trialing ads.

In the last month we've built 13 features. Sunsetted, rebuilt, then fully killed our first most-used feature (a guided daily coach). Rebuilt our marketing website in Framer only to kill that and build it again in code. Every day every person on our team writes code or app content. Every week we tweak sales or marketing execution.

I still think we could be moving faster. We should be moving faster. We all should be moving faster. Every month I realize how slow I was the month before – how much time and runway I wasted on a bad idea by being too attached and too slow to act. So now I act faster.

We've had 22 consumer signups in the two weeks since we started testing consumer, and while that's fine, we'll need to ramp to 289 weekly signups to hit our $1M ARR goal. 289, that’s the new metric that matters. The gap between last week’s signups and 289 is how we measure strategy now.

More to come in a month. Hopefully closer to 289.

Build & Pitch: A Live Pitch Session for Founders

Calling all founders, entrepreneurs, and big-idea builders!

• Wednesday, May 20th 5pm

• Mashup Food Hall

Join Amplify for Build & Pitch: A Live Pitch Session for Founders — an interactive event designed to help entrepreneurs sharpen their pitch, gain real-time feedback, and build confidence in telling their story.

Whether you are a founder refining your pitch, or a service provider ready to support the next big idea, this is built for you - don’t miss this opportunity!

REGISTER TO ATTEND

FOUNDERS INTERESTED IN PITCHING - SIGN UP HERE

Note’s on The Distill’s co-EICs: Jack Crowdis & Rachel Edenfield

Jack runs the newsletter, helps run KYX. He’s a career startup kid, past founder, and current operator. Weekly contributor. Always editor.

Rachel’s the Founder/CEO of venture-backed Swell, and a driver of KYX. Routinely delivers the city’s sharpest long-form startup advice. Always re-edits Jack’s edits (including this bio).

Know someone who should read this? Forward it, or send them this link.

That’s a wrap 🎬
Keep showing up 👊 
Keep shipping 🚢 
Peace, Pioneers ✌️