Daniel Ionescu
(He/Him)
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Journalist + Entrepreneur ✨ Millennial Masters 🎧 Podcast & 📧 Newsletter
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Articles by Daniel Ionescu
Your rebrand is fixing the wrong problem 🩹
You can easily sink a lot of money and time into a rebrand, especially with an agency, only to find months later that it hasn’t fixed the sales problem you started with. If the cause sits somewhere else in the customer journey, that problem keeps costing you while you’re busy changing the brand. Brigitte Knight writes Brandemonium, a newsletter for small business owners doing much of their own branding and marketing.
Your friends are lying to you nicely | Charlie O'Donnell (Brooklyn Bridge Ventures)
Five hundred LinkedIn likes can still tell you nothing about whether anyone wants what you’re building. Charlie O’Donnell learned that from the founder side after years in venture capital. His network was supportive and angel investors wrote cheques because they trusted him and his co-founder. Looking back, Charlie says that support gave them confidence the business itself hadn’t yet earned. The warning signs were there.
The marketing worked, but the money disappeared 💸
One of the easiest ways to waste money on online marketing is to assume the problem is the marketing. When sales feel light, you spend a bit more on Google, put more into Meta, buy a few more leads and hope the numbers pick up. But if the leads are already coming in, you’re paying for more enquiries while losing money somewhere between the enquiry and the bank account.
The hard work starts after the first sale | Eric Kurbanov (RKIN)
Getting the first customers is supposed to prove the idea works. Eric Kurbanov learned that it only answers one question: whether somebody wants what you are selling. His first water-filtration sales came from people he worked with after he solved the problem for himself. The harder lessons came later, when he started the business through the 2009 recession and had to work out how to fund physical stock without the cash to pay for it upfront. Eric spent roughly 17 years building RKIN Water Systems.
AI is costing you sales you never see š
What if youāre spending more to bring customers to your website when the problem starts before they get there? You can explain what you offer when someone makes an enquiry. But that assumes they get that far. Your marketing reports wonāt show how often an AI assistant leaves you out. Zohre Shirazi founded AI Wide Open, where she explores the practical impact of AI on businesses. In this guest post, she examines what an AI assistant needs to know about your business before it can recommend you.
What LinkedIn is actually good for now
LinkedIn makes it very easy to see how many people saw a post. It gives you much less help working out what that attention did for the business. I know the feeling because I spend more time there than I’d like to admit. I publish something, keep up with people, get a reach number back and still have to work out whether the time was worth it. That was where I started the latest Millennial Masters Live with Melanie Goodman, Cory Blumenfeld and Taylin John Simmonds .
The Exit Files documentary
When I started Millennial Masters, I always thought I’d eventually write a book. Somehow, I’ve ended up making a documentary instead. I’m still not sure which would’ve been easier. The idea came from going back through podcast interviews and pulling together quotes about founders selling their businesses. I started finding connections between their stories and realised I had enough material to bring them together in a film.
A slick pitch can be an expensive distraction đ
When you bring in a marketing agency to help grow your business, itâs easy to get swept up in a slick presentation. Youâre paying for expertise, and the people in front of you sound very sure of what to do next. You can leave that meeting excited about the work without asking whether itâs where your limited budget should go. That gets expensive when the question resurfaces weeks later and the team has to do the work again.
The Exit Files 🚪 What they built next
This is part four of 🚪 The Exit Files, my Millennial Masters series following founders through the years around a business sale. Part one looked at the pressure of building towards a sale. Part two followed the work that continues after the deal. Part three explored how founders adjusted as the businesses they sold changed around them and after they finally left. Several founders went back to building after selling.
A one-person company can do too much 🫠
There are no two-week development sprints at Orel Zilberman's WriteStack any more. He tells an AI agent what he wants to build, and it coordinates the coding and prepares emails for beta testers. He runs the software business on his own. During our Millennial Masters Live, Philip Hofmacher admitted he left one of his automations 80% finished for four weeks. I recognised the problem immediately.
