IN THIS WEEK’S NEWSLETTER:

• 🚀 Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. for an AI World

• ❤️ Focus on Something You and Others Love: A Founder’s AI Framework

• 🔥 How Startups Can Scale With AI Agents

• 🤖 AI Tip of the Month

• 🏰 Can You Build a Moat Around Your Idea in an AI World?

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🎙️ Build a Business that Doesn’t Own You – Serial Entrepreneur: Secrets Revealed - September 18th at 2pm EDT

Learn about building a business that creates real freedom. We’ll talk ownership, profit, systems, risk, and how founders can stop being essential to everything their company does with guest Steve Rolle, author and entrepreneur.

Listen to this newsletter👇

🚀 Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. for an AI World

We are coming up on the third anniversary of Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.

Since the book launched, it has hit #1 on Amazon in 15 categories and won 40 global awards. But the awards aren't why I wrote the book.

I wrote it because I wanted to share what took me a lifetime to learn about entrepreneurship.

I have spent my life launching one business after another. Some were complete failures. Others were wildly successful. Some went public, some were sold. But every one of them taught me something.

Eventually, I became obsessed with a question: Is there a formula behind successful entrepreneurship? Why are some entrepreneurs able to Start, Scale and Exit a business, and then do it all over again?

Is it luck?

Timing?

Talent?

Or are there repeatable patterns that the best entrepreneurs learn to recognize?

I spent ten years writing the book and another two putting it together with a team of six. We interviewed more than 200 entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs and experts, with about 50 of those interviews making it into the book.

We were trying to decode entrepreneurship. What are the ingredients? What are the patterns? What do serial entrepreneurs do differently?

The result was Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.

And three years later, I believe the book may be even more relevant than when we wrote it.

Because of AI.

Entrepreneurship Just Got Compressed

The fundamental principles of entrepreneurship haven't changed. But the speed at which we can execute them has.

Recently, I built an app called Rummy Gummy in about two hours. I had never built an app before. A few years ago, I would have needed a developer, a designer, someone for the database and probably someone to help deploy it. There would have been meetings, budgets, specifications and timelines.

Now I can sit down with an idea and, two hours later, have something working.

It means the Start process can be compressed. And increasingly, I believe the Scale process can be compressed as well.

But there is an important distinction. AI makes entrepreneurship faster. It doesn't make understanding entrepreneurship less important. In fact, I think the opposite is true.

From Jack of All Trades to Master of All Trades

Entrepreneurs have always had to be jacks of all trades, particularly in the Start phase. You are selling one minute, recruiting the next, figuring out marketing after lunch and looking at cash flow before you go home.

Historically, you didn't have to be great at all of them. You just had to know enough to keep moving.

AI changes that equation. For the first time, an entrepreneur has the potential to become something closer to a master of all trades. Not because you suddenly know everything, but because you now have intelligence available to you in almost every discipline.

That is incredible leverage. But leverage is only useful when you know where to apply it.

You still need to understand Story, People, Money and Systems. You need to understand Stage Gates, Proof and Minor/Majors. You need to know when to enter Scale mode and when it may be time to Exit.

AI doesn't replace those principles. It puts them on steroids.

Seven Ways to Apply Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. in an AI World

1. Turn Growth Hacks into AI Hacks

In the book, I talk about Minor/Majors, or Growth Hacks. The idea is simple: small improvements, repeated over and over, can create major results.

Now every entrepreneur should be looking for AI Minor/Majors. Don't ask, "How can AI transform my entire company?" That's too big. Instead, ask: What takes my team four hours that could take 20 minutes? What report could be generated automatically? What customer questions could be answered instantly?

Find 10 of those. Then find another 10. Fifty small AI hacks spread throughout a company may create a much bigger competitive advantage than one gigantic breakthrough.

2. Don't Just BPO. Build AI Agents.

One of the four core ingredients in the book is Systems. As you Scale, you must get things out of the entrepreneur's head and build processes others can execute.

For years, one answer was BPO, and I still believe offshore talent can play an important role. But now there is another question every entrepreneur should ask: Before I BPO this process, can I build an AI agent to do it?

An agent could monitor leads, prepare research before a sales call, follow up with prospects, analyze feedback, reconcile systems or flag problems before a human knows there is one.

This doesn't mean eliminating people. Use people for judgment, creativity, relationships and the exceptions. Use AI agents for more of the repetitive execution.

At Paw.com, we recently replaced the work of five full-time offshore staff members with AI agents.

