Greeting Pioneers,

Rachel dives into the brutal stretch every founder hits but few admit out loud: the Trough of Sorrow. That miserable middle zone where the hype is gone, progress flatlines, and quitting starts to feel like the only sane option.
If you’ve launched something and suddenly everything feels uphill, this one’s for you.

Oh, and upcoming events too. Tap in.

Welcome to Hell

You launched. You raised a round. Maybe you won the Render competition or took home a Vogt Award. LBF wrote a glowing piece about your vision for the future. Your friends shared your announcement on Linkedin and it went semi-viral. For a brief, shining moment, it felt like you'd made it.

Then everything got 10 times harder than you thought it would be. Now it feels like you're wading through water. You can't find the right talent. You just lost a customer. Your next release that was supposed to take 5 weeks is taking 5 months. Your customers won't pay what you need them to make your unit economics work. Sign-ups have crawled forward at a snails pace; no hockey stick for you. Here comes a TechCrunch article about the next hot young startup that's apparently your new competition.

Welcome to what Paul Graham calls the Trough of Sorrow—the long, brutal middle where most startups go to die. The media bump fades. The early adopters stop engaging. Revenue flatlines. Investors stop returning calls. And suddenly you're alone with a broken product and wounded ego, wondering why you walked out onto this limb.

The Mental Game

You thought the hardest part was getting started. Turns out, the hardest part is staying started when everything dries the fuck up.

This isn’t really about dealing with your company’s metrics. Those are transient. Almost all successful growth companies faced similar flat lines.

As they say, where there’s a will, there really is a way.

But getting to the other side means for now, you have to live with the voice in your head at 2 AM whispering that you're a fraud. You have to watch your cofounders' eyes lose that spark when you miss another milestone. Then you have to keep going.

Most founders hit this wall and start looking for soft ways out. They pick up another fun side-project-startup. They take a consulting gig and shelf their company for when "timing" and "market conditions" improve.

Some people only have so much personal runway. They do what they’ve gotta do. But some of you swore you would be relentless. Now you’re internalizing this period and throwing in the towel early.

Stop. Become Relentless.

Pick Your Poison

You’re here. Me too. Sadly, waiting for inspiration won't save you. Isolating from your founder friends and holing up on your couch doing fake work because you don’t know what to do won't save you. A fun new project to make you feel competent again? It won't save you either.

The thing about building a startup is you're going to feel like quitting whether you quit or not.

I know, this stage is miserable. The question is: Which version of miserable is gonna move you forward?

You can be miserable six months from now working for someone else who managed to stick it out longer than you, wondering what would have happened if you'd just pushed through the brutal patch. Wondering if you gave up right before the breakthrough.

Or you can be miserable right now, in the thick of it, cold calling another 50 prospects, building something that might actually work.

Both suck. But only one has a shot at getting you somewhere better.

The Survival Guide

If you’re all-in, if you’re ready to become relentless, then you need systems that outlast your fleeting motivation. Here’s what keeps you moving when your drive doesn’t:

1. Accept the Suck; It Is What It Is. The Trough isn't punishment for doing something wrong – it's the price of admission for doing something that matters. Every startup that survives goes through this. The ones that die just don't talk about it. Stop fighting the fact that it's hard. Start using the hardness as fuel.

2. Burn the Ships; Remove All Escape Routes. No day job safety net. No "just until things pick up" consulting gigs. No backup plans that make quitting feel rational. When staying becomes easier than leaving, you'll stay. The founders who make it through the Trough are the ones who made quitting more painful than continuing.

3. Find Your Root Problem; Don’t Jump To Money. Is the product fundamentally broken? Or are you just bad at getting people to try it?

High engagement, low acquisition = marketing problem. Fix distribution. Low engagement, high acquisition = product problem. Fix retention. Low everything = you probably have a product problem masquerading as a marketing problem.

Most early Louisville startups aren't taking product risk – they're taking execution risk. They think money will solve problems they haven't cracked yet. They’re uncomfortable making cold calls so they want to raise money to hire a sales person. They aren’t an engineer so they need money to hire a dev shop. You can’t outsource what you don’t understand, and paid external help at this stage is rarely helpful.

Pick up the phone and shoot your shot. Vibe code an MVP and get it in front of customers today.

4. Build a War Room; Proximity Creates Pressure. Stop working from your kitchen table. Get around other people fighting the same fight. This is why we built Cinderblock – forty hours on-site minimum, open bullpen, no room to hide. When everyone can see you slipping, you don't slip. When everyone's grinding, you grind.

