Building in the Real World: Lessons From This Week
The product is only half the story.
There’s a pattern we’ve noticed across founders who are solving consequential problems: eventually, you realize you’re not just building a product. You’re rebuilding something people rely on.
This week, that showed up in two very different industries.
On Monday, we shared our conversation with Kira Shishkin, four-time founder and CEO of informed.now, a news-by-text concierge service built for a world drowning in noise. On Wednesday, we posted our chat with Nafaa Haddou, co-founder and CEO of FireSafe AI, a company using AI and multi-source sensing to prevent and mitigate wildfires.
Different domains. Same underlying constraint: trust.
Kira is rebuilding trust in information. Nafaa is rebuilding trust in systems that protect communities. And both conversations landed on the same truth for founders: if your customer can’t trust what they’re seeing, or trust the outcome you’re promising, it doesn’t matter how good your tech is. Trust is the product.
Below are the lessons that stuck with us most, and how they apply even if you’re not in media or climate tech.
When your mission rejects an industry norm, distribution becomes the hard problem.
Kira shared a challenge that’s both obvious and sneaky: when you’re anti-advertising (ethically and philosophically), it becomes difficult to advertise yourself.
That tension forced informed.now to evolve. They’re still not running paid ads, but they’ve leaned into organic growth through creators and real users who champion the product because it genuinely improves their life.
This is a classic founder pattern:
Your differentiator creates a new constraint.
Your constraint forces creative distribution.
Your distribution becomes the real moat.
If your stance rejects the default playbook, don’t fight the constraint; design around it.
In “physical world” startups, trust isn’t abstract; it’s operational.
Nafaa’s story is personal. A wildfire impacted his family and community in the Mediterranean, with significant loss. He and his younger brother (and co-founder) asked a simple question: could we do anything about this?
That question became FireSafe AI.
Their platform ingests data from satellite down to local sensing (cameras, drones, etc.), assesses wildfire risk, and aims to detect ignition events quickly — with the goal of helping responders act faster and reduce false alarms.
In their world, trust is not a branding exercise. It’s whether operators believe the system enough to take action. It’s whether the alerts are credible. It’s whether the product integrates into real infrastructure and real response workflows.
In high-stakes environments, “trust” means reliability + speed + interoperability. The product must earn belief through performance.
Fundraising must be run like a project, not a permanent background task.
Nafaa gave one of the most pragmatic lessons of the week: they didn’t run a tight fundraising process early on. It dragged on, pulled attention away from sales, and compounded the cost — especially in an industry with seasonality and long sales cycles.
His fix is simple and founder-friendly:
Build a targeted investor list (50–60)
Commit to an intense 2–3 week sprint
Book everything
Set a hard cutoff date
If you don’t hit it, stop; go back to customers, milestones, traction
Then run another process later
There’s no ego in it. Just truth: lingering fundraising steals from the only cure-all that consistently works: building and selling.
The best founders are stubborn and open.
If you take nothing else from this week, take this:
“You need to be stubborn, but open.”
You need conviction to survive the clock, the uncertainty, and the inevitable friction. But you also need openness to feedback, to hard conversations, and to the possibility that the right move is a pivot, or even stopping altogether.
Too much stubbornness becomes blindness. Too much openness becomes drift. The skill is holding both.
Conviction gets you moving. Humility keeps you honest.
These were two very different episodes, but in both cases, the “tech” is only half the story. The real work is rebuilding systems people can depend on.
And that’s true for founders in any industry.
If you can create a product that brings clarity where there’s noise, or reliability where there’s risk, you’re not just shipping features. You’re restoring trust.
Listen to the episodes:
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