The buyer in your head isn't your market | Ayse Guvencer (ELVT Advisory)
Being close to a problem can make you dangerously confident about the buyer. Ayse Guvencer calls it the domain expert trap: once you’ve lived with the pain yourself, it’s easy to assume other people will want to solve it the same way. She came to that view after moving from agency work and roles at Google and Sage into advising early-stage companies.
The Exit Files 🚪 When the business moves on without you
This is part three of 🚪 The Exit Files, my Millennial Masters series following founders through the years around a business sale. In part one I looked at the pressure of building towards a sale. Part two followed the work that can continue after the deal. This time, I’m looking at how founders adjust as the businesses they sold change around them, and after they finally leave. 👇🏻 Watching someone else change the business you built can still hurt, even when selling was your choice.
The race to prove which space startups are real | Philip Hover-Smoot (Atlas Cup)
Millennial Masters Conversations with founders and leaders about the decisions shaping modern businesses Conversations with founders and leaders about the decisions shaping modern businesses
The Exit Files đȘ When selling means staying
This is part two of đȘ The Exit Files, my three-part Millennial Masters series following ten founders through the years around a business sale. In part one, When growth takes over, I explored the pressure of building towards a payout nobody could guarantee. This time, Iâm looking at the months or years of work that can follow a sale, and how the deal shapes the handover. đđ» The sale goes through, and the founderâs diary is still full.
AI fools you where you know the least 🤡
I’ve used AI to do more work than I expected to this year, and one problem hasn’t gone away: knowing when it’s wrong. I can catch a bad edit or an automation misbehaving because I know how it should work and when the output looks wrong. But when I use AI in an area I don’t know that well, there’s no safety net. I’m relying on an answer I’m not really qualified to challenge, especially when ChatGPT or Claude can sound so reassuringly confident and convincing.
You can’t run a business you don’t understand 📊 Lauren Pearl
Lauren Pearl spent years inside her family business before someone else figured out what was wrong in two minutes. That moment changed how she understood business, and today she teaches financial modelling at NYU Stern. She grew up working in her family business, but the wake-up call came when someone with a finance background diagnosed what was wrong in just two minutes. That was when Lauren knew finance was the language she needed to understand what was really happening.
The Exit Files đȘ When growth takes over
Iâve spoken to enough Millennial Masters whoâve sold their businesses to know how much getting to an exit takes out of you. Ask them what the years around the sale felt like and youâll hear about exhaustion, or going back to work on Monday with the millions already in the bank. Over the next three Fridays, Iâm bringing those stories together in đȘThe Exit Files. Iâm following the experiences of ten founders, from hypergrowth, through to the sale and into life after.
Long lead lists won’t fix low reply rates 📉
Having more leads than you can work through feels like a good problem. Hundreds of emails later… and the replies don’t come. So you send more because there are always more names waiting. The list keeps you busy enough to avoid asking why any of those businesses would want to hear from you today. That’s why I was intrigued when Jasper Vanu | Claude for GTM, who’s obsessed with finding useful things to do with Claude, explained how he finds the names on that list with an actual reason to buy now.
How to write with AI without losing your voice
Is obvious AI copy laziness, lack of time or just carelessness? That question got minds clashing pretty quickly in the latest Live Extra I hosted with Alicia Teltz, Anjeanette Carter, Claudia Faithand Cory Blumenfeld. Alicia thought obvious AI copy from someone she knows looks lazy. Anjeanette’s first instinct was more generous: maybe they were just busy. Cory admitted some of his earliest writing was “fully AI slop”, but said it gave him the confidence to start.
Your AI reports to nobody đ¤ˇđźââď¸
Getting an AI workflow working is satisfying, which is probably why itâs so easy to forget that âworkingâ today doesnât mean you can stop checking it tomorrow. Heather Baker has seen that problem from the inside. She built and sold an agency, later ran the company that acquired it to ÂŁ14m revenue, and now writes The Humans in the Loop and runs The AI Edit.
