Founder Fit

Founder Fit

Match strategy to the person. Most founders build strategies that impress others and compete where others are strong. This skill produces the opposite input: a file of non-judgmental, evidence-backed characteristics, then the one or two extreme traits a strategy can bet on.

Boundary

Own founder self-knowledge and its distillation into decisive traits. Strategy design, positioning, bios, and marketing copy are downstream work that consumes the output. Do not inventory what a company or product is good at; that is a different exercise. This is not therapy: record personality facts, never distress. When material surfaces that needs professional care, say so plainly, name the kind of professional, and do not record it as a characteristic.

Mode

Ask which applies, or infer from the request:

• Self-portrait. The person wants to know who they are: drives, hindrances, and the strengths they cannot see. Output: a self-portrait file.
• Distillation. The person or company asks what makes them special or what to bet on. Output: at most two decisive traits plus the honest zero verdict.

Run the self-portrait before distillation when both are needed. A distillation without a self-portrait works from live capture and marks its evidence unvetted.

Required Inputs

• The decision this work serves, when one exists
• Real episodes: work history, war stories, past projects, or a written self-portrait or strengths chart
• For a company distillation: strengths evidence and the named people who carry the company's obsessions
• For the self-portrait: two to five people who know the person well, for outside-in evidence

Self-portrait workflow

1. Name the decision this serves and where the file should live. Resume from the in-progress header when a file exists.
2. Mine drives one prompt at a time from the prompt bank. Settle one characteristic before offering the next prompt, and drain each vein before moving on. The second and third answers are usually the honest ones.
3. Mine hindrances with the anti-questions. This section is mandatory; a portrait with no hindrances is flattery.
4. Press every claim for a concrete episode. A label with no episode dies. Apply the presses: sanitized motive, aspiration dressed as fact, generic phrasing, and the energized-or-wrecked check.
5. Record each characteristic as a non-judgmental fact with evidence, the contexts where it expresses as a strength, and the contexts where it expresses as a hindrance. Freeze identifiers in settle order.
6. Assign the three outside-in questions as homework to two to five people who know the person well. Process answers as evidence when they arrive. Record an outside-named strength even when the person cannot corroborate it, attributed as outside testimony, because impact is determined by others' perception.
7. Run the closing press against the draft: virtue words, résumé lines, humblebrags, missing hindrances, missing unflattering drives, and contradictions.
8. Write the shape section: read the whole portrait back as one synthesis, cited by characteristic numbers. If a framing question was named, state what the map says about it. The map describes the shape of the answer; it does not prescribe what to do.
9. Finalize and hand off to distillation.

Distillation workflow

1. Harvest every plausible candidate from the portrait, strengths notes, war stories, and your own reading, each tagged with its source and episode evidence.
2. Run each candidate through the five tests, one candidate per exchange, verdict on the record: voter candidate, special strength, shaping strength, or cut.
3. Cap the voters at two. When more survive, force the ranking question: when they conflict, which one wins?
4. Walk the weaknesses each settled voter overpowers, including the costs its admirers accept as proof of the voter.
5. Deliver the zero verdict honestly when nothing passes: nothing is special and extreme yet. Name the twofold response: invest the deepest genuine obsession into extremity, or change games to one where an existing fact is extreme.
6. Run the closing press, including an attack on the count, then finalize.
7. Close with the handoff: audit current strategy against the voters across pricing, positioning, product, and channels. Mismatches are where to pivot.

Output

1. Self-portrait file or voters file in the agreed location, with stable identifiers and an in-progress header that supports resuming
2. The shape synthesis for a self-portrait
3. Voters with evidence, special strengths, shaping strengths, and the cut list for a distillation
4. Zero verdict with named obsession candidates when nothing passes
5. Next step: strategy audit or downstream skill handoff

Quality Gate

• Every recorded characteristic cites a concrete episode.
• The portrait contains hindrances and at least one unflattering or unsanitized motive.
• Each voter passes all five tests; the cap stays at two.
• Near-miss strengths are demoted to a special tier, never inflated into voters and never buried as common.
• Aspiration is never recorded as history.
• The zero verdict is delivered when nothing passes; the file is never padded.
• No distress is recorded as a characteristic.
• The file can support a later strategy audit without this session's conversation.

Reference

Use founder-fit-protocol.md for the prompt bank, press lines, the five voter tests, and file templates.