For decades, entrepreneurs asked, "Who can do this?" Now we should also be asking, "What can do this?"

3. Compress Your Stage Gates

I have always believed in Stage Gates. Don't try to solve the entire company at once. Prove something, then move to the next gate. Can you build the product? Get the first customer? Get 10? Get 100?

AI allows us to move through these gates much faster. You can build prototypes in hours instead of months, test dozens of landing pages, and analyze thousands of customer comments in an afternoon.

Don't remove the gates. Move through them faster.

4. Scale in Zeros With AI

When you enter Scale mode, your thinking has to change. You stop asking how to get a few more customers and start asking how to add zeros. From 100 to 1,000? From $1 million to $10 million?

Every time you build a process, ask whether it can handle 10X the volume. Then ask whether AI can help it handle 100X. If AI allows the same people to manage five or ten times the volume, the economics of your business begin to change.

Don't just use AI to automate the company you have today. Use AI to build the company you want to have tomorrow.

5. Make Proof Faster and Cheaper

One of the most important lessons in entrepreneurship is that Proof sells. Customers want proof. Employees want proof. Investors definitely want proof.

The problem has always been that getting proof takes time and money. AI can dramatically reduce both. You can build prototypes faster, test messaging faster and analyze results almost immediately.

Entrepreneurship is filled with opinions. "I think customers will want this." "I think this price is right."

Great. Prove it.

6. Become a Better Communicator

After decades of building businesses, I believe one of the great entrepreneurial superpowers is communication. Selling is communication. Fundraising is communication. Recruiting, leadership, negotiating, marketing—all communication.

AI gives entrepreneurs an extraordinary communication coach. Have it challenge your pitch before the investor does. Have it role-play your biggest customer. Ask it where you lose credibility.

But human-to-human contact is still key. People buy from people. Don't outsource your personality to AI. The objective isn't to sound like ChatGPT. It's to use AI to become a clearer, more persuasive version of you.

7. Use AI for the Signals. Trust Your Instinct on the Exit.

Entrepreneurs love their companies. Sometimes too much.

AI is changing the rules in almost every industry, so you need to constantly ask uncomfortable questions. Could someone reproduce in six months what took us six years to build? Is our moat getting wider, or is it disappearing?

AI can help you identify the signals. But ultimately, the entrepreneur has to make the decision. Timing has always been a huge part of Exit.

Sometimes the smartest decision is to sell while a technology shift is still increasing your value, or before it destroys it.

Use AI for the data. Use your instinct to make the decision.

Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.

Take the One-Chapter-a-Week Challenge

We made Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. different from a lot of business books. It has 58 short, digestible chapters filled with personal stories and callouts. We wrote it for entrepreneurs with ADHD. People like me.

So here is my challenge. Don't try to read the entire book this weekend. Read one chapter every week. Take the idea from that chapter and apply it to your business. Try something. Change something. Build something.

We have also created NotebookLM resources to complement the chapters.

Click here to access the NotebookLMs for each chapter of the ‘Start’ section.

Read the chapter, then use the corresponding NotebookLM to listen and go deeper.

If you read one chapter a week and apply what you learn, you'll build something far more valuable than knowledge about entrepreneurship. You'll build an entrepreneurial operating system.

AI Doesn't Replace Entrepreneurship. It Amplifies It.

There is a lot of discussion right now about what AI is going to replace. I think entrepreneurs should ask a different question: What does AI allow me to do that I could never do before?

It allows me to build an app in two hours. It allows a small company to access capabilities that once required dozens of employees. It allows us to test more ideas and move through Stage Gates faster.

But AI still doesn't tell you what business to build, which customer problem is worth solving, when to raise money or when it is time to Exit. Those are entrepreneurial skills. That is why learning the fundamentals may be more important in the AI era, not less.

The technology has changed. The speed has changed. The amount one entrepreneur can accomplish has changed enormously.

But the game is still the game. Learn how to play it. Then use every tool available to play it better.

— Colin C. Campbell

Disclaimer: Startup Club and its AI resources are for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Consult a qualified lawyer for legal matters.

📕 Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat E-Book Sale is Now ON!

This October marks three years since the launch of Colin C. Campbell’s Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. To celebrate, the Kindle edition is available for just $0.99, making it the perfect time to grab a copy or share it with an entrepreneur ready to start, scale, and build their next big business.

Check out Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. on Amazon for more!