How non-technical founders should use AI and vibe coding
You can build a tech company without becoming a developer, as long as you understand enough to work properly with the people building it. Sophia Matveeva, founder of Tech for Non-Techies, learned that after raising money for her first startup and hiring a technical team. She was the CEO, but when a developer started talking about building the back end on Ruby on Rails, she realised she had no idea what he meant. Her first instinct was to learn to code.
Your next senior hire has to learn somewhere đȘ
You donât need a dramatic prediction about the death of work to see the problem. If AI helps you get more done with a smaller team, cutting payroll can be a perfectly sensible decision. The trouble arrives a few years later, when youâre hiring experienced people after giving fewer juniors the chance to learn the job. Jordan Stachini sees the incentive clearly in a creative agency.
AI delegation has a hidden bill 🧾
AI can make a task disappear surprisingly quickly. That doesn’t mean you’re finished with it. It often comes back as something somebody still has to review or correct. Models have improved, but in my experience, they still need checking. That’s why Cory Blumenfeld, the entrepreneur behind Taking My Time Back, uses a simple three-question test before handing work to AI. In this guest piece, he explains where human judgement still matters when AI is doing more of the work. 👇🏻 You still own the outcome.
AI can build it. But should you?
Konstantin Klyagin has spent more than two decades building software for other companies, and lately he’s also been fixing more of what AI helps people build. Through his agencies Redwerk and QAwerk, he sees what happens after the prototype looks convincing and real users start doing things you didn’t expect. Something that worked perfectly in a demo suddenly starts failing in ways you didn’t expect, from payments to duplicated bookings. That’s why Konstantin sees AI as a multiplier.
You don’t owe LinkedIn your whole life 👀
You can open LinkedIn most mornings and find someone telling you about the hardest day of their life. There might even be a good reason for it. Maybe the story explains a decision or gives context about the person behind the business. At the right moment, it can make someone feel less alone. But I still finish plenty of these posts wondering why I should know this about a stranger. Kamal Ellis-Hyman is a motivational speaker who has built a business around putting himself in front of people.
Work you enjoy is harder to compete with đ
â Daniel posted a Note a few weeks ago saying: âThe worst person to compete with is someone having a brilliant time. That kind of energy is annoying because it doesnât need permission.â It appeared in my feed on the same day â Rebecca Spilter published a post about building income from her fractional work, including the jobs that simply need doing even when theyâre no fun.
AI can do more work than I expected
When we started our Live, Cory Blumenfeld had used AI seconds before joining us to help answer a potential customer. Joel Salinas had it running in the background, reading a client email and attachment. Philip Hofmacher had already checked in with his AI running coach about his ultramarathon training. We’d gone live to talk about how much of our work AI should do while all four of us were already handing it jobs that would have taken our time a year or two ago.
AI can do more of the work than I expected
When we opened our Substack Live on Friday, Cory Blumenfeld had used AI seconds earlier to help answer a potential customer while he joined the call. Joel Salinas had it running in the background, reading a client email and attachment, while Philip Hofmacher had already checked in with his AI running coach about his ultramarathon training.
Success can break the business too ☕ Zain Peer
Getting more orders sounds like the answer until the business can’t keep up. Zain Peer found that out when London Nootropics appeared on Dragons’ Den (UK’s Shark Tank). The website crashed, orders surged and a business that had been manageable the week before suddenly had to cope with a completely different level of demand. With no employees at the time, Zain and his co-founder Shez Shaikh were doing everything themselves. Three months later, he says he still hadn’t properly slept.
Your comfort zone can look very productive đ
Matt Watson knew a founder whoâd spent around six months immersed in Claude. He produced millions of lines of code. Every prompt gave him something else to work on and a little hit of satisfaction. Eventually he asked him a much less enjoyable question: How much revenue had all that work produced?None. Heâd spent half a year doing difficult work while avoiding what made him uncomfortable. He wasnât talking to customers or asking anybody to pay for it.