5. Small Teams Move Faster & You Need Focus, Not 1:1s. Big teams create communication overhead you can't afford right now. Every person you add is another voice in the room when you need to pivot fast. Keep it tight. Keep it focused. Scale the team after you find what works, not before.

6. Track Leading Indicators; What You Control vs. What Controls You. Stop obsessing over vanity metrics you can't control (signups, revenue, users). Start tracking what you can control: calls made, emails sent, features shipped, tests run. When the lagging indicators flatline, the leading indicators keep you moving, testing, and sane.

7. Install Public Accountability; Weekly Numbers, No Excuses. Speaking of tracking, set weekly milestones that tangibly move the needle. Report them to your crew every Friday. Let them hold you to numbers that make you uncomfortable. When you want to lower the bar, they won't let you. When you hit the milestone, they celebrate. When you miss, they ask what you're changing next week.

8. Ship Daily; Momentum Compounds. Ship something every single day. A bug fix. A cold email campaign. A new feature. 10 customer calls. Momentum dies in stillness, so the goal today isn’t perfect anything, it’s just creating proof that you're still moving.

9. Practice Surplus Value; Fix Someone Else's Problem. Spend 5 hours every month helping another startup in your orbit. When you're stuck in your own mess, fixing someone else's problem reminds you that solutions exist. Plus, when you hit your breaking point, they return the favor. Community isn't networking; it's survival insurance.

10. Process the Brutality; Find Your Founder Friends. Every week, call another founder who's been through this. Not for advice. For sanity. To remember that the voice calling you a fraud isn't unique to you. To hear that someone else survived month seven of no growth and lived to tell about it.

The Filter

The Trough isn’t your detour around success - it's the main road through it. It’s where real companies are made.

The founders who make it to product market fit aren't the ones who never hit the Trough. They're the ones who built systems that kept them shipping when that analytics dashboard made them want to cry.

So stop waiting for the perfect moment. Stop looking for the hack that makes it easier. Stop picking up side projects when the main one gets hard.

Build systems. Lock in. Ship daily. Help others. And when you want to quit—which you will—don’t.

The Trough of Sorrow is the filter that separates the people who want to build something that lasts from the people who do.

Which one are you?

–Rachel

Ready to lock-in and survive the Trough? KYX Cinderblock is looking for founders who refuse to coast. Reply to this email or hit us up in Slack.

Events

This Week: Vibe Code Night x Poker Night

Tired of choosing between being social and being productive? Thursday's Vibe Code Night at Cinderblock is built for founders who want both. Bring whatever you're working on: side project, startup sprint, or just experimenting with AI and knock it out alongside other builders who understand the grind.

You bring the vibes. We'll bring the pizza, drinks, and bourbon for those who want it. Finish your work and mosey on over to the poker table for some light degen activity.

Sometimes the best networking happens when you're not trying to network, just building cool stuff in good company.

When: Thursday, July 24th at 5p
Where: Cinderblock
RSVP here: https://lu.ma/1kqp9j9g

Fire & Ice

Fire & Ice was my first real exposure to a startup community in Louisville.

I’d met with Dan a few weeks earlier to ask about the scene. “What’s the community like here?” “Bad. Run away,” he said.

I believed him.

I’d spent months trying to find something — anything — that resembled momentum. There were silos. Blips. But no connective tissue. I’d mostly given up.

Then I got the invite: A cold plunge and sauna event for the doers in Louisville.

And it was awesome.

Real conversations about things I actually cared about. Conversations I actually remembered. I met Otavio, Rachel, Kevin, Sam, Zeeshan, Felice, Taylor, and Ashley.

I left that Saturday feeling alive.

The next week, over coffee, I asked Dan —“How do we get this crew together more often? How do we grow it?”

He was already there. “I’m done whining. I’m gonna try to fix some things here.
You in?” I was.

A week later, I claimed a desk next to Dan, Otavio, and Kevin—and put the proximity experiment to the test.

The next six months of my life were completely different than they would’ve been if I hadn’t shown up that Saturday.

If you’ve been looking for momentum—for people who actually do things, for a crew that gets shit done—you have to put yourself out there. Just show up. One event can change everything.

It did for me.

–Jack

Join us at the next Fire & Ice and find out.

When: Saturday, August 9th @ 11a
Where: MaybeItsFate
RSVP here: https://lu.ma/5aeqk3w4

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

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