Your business still runs through you, and you're starting to feel it. The instincts that got you off the ground, like control, urgency and owning every detail, are the same ones that can quietly cap how far your business grows.

The startup world keeps rewarding those instincts anyway. Investors still picture a certain kind of founder, and some of the most celebrated founders of the last decade, from Theranos to FTX, played that role right up until it all came apart.

Susanna Kislenko has spent her career studying why. She founded the Founder Leadership Research Lab at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and has interviewed founders in more than 30 countries. In this episode, Alex and Susanna dig into founder syndrome: what it is, why it happens, and how to catch it before your business can't grow without you.

What We Break Down:

• The Question That Reveals Founder Syndrome: Susanna asks every founder whether they see themselves more as a founder or a leader, and who their hero is. The answers tell her more than most founders realize.
• When Startup Strengths Become Growth Limits: How the control you needed early turns into a bottleneck later, even at companies with thousands of employees where nobody can move without the founder's approval.
• What Happens to the People Inside: Susanna's research on star hires who get recruited hard, then diminished once they arrive.
• How Elizabeth Holmes Became Steve Jobs: Why Holmes pitched Boston first, what happened when the experts said no, and what she changed about herself to get funded in Palo Alto.
• The Founder Pedestal: How loyal executives, boards, funders and lists like Forbes 30 Under 30 protect founders until they get caught, and why Alex calls that list the next America's Most Wanted.
• Leading Without the Pedestal: What leader-first founders do differently, including reviews where the team evaluates the founder too.

Continue with this week's free Growth Playbook: We take the story one step further by exploring how founder syndrome starts, why the ecosystem keeps rewarding it, and what it costs a business that can't grow past its founder, then give you one concrete move to make in your own business this week.

Read the free Growth Playbook on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Want support putting it into action? Paid GSD members get the accountability, connections and support to keep moving. That includes a monthly Community Traction Lab to work through real business challenges together, a quarterly Growth Planning Party to review progress and plan what's next, feedback and introductions from other founders, and our full library of classes, templates and Playbooks.

Alex Schinasi built Hulken into an eight-figure business with two employees, and she didn't spend a dollar on ads for the first two years. She grew it niche by niche: one DM from a thrifter turned into a partnership offer from Poshmark. She did the same thing with makeup artists, then professional organizers. This momentum later turned into major brand deals with brands like Supreme.

In this episode, Alex walks through how that thrifter DM turned into Poshmark reaching out to her, why she waited until Hulken was mid eight figures to spend a dollar on branding, the exact return she required before she'd let a channel that was already converting organically become a paid one, and how shes's scalin to $100M with > 10 employees.

What We Break Down:

• The Niche Before The Budget: why Alex built her acquisition engine on niches small enough to win one person at a time, not audiences big enough to need an ad budget.
• The Free Ask That Wasn't a Favor: what she offered thrifters and makeup artists, and why it solved a real problem instead of asking for content in return.
• The 5-to-1 Rule: the exact return she required before turning on paid ads for a channel already converting for free.
• Profit First, Every Time: why she never raised outside funding for Hulken, and what her family's manufacturing relationship made possible instead.
• Eight Figures, Eight People: how she's staying intentionally small, using agencies instead of headcount, and why she thinks she can hit nine figures under ten employees.

Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where Alex's story becomes a repeatable system for finding the customer group already pulling your product forward, before you spend a dollar promoting it. Paid subscribers also get The Collective, our private founder community, where you can bring your niche list and get real feedback before you make the ask.

Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Burnt out, overwhelmed, optimistic but feeling meeehhh? That's what founders in the Get Sh!t Done community have been telling Alex the last few weeks.

Deals may be taking longer to close right now, no matter your stage, no matter how long you've been doing this. And the instinct when things get harder is to grip tighter and try to do more of it alone. Alex's answer is the opposite: stop trying to do this by yourself, and start building channel partners, the strategic partnerships where you're usually not even exchanging money, just access.

In this episode, Alex walks through her full 7-step Channel Partner Framework, goal, offer, who, partner types, short list, ask, and activation, and tells the real stories behind how she's developed channel partnerships and how brands you know of have.