❤️ Focus on Something You and Others Love: A Founder’s Framework for the AI Era

In 1993, I made a decision that looked questionable on paper.

My partners and I had built ComputerLink, a profitable BBS company. The business worked. It had customers. It made money.

And we decided to shut it down.

Why?

Because we could see something much bigger coming: the internet.

We loved what we had built with ComputerLink—the community, the connectivity, and the ability for technology to bring people together. But we realized that the BBS itself wasn't the thing we loved most.

It was the idea behind it.

So we took the assets of a profitable company and used them to start Internet Direct, venturing into an industry that was still largely uncharted.

More than three decades later, entrepreneurs are facing a remarkably similar moment with artificial intelligence.

AI is changing how companies are built, how work gets done, and what customers expect. New tools and business models seem to appear every week.

That creates enormous opportunity.

It also creates enormous distraction.

The founders who thrive in this environment won't necessarily be the ones who chase AI the fastest. They'll be the ones who understand what they truly care about, what their customers care about, and how AI can become a better vehicle for delivering it.

One of the most important lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur is this:

Don't fall so deeply in love with your business that you go down with it.

Fall in love with the purpose instead.

The full article lays out a seven-part framework for finding that focus in the AI era—including the three overlapping signals that separate a real opportunity from a shiny object, and the seven-question test to run before you pursue your next idea.

👉 Read the full article on Founder’s Framework

🤖 AI Tip of the Month: Connect ChatGPT to Your Email

I recently connected my Gmail account to ChatGPT, and it opened up a whole new world of information and automation.

Instead of spending time searching through hundreds or thousands of emails, I can simply ask ChatGPT to find what I’m looking for. An old invoice, a report someone sent months ago, details from a conversation, or an attachment buried somewhere in my inbox. The AI searches for it and brings back what I need.

But searching email is just the beginning.

For one of my businesses, I set up an automated workflow to track new leads. Google alerts and other lead information arrive in my inbox, and AI can review those emails, research the individual and company, find contact information, and prepare a personalized LinkedIn message and email. It can even create the email draft for me to review.

I receive a lot of monthly reports from different companies as well, so I’m also using ChatGPT to turn that information into monthly dashboards and prepare accounting entries.

Think about that for a moment.

Your inbox is probably one of the largest databases of information about your business. It contains years of conversations, reports, invoices, leads, contracts, introductions, customer information, and attachments. Yet most of us still use it by typing a few words into a search box and hoping we find what we’re looking for.

Connecting email to AI changes that.

You can start asking questions instead of searching for emails.

If you haven’t already connected your email to ChatGPT, give it a try. Start simply. Ask it to find an old invoice, summarize your latest reports, or locate a conversation you remember having but can’t find.

Then start thinking about what you receive repeatedly.

What hits your inbox every day, week, or month that an AI workflow could monitor, analyze, summarize, or turn into an action?

That’s where it starts getting really interesting.

One important note: I’ve found that connected email doesn’t work through the Live Voice experience, so I type these requests into ChatGPT. Features and availability also vary depending on your ChatGPT plan, workspace and device.

My challenge this month: Connect your email to ChatGPT and find one repetitive task in your inbox that you can hand over to AI.

🔥 The AI Mindset: How Startups Can Scale With AI Agents

AI is no longer just a tool for answering questions or writing first drafts. For entrepreneurs, it is becoming an active digital workforce capable of managing complete business processes.

In this episode of The Complete Entrepreneur, Colin Campbell, Michael Gilmore, and members of the Startup Club community explore how this shift is changing the way companies start and scale.

The lesson is bigger than any single platform. Instead of asking, "How can AI help me complete this task?" founders can now ask, "Which process could an AI agent help me operate?"

These capabilities can help startups move faster, reduce overhead, and compete with organizations that once had a major advantage in people and resources.

But AI can accelerate the work, but it does not replace the entrepreneur.

Agents can misunderstand instructions, produce inaccurate information, or take a workflow in the wrong direction.

The winning approach combines AI's speed with human creativity, expertise, relationships, and judgment.

The full episode breaks down how one company deployed a team of specialized AI agents across its business, the exact workflows entrepreneurs are already automating, and where to start if you want to do the same.

👉 Read the full article here

🏰 Can You Build a Moat Around Your Idea in an AI World?

AI has made it incredibly easy to start a company.

It has also made it incredibly easy to copy one.

A competitor can study your website, recreate features, generate similar content, launch ads, build software, and enter your market faster and cheaper than ever before.

