📢 15 Product Principles Every Founder Should Understand

​Adrian Cole August 6th

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🎉 Milestone

Over the last two months, we’ve successfully launched two founders through our flagship 30 Days of Product program with more Founders in the process! ​

Watching their ideas go from concept to reality in record time has been incredible and we’re just getting started. I’m excited to see what the next wave of founders will build with us.

We're taking one more Founder for this month. Apply here. ​

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Hey Reader, in This Issue:

In This Issue:

📢 15 Principles Every Founder Should Understand

🛠️ The AI agent platform that can run your repetitive work

💡 The billion-dollar marketplace for prompts

🧘🏾‍♂️ How 30 minutes of silence can sharpen your mind

🚀 Limited spots open for Fractional Product Leadership

🌟 30 Days of Product Founder spotlight: Claire Vo, building ChatPRD

🧠 Why the speed of your startup is really about speed of learning

Let's get into it!

💡 Today’s Big Idea: My 15 Principles of Product

I wrote these while I was still deep in my second startup, building, shipping, growing the team, going through accelerators, devouring books, and learning at a breakneck pace.

Everything was moving fast, and I wanted to distill the core truths that kept showing up, no matter the stage or challenge.

These principles aren’t set in stone. They evolve as I do.

Take what resonates, reject what doesn’t, and make them your own.

The 15 Principles of Product

1. Solve a real problem If it doesn’t matter to someone’s life or business, it won’t matter in the market.
2. Keep it simple, no simpler Make it easy to understand and use without stripping away what makes it work.
3. Launch yesterday, learn today Ship as soon as possible so you can start collecting feedback and improving.
4. Have an opinion, stick to it but be flexible and adapt Know what you believe in, but stay open to changing course when evidence demands it.
5. Be different, embrace your weird. Be yourself Originality stands out, lean into what makes you and your product unique.
6. No idea is too small Tiny ideas can grow into huge outcomes when executed well.
7. Customers are judge, jury and executioner. No one else The market decides your success, not investors, advisors, or friends.
8. Stay alive. Stay swinging Your only real job is to keep going long enough to figure it out.
9. Quit or learn and pivot If something isn’t working, either stop it or adapt fast.
10. Keep it real Build with honesty and integrity so you can stand behind what you’ve made.
11. Own your story Be clear and comfortable about your why, and use it as the bedrock of your superpower. When you fully own your story, it becomes a powerful tool for connection, trust, and direction.
12. Have fun. Lots of it If you’re not enjoying the process, your energy will show and not in a good way.
13. One customer. One product. Start here Focus deeply before you try to serve everyone at once.
14. Use duct tape. Stay scrappy Resourcefulness beats resources in the early days.
15. Seek truth. Show proof Validate your ideas with real-world evidence, not assumptions.

These are my 15 Principles of Product.

I’m excited to keep refining them as I grow and learn.

I hope these principles help guide you as you navigate your own startup journey.

​Adrian C.​

🔧 Toolstack Drop

AI Agent Tool Worth Trying:Relay.app Everything is moving toward agents, and Relay.app makes it easy to get ahead of that curve.

With Relay, you can build AI-powered agents that work internally for your company or integrate directly into your product.

These agents can take over the monotonous, boring, or repetitive work your team does every day, from handling customer support tickets, to scheduling, to monitoring and updating systems without human intervention.

As AI continues to evolve, autonomous agents will become as common as spreadsheets in business. Relay is a great starting point to explore how these agents can save time, reduce errors, and free up your team for higher-impact work.

🤯 Crazy Product Idea of the Week

PromptBase – The Global AI Prompt Marketplace

Everywhere I turn, people are showing off what they’ve built with prompts, from stunning images to cinematic videos, clever automations, and complex workflows. But there’s no single place where creators can share, sell, and scale these ideas.

Enter PromptBase, a centralized marketplace for AI prompts across all mediums. Whether you’re selling the exact prompt behind a viral image, the sequence that automates a workflow, or the script for a high-quality AI video, PromptBase would let you:

• Upload and showcase your creations
• Sell or give away prompts with built-in purchasing and licensing
• Earn revenue while building your creator reputation
• Collect ratings and reviews to boost visibility

It’s Etsy meets GitHub meets Fiverr --> but for the prompt economy.

In a world where AI is becoming the new creative toolkit, owning a platform like this could mean owning the rails for an entirely new creator economy.

Someone needs to build this!

⚔️ Challenge of the Week: 30 Minutes of Silence

Founders live in constant motion, juggling ideas, problems, and decisions. But some of the deepest clarity comes when you stop.

This week, your challenge is simple: sit in silence for 30 minutes. No phone, no music, no podcasts. Just you, your breath, and stillness.

Close your eyes. Sit or lie down. Do nothing except breathe. Let your mind wander, then gently bring it back to your breath. Notice how your body feels. Notice how your thoughts slow down.

It might feel uncomfortable at first, but stick with it.

By the end, you might be surprised at how deeply relaxed and mentally sharp you feel.

🔥 What’s Launching Limited Spots for Fractional Product Leadership

If you’re a busy founder who’s been running product yourself, you know the grind.

Balancing product with growing the business, building the team, and setting up operations can feel impossible.

This week, I’m opening a limited number of spots for Fractional Product Leadership. I come in as your product partner to:

• Organize your entire product function
• Build and maintain your roadmap
• Prioritize features and requests
• Run your product team and sprints
• Drive product strategy and execution
• Ensure the right product gets built at the right time for the right customer
• Keep revenue growing while users stay engaged, loyal, and spreading the word

If you’re ready to free up your time, scale faster, and get your product running like a machine, let’s talk.​

🚀 Founder Spotlight Claire Vo – Founder of ChatPRD

This week’s spotlight is on Claire Vo, founder of ChatPRD.ai, and one of the best examples of founder-led growth I’ve seen lately.

I personally enjoy Claire’s emails. They feel like they’re written by the founder, not a marketing team, and that authenticity stands out. Her velocity is breakneck, she’s shipping fast, iterating even faster, and constantly engaging on Twitter to get feedback from the product community.

ChatPRD started as a side project and quickly became a full-time focus because it nailed something every product manager struggles with: writing PRDs. It’s a repetitive, time-consuming task, and Claire saw the opportunity to automate it with AI. She’s kept pace with rapid advances in agent technology, even tying ChatPRD directly into AI builders so you can go from idea to documentation to prototype without missing a beat.

We like Claire because she embodies the two traits that make a great founder: she ships product and she listens to users. That combination has fueled fast adoption, strong revenue growth, and a clear path forward.

If you want a playbook for building something people want, watch what Claire’s doing with ChatPRD.

🛁 Adrian’s Shower Thoughts

The speed of your startup isn’t just about how fast you can build. It’s about how fast you can learn.

Founders obsess over features, funding, and launches, but the real edge comes from compressing the time between action and insight. The faster you can test an idea, collect feedback, and make the next decision, the more unstoppable you become.

It’s not about working frantically. It’s about building a feedback loop so tight that you can’t help but get better every single week.

Let’s build,

​Adrian C.​

The Product Wizard, www.30daysofproduct.com​