What We Break Down:

• The Goal Before the Ask: why the founders who actually land partners get quantified before they ever reach out, not after.
• The Offer That Isn't Tit for Tat: how to build something a partner says yes to that isn't a mirror trade.
• The Who and the Seven Partner Types: the categories of channel partners most founders never think to pitch, including two that are probably already inside your target company right now.
• The Ask, In Alex's Actual Words: the exact phrasing she uses to open a partnership conversation.
• The Follow-Up Gap: the one habit almost every founder skips, and the number that proves it.
• SipFit x Google: how one free office fitting through a single contact became a nationwide channel, then a client relationship.

Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where Alex breaks down all 7 steps of the Get Sh!t Done Channel Partner Framework with a real action for each one, plus copy-and-send outreach templates so you can build your own partner list this week. Paid subscribers also get The Collective, our private founder community, where three members are already building their own partner lists together after this week's coaching call.

Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Dolly Parton passed away on August 25th. By the time she did, this woman who started out as the fourth of twelve kids in rural Tennessee had built an estimated net worth of $450 million.

So how did she get there? Beyond having an incredible, game-changing career, she stopped trying to do everything herself, and she built the capacity to prosper, and to circulate that prosperity back out to the people around her.

This week, Alex walks through Dolly Parton's entire business journey using the Get Sh!t Done Prosperity Ecosystem, the five-pillar framework this whole show is built on: vision, oxygen, capacity, prosperity, and stewardship. From the radio show her Uncle Bill got her onto at 10 years old, to the song credited to him instead of her because she was too young to sign her own publishing contract, to the night she said no to Elvis Presley's team and reportedly cried through it, to an estimated $165 million theme park stake she never had to run herself.

What We Break Down:

• The ownership lesson she learned at 13: Why "Puppy Love," the first song Dolly ever wrote, was legally credited to her Uncle Bill instead of her, and why that shaped how she handled every deal after it.
• The night she said no to Elvis: The real story behind refusing to hand over half the publishing rights to "I Will Always Love You," and the $3 million lawsuit from Porter Wagoner that came before it.
• How she built capacity beyond herself: Sandollar Productions, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Dollywood partnership with the Herschend family that turned into an estimated $165 million stake she never had to run day to day.
• What $450 million actually bought her: How a $120 million song catalog and a theme park she didn't personally operate turned into freedom, not just money.
• What she did with all of it: The Buddy Program, the Imagination Library, and why Dolly's giving looked structurally different from most celebrity philanthropy.

Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where we break down How to Build Capacity by Developing the Right Partnerships, a specific way to identify the one asset only you bring and find the right partner to build the rest with you, plus access to The Collective to workshop your own capacity gap with other founders doing the same work.

Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You built something. You got feedback. You launched it. And somewhere between the beta group and the actual users, the product stopped working the way you imagined it would.

Most founders assume that is a marketing problem. It is not. It is a building problem. Specifically, it is the gap between consulting your users once and actually co-creating with them across every iteration of your product or offer.

Diana Verde Nieto is a serial entrepreneur on her third company. She built and exited her first international sustainability consultancy, scaling it across three continents. She was trained by Al Gore. She is now the co-founder and CEO of Edify, an AI platform helping frontline organizations turn strategy into action on the shop floor. And even with all of that behind her, she spent almost a year building the wrong version of her product before one decision changed everything.

What We Break Down:

• The year Diana built the wrong thing: What she was building, why it made complete sense on paper, and what finally forced the pivot.
• What co-creation actually looks like: The difference between a one-time feedback loop and a continuous co-creation practice across every version of your build — and why that difference determines whether users come back.
• How to read user behavior: What people do with your product tells you something completely different than what they say about it. Diana breaks down how to listen for the right signals.
• The engagement and rewards infrastructure: How Diana built gamification and instant rewards into Edify, and what any founder building a platform or offer needs to know about making users return.
• The enterprise sales warning: Why Diana is not yet in enterprise despite having a scalable product, and why she says rushing into big contracts before you know your product cold can close that door for good.

Paid Subscribers Get Access To: How to Build a Product Your Customers Keep Coming Back To Before You Spend Another Dollar Scaling It — a step-by-step co-creation framework for building iteratively with real users, the engagement loop infrastructure that brings people back, and a copy-and-send template to run your first co-creation session this week. Plus access to The Collective, where founders are working through exactly these questions together.

Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You are trying to build something in an industry where the market keeps rewarding the cheapest option. You have run the math. You cannot match the price. And every time you try to compete anyway, you end up either losing the margin you need or losing the contract.

Most founders in this position keep trying to close the price gap. Kathy Cheng went the other direction entirely.

Kathy is the founder of Redwood Classics Apparel and president of WS and Co., a family-owned Canadian garment manufacturer that has been operating for nearly 40 years. In 2008, after the offshore wave shrunk her family's factory from nearly 500 employees to around 100, she and her father made the decision to restructure to 40 people and go all-in on made-in-Canada. She built a Tier 2 supplier model inside the $28 billion branded merchandise industry, a four-part value proposition that removes price from the conversation entirely, and an internal supplier diversity policy where over half of factory spend goes to women-owned and minority-owned businesses.

What We Break Down:

• The constraint-based positioning decision: How Kathy identified what domestic production made structurally possible that offshore could not replicate, and built her entire value proposition around those four things instead of price.
• The Tier 2 distribution play: Why she sold through branded merchandise distributors rather than direct to corporations, and how that decision got her into a $28 billion industry without building a sales team from scratch.
• How Redwood Classics was actually born: A customer tracked down the factory through a CA number on a label to find a sweatshirt they had washed a million times and could not find anywhere else. What that call told Kathy about who was actually buying and why.
• Certification as a capacity tool: Why she pursued CAMSC certification not primarily for business leads but for executive education at Tuck Business School at Dartmouth, fully funded by GM, and what that reframe means for founders eligible for certification right now.
• The factory floor moment: What she felt standing among her makers when the word got out the factory might close, and why that emotion became the entire strategic foundation of what she built next.
• The internal diversity spend commitment: How Kathy operationalized a policy where over half of her factory's spend goes to women-owned and minority-owned businesses, and why she believes the ultimate goal is a world where programs like this are no longer necessary.

This episode is for you if you are running a product or service business where price pressure never lets up, if you have been wondering whether supplier diversity certification is worth pursuing, or if you are trying to find a distribution strategy that does not require you to build a full sales infrastructure from scratch.

Paid Subscribers Get Access To: The Price-Proof Value Proposition Framework, a named, structured, step-by-step system for identifying your operational constraints and rebuilding your positioning around them so price stops being the deciding factor in your sales conversations. Plus access to The Collective, a community of founders and ecosystem builders working through the exact same questions, together.

Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You hit the number. The revenue milestone, the press hit, the round you'd been chasing for years. And you felt nothing. Or worse, you felt like it wasn't even real.

That's not a personal failing. It's what happens when you build a business around what success is supposed to look like instead of how you actually want to feel.

This week, I sit down with Claire Wasserman, founder of Ladies Get Paid, who built her business the way most of us are taught to, brand deals, national press, a book deal, over a million dollars in revenue, and still ended up on food stamps in that same five year stretch.

What We Break Down

• The whiplash: How Claire went from seven figures to food stamps in the same five years, and what actually caused it.
• The reframe that changed everything: Why Claire stopped asking what success looks like and started asking what it feels like.
• The body keeps score: The herniated disc, the doctor's question, and what it costs to never process a crisis.
• Rebuilding on purpose: How Claire went from one revenue stream to three, and why premium pricing over volume finally gave her peace.

This episode is for you if you've ever hit a goal and felt strangely empty, if your business has ever depended on one client, one platform, or one budget line that could disappear overnight, or if you've been pushing through stress and calling it resilience.

Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, The Feeling-First Revenue Model, the exact framework for building your revenue decisions around how you actually want to feel instead of what success is supposed to look like from the outside. Plus direct access to our Group Chat, where founders trade real feedback on the stuff they can't post publicly yet.

Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You built a business people actually need a human for. Then you started treating every part of it like a problem to automate, or you got so scared of losing the human touch that you wouldn't touch technology at all.

Neither one is a strategy. There's a more precise way to decide what stays human in your business, and almost nobody teaches it.

This week Alex talks with Nicole Wood, cofounder of Ama La Vida, about exactly that. Plus why she thinks the word "coach" has become almost a punchline, and what an entire industry got wrong by scaling for scale's sake.