AI moved the hard part somewhere else ↩️
Once AI starts making recommendations, someone still has to know when the answer doesn’t quite add up. A lot of that comes from experience that was never written down in the first place. Sometimes you only realise how much one person knew until they’re gone. Om Prakash Pant writes Between Roles, drawing on his experience across AI, technology, consulting, products and retail.
Every tiny decision is costing you 🔋 Barry Cryan
Tiny decisions rarely feel expensive in the moment. One more email, one quick question from the team, one interruption you deal with before getting back to the work you were doing. Barry Cryan sees the cost of those interruptions differently. Through his company, Do More Better, he works with business owners to reduce how much work keeps flowing back to them and build systems that give them more room to focus. He calls the problem the invisible tax.
Your AI agent carries your reputation 🧠
The moment an AI starts acting in my name, its mistakes become my reputation. I’ve been thinking about that as AI moves beyond drafts and starts making decisions for us. Sending an email is different when nobody checks it first. So is recommending something to a customer or deciding what another person gets to see. A year ago, I was more interested in whether AI sounded like AI. There were obvious giveaways everywhere. Certain words appeared too often and sentences had the same polished rhythm.
AI built the product. Investors still said no 💸 Vinnie Lauria
Building a startup has never been easier. Convincing someone to invest in it is a different problem. Vinnie Lauria has spent more than fifteen years on the other side of that decision. As a founding partner at Golden Gate Ventures, he has backed companies across Southeast Asia after starting his own career as an entrepreneur. That gives him a useful view of what investors notice once a founder gets in the room.
Cheap prices get expensive fast đ¸
The product was good enough for large companies, but the price made the business look smaller than it was. Melissa Kwan had built eWebinar into a proven product. She called it âquite overbuiltâ, yet the starting price was still $99. Bigger companies saw that figure and questioned whether the company was serious enough to support them. âOur starting point is still $99. But there are big companies that look at us and think weâre not serious enough,â she said.
Your proof is in the wrong place 🔍
David Royrevealed how AI can filter a proposal before a human ever sees it when the claims are vague and the proof is weak. Colette Moltenilooks at what happens next. The buyer opens it, but the proof sits too far from the claim and they’re left to connect it themselves. That extra work creates doubt. The longer they search, the easier it becomes to stop. Colette spent eight years in sales and revenue operations analysing where deals slowed down and why buyers disengaged.
Build like the buyer is already watching 👀 Luke Tobin
Luke Tobin built Digital Ethos from a startup into an international agency before selling the business in 2022. By the time the offer arrived, the real work had already happened. He’d spent years building the team, tightening how the company ran and making sure it could keep moving without him at the centre of everything. That is what a buyer is really looking for. They want to know the clients will stay, the team can make decisions and the business will not wobble the moment the founder steps away.
The invoice was late before you sent it 🧾
A late payment doesn’t need to be weeks overdue to cause damage. Plenty of businesses are running close enough to the line that a single payment arriving one day late can throw off payroll, delay suppliers or force a scramble to move money around. I’ve lived it and seen it first-hand. In tougher periods, having months of cash in the bank is a luxury few businesses can afford.
Your AI workflow is too easy to break đ
The real test of an AI setup comes when the tool suddenly disappears. Thatâs when you find out whether youâve built a useful way of working or just got very good at using one model. If the prompts, context and checks only make sense inside that tool, changing models means rebuilding far more than it should. Raghav Mehra is a tech consultant and AI practitioner based in Spain, who writes the Cash & Cache newsletter.
The wrong hire said all the right things 🎭
The easiest candidate to hire can be the most dangerous one. A bad hire hurts at any level. Put the wrong person near important decisions and the damage can spread before the probation period has even caught up. The trap is that a polished interview can make the risk harder to see. Clean answers, neat stories and the right values can feel like proof, when they may only show that someone prepared well. Daryna Karuna writes The Leverage Point, a field guide to hiring and senior decision risk.