That changes the question entrepreneurs need to ask.

It's no longer just: Can I build this?

It's: If this works, what stops someone else from building it too?

That's your moat.

In Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat., I talk about building a moat around your business the same way you would protect a castle. The stronger the business becomes, the more people will want a piece of it.

In the AI era, those walls need to be even stronger.

Technology itself is becoming less defensible. Features that once required a team of developers and months of work can now be replicated surprisingly quickly.

Your advantage has to come from something deeper.

Brand. Distribution. Data. Intellectual property. Customer relationships. Network effects. Exclusive partnerships. Community. Expertise.

Ideally, several of them working together.

AI can reproduce a feature.

It cannot automatically reproduce years of proprietary customer data, an exclusive licensing agreement, a trusted community, or intellectual property you legally control.

The goal isn't to make competition impossible.

It's to make competing with you harder.

The full article breaks down where those deeper advantages actually come from—including why distribution may be your strongest moat, when a smaller market beats a massive one, and a simple way to score your idea's defensibility before you commit serious time and capital.

👉 Read the full article here

🚀 TTSI Update: September’s Numbers are in!

For context, there have been 237 U.S. IPOs through September 2, 2026, 3.04% more than the 230 at the same point last year. Stock Analysis also shows continued new IPO filings heading into September.  

If the IPO market reaches 385 public offerings in 2026, the Startup.club Time to Sell Index (TTSI) would rise to 32.1, up from 26.8 in 2025 and significantly higher than our April estimate of 16.8.

The calculation is straightforward:

TTSI = ((385 − 154) ÷ (873 − 154)) × 100

TTSI = (231 ÷ 719) × 100 = 32.1

With a historical trough of 154 IPOs, a peak of 873 IPOs, and an estimated 385 IPOs in 2026, a TTSI of 32.1 suggests the IPO market continues to recover, although we remain firmly in a buyer’s market.

What has changed since April?

Sentiment has improved considerably. IPO activity remains ahead of last year’s pace, and we are entering the important post-Labor Day period with a strong pipeline of companies looking to access the public markets. Optimism surrounding mega technology and AI IPOs has also helped improve investor confidence.

That matters because liquidity tends to flow downstream.

Successful IPOs provide liquidity to investors and employees, generate returns for venture capital and private equity firms, and give those firms additional capital to deploy into the next generation of companies. Strong public markets can also encourage strategic buyers to become more active.

More liquidity ultimately means more capital competing for good companies, which can support higher valuations throughout the startup ecosystem.

There is still one significant factor holding the TTSI back: interest rates.

Higher-for-longer interest rates increase the cost of borrowing to acquire businesses. This is particularly important for private equity firms, which often use leverage to finance acquisitions. Higher borrowing costs can reduce the price buyers are willing or able to pay, putting pressure on acquisition multiples.

So while liquidity is returning and sentiment has improved, the cost of capital continues to temper the recovery.

Historically, the strongest environment for founders looking to exit has been when the TTSI climbs above 50, with the most frothy seller’s markets occurring above 70.

At 32.1, we’re not there yet.

But the direction is encouraging.

While no single metric can perfectly predict the best time to sell a business, I believe the TTSI provides founders with an objective way to measure the strength of the exit market.

Rather than relying on headlines or emotion, it tracks one of the most important drivers of acquisition activity: liquidity. Like any index, it should be used as a guide rather than a guarantee, but understanding where we are in the market cycle can help founders make better long-term decisions about when to build, buy, or sell.

My advice remains the same: focus on building a great company, improving profitability, and creating strategic value.

The market is recovering, but it is not yet a seller’s market.

When the TTSI eventually moves above 50, founders who have spent this period building stronger businesses will be in the best possible position to capitalize on it.

🔥 Check Me Out on TikTok!

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Scaling isn’t luck — it’s momentum, and nobody knows that better than Joe Foster, founder of Reebok. Some entrepreneurs dream of one cozy ... See more

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2. Responding to this email and letting me know what you think.

3. Picking up your copy of Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.

And if you made it this far, thank you for reading.

— Colin C. Campbell

Entrepreneur Fact of the Month: Timing is the #1 predictor of startup success. When Idealab founder Bill Gross analyzed 200 companies, timing accounted for 42% of the difference between success and failure — ranking above team, execution, the idea, the business model, and funding. Launch when customers are ready, not just when you are.

Source: Forbes