What We Break Down:

• Why coaching got predatory: Why Nicole watched an industry flood with people promising outcomes they had no business promising, and why she built the opposite kind of company on purpose.
• Tech-enabled, not tech-first: Why she built Ama La Vida around protecting the coach-client relationship instead of the platform, and what that protected as the company scaled past 35 coaches.
• The hybrid model that actually worked: How e-coaching software handles the surface-level reflection between sessions so coaches can go straight to the human challenge.
• Bootstrapped to multi-millions: How $8,000 each and no funding round became a business that's doubled revenue year over year.
• Why the relationship doesn't end at the first goal: The internal rule, "always be bettering," that turns one-time clients into years of revenue.
• Rejecting the headline path on purpose: Why Nicole had 10 conversations with founders who took the VC route before deciding Ama La Vida wouldn't.

The episode gives you Nicole's story. The playbook gives you something to actually build with.

Paid Subscribers Get Access To: the Multi-Million Dollar Service Model, the exact way to decide which part of your business gets to stay human and which part is free to scale, so you can grow without losing the thing people are actually paying you for + access to a community of other badass founders getting it done together

Learn More  + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

You may be one of the smartest people in the room. You work harder than anyone else, you have done everything right, and yet it still feels like it is not translating. The deals are not closing the way they should. And then you start coming down on your price before anyone even asks, out of fear you asked for too much.

Yes. The system was not built for you to win and it has done a number on how we see ourselves and what we believe we are allowed to ask for. But sometimes we are also the barrier. We are the ones folding before anyone called our bluff.

My guest today has spent 20 years at the intersection of both truths.

Ellen Leikind spent 15 years at Pfizer and L'Oréal launching over a billion dollars in products before she founded PokerDivas in 2005. She is the creator of the BOLD Negotiation System, the author of PokerWoman: How to Win at Love, Life and Business Using the Principles of Poker, and one of the most practical voices on negotiation, access, and strategic confidence working today. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies, spoken at Chief, and spent two decades teaching women the rules of a game nobody wrote down for us.

What We Break Down:

• Playing to win vs. playing not to lose: What fear-based play actually looks like in a negotiation, a pitch, or a room where you are the only woman and how to catch yourself doing it.
• The BOLD System: Ellen's four-part negotiation framework built specifically for the moment the ask is for you, not for your client or your company.
• Reading the room: How to walk into any high-stakes environment and understand who holds power before you say a word.
• The rooms we were never in: Why poker became the new golf and what it has cost women that we were not at either table.

• When folding is the move: How to know the difference between playing it wrong and just getting unlucky and why that question changes everything.

How to Get Sh!t Done

• Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook HERE on Substack.
• Check out How We Support Entrepreneurs HERE
• Check out How We Partner HERE

Shawna Ruff was five days into writing government grants without sleeping when she ended up on her couch at 3am, crying into a bowl of cereal. She made it to her whiteboard instead. By morning she had the first version of what became Rayla AI.

That's the version of this story nobody tells you when they say "go get equity-free government funding."

The money is real, especially from SBIR, NSF, the America Seed Fund. This is non-dilutive capital available right now when most VC doors are closed. But there are 900+ trigger words that auto-reject proposals before a human ever reads them. There are portal registrations that take weeks to process. There are AI screeners flagging LLM-generated applications. And I know personally that you can do everything right and still have the entire round shut down when the political landscape shifts.

This week Shawna breaks down the whole system on how to validate eligibility before you write, what the compliance layer actually requires, and how to build from Phase 1 all the way to $30M in Phase 3 commercialization.

What we break down:

• The 900+ trigger words: Words and phrases that auto-reject your proposal before anyone reads it — and the language that wins instead.
• What "dual use" actually means: Who qualifies, who doesn't, and why your SaaS product probably isn't it.
• Your bio sketch is carrying more weight than you think: At early phases the government is funding a team. Most founders write this last.
• Phase 1 to Phase 3: From $275K to $30M and what they need to see at every stage.

This episode is for you if you've been curious about government funding.

This week's Growth Playbook goes deep on everything we covered. Paid subscribers have it in their inbox now. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook here: https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/