Build the business beyond you đ§±
At the start, it works because you do. Thereâs comfort in being the person who knows. People come to you because you have the answer, and you usually do. Thatâs useful early, until the business starts needing you for too much. Then you have more people, customers and moving parts. Your memory and willingness to step in are still holding too much together. Gary Das had to admit this in his own business. âI realised that I was the problem. I was the bottleneck.
AI slop starts inside the business 🧹
AI has made it much easier to create a mess that looks productive. Every new tool adds another thing someone has to check and clean up. Neha Kabra writes The Humanizing and works with banks, fintechs and private equity-backed businesses on making AI work inside complex organisations. Her piece is about the gap between a good demo and the business strain that follows. The next discipline is deciding what deserves trust and what should be cut. 👇🏻 More tools will not fix the work underneath.
The co-founder prenup đ Agree before building
You can spend hours discussing the product, the company name and how youâll launch. The harder questions get left until later. Who has the final say when you disagree? What happens if one person works harder, the business canât pay you or you want different exits? When the company has no value and both of you are excited, those conversations can feel unnecessary. You trust each other and assume youâll work out the difficult parts later.
The bank balance warns you too late đ
Youâve made sure enough money came in this month. Maybe even a little more than expected. Then a tax bill arrives, or a client who always paid on time suddenly doesnât. The money still has to come from somewhere. You take out credit, delay something else or, as Iâve done before, reach into your own savings to cover the gap. The bigger the business, the more money you have to find. Getting caught once is painful. When it happens again, you can end up frighteningly close to the edge.
The video isn’t your real problem 🎬 Dustin Schultz
Spending more on a video won’t make your business easier to understand. That is the mistake Dustin Schultz sees all the time. You decide you need a better video, then jump straight into production before the message is clear enough to carry it. Dustin has spent 15 years building Union, a creative agency that helps businesses turn ideas into video that actually has a job to do. His view is useful because he’s not precious about production for its own sake.
The cringe tax is costing your business đ
I spent 15 years in news, running the show from behind the camera and the keyboard. My name sat on the masthead with the editor title, although plenty of the work carried no byline. I was used to making the calls without making myself the story. Millennial Masters asked something different of me. I had to put my face on camera and publish ideas and experiences Iâd previously kept private. Iâm not shy and I donât lack confidence.
Your raise can make the business worse 💸
Raising a serious round feels like the moment the business becomes real. That feeling is dangerous once the money lands and problems are easier to ignore. I’ve learned the hard way that funding doesn’t mean the business will survive. That’s why I invited Ben Botes | GP & 4x Founder to write this guest post. He’s a four-time founder and investor who also writes the ScaleSignals newsletter. His argument is uncomfortable: the money can hide the problems that still need fixing.
The new one-person company đ§âđ»
The tiny company is no longer a joke. A few years ago, the idea of building a proper company with one, two, or three people still sounded far-fetched. It usually came wrapped in internet bro nonsense. Work from anywhere, automate everything, run a tiny empire from your laptop in Thailand while the tools do the hard bit in the background. That version still sounds unlikely. The useful version is harder to ignore now.
Going viral isn't a growth strategy đ§Ș
The âbuild it and they will comeâ myth is still costing startups time they donât have. Building software is getting easier. Getting the right people to care is getting harder. Jason Tan writes Behind the Scenes and created Engage AI, which he grew to 100,000 users without VC funding or a marketing team. In this guest post, he explains how he stopped treating distribution like a viral lottery and used code itself as a route to demand.
The shortcut always costs more 🧼 Kate Assaraf
Kate Assaraf built Dip to seven figures while turning down some of the growth channels most founders chase. She doesn’t sell on Amazon, and she hasn’t relied on Meta or TikTok ads. Instead, she built the business through independent refill stores, salons, and surf shops, one relationship at a time. On paper, some of those decisions look expensive. Kate believes the opposite. The shortcuts were the expensive option.
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