Founder Reality Rant

Literally just a rant

I don’t really know what I’m writing about today. I just felt like saying hi. It’s been a while, and every time I tried to write, nothing came out. Zero inspiration. A bunch of half heartened drafts. Just this weird flatness.

I’ve been deep in the trenches trying to figure out sales for Pronoya - we build AI concierges for creator-led experiences & communities - and it’s the driest chapter of the journey so far. Like. DRY.

The whole B2B world moves like a casse-tête chinois. Slow, bureaucratic, allergic to momentum. People reply once, disappear for 3 weeks, then pop back up like nothing happened. I mean….some consistency please????? Meanwhile my internal clock is spinning at 10x speed. My pace & the outside world’s pace are not matching at all.

Am I being taught patience?? (please God take that lesson away LOL).

Jokes aside. I understand that I’m still here, in this phase because there’s something I haven’t mastered yet. Something I still need to learn. Something I am frantically trying to learn. The sales cycle, the process, the cadence, the patience. Something else? Within perhaps? What is it that I am not seeing or understanding? Or maybe doing wrong?

No one talks about how violently disorienting the jump from B2C to B2B is. They’re not even different worlds; they’re different species.

I miss the days of throwing a big, bold idea into the universe and watching people run toward it. Now I’m selling to organizations that move like glaciers. And the irony? There is a whole B2C strategy we could be doing which does not require us selling B2B. BUT we’d have to fundraise for that, and right now we decided to make money first. So B2B makes sense. It just doesn’t feel good.

We have paying clients. We’ve proven value. Early. But that’s still proof no? Now I’m trying to build a repeatable sales engine to fund the bigger vision - without outside capital (yet). And I would love to tell you that I know what I’m doing. But truthfully? I’m figuring it out in real time.

Here’s why I’m writing this to you:

Half of you reading this are investors or operators who’ve lived this chapter before. The impossible, liminal space where your ambition outpaces your resources and the world moves slower than your vision.

If you’ve:

– Scaled B2B sales from messy first deals to something repeatable, or

– Backed founders doing weird, non-obvious things

…I’d genuinely love to hear how you navigated it. Frameworks, mistakes, what you’d do differently.

Capital for Pronoya will come from one of 2 places: clients or fundraising. Right now, clients make more sense. But building the machinery to scale that is its own boss level.

If anything in this rant rings true and you feel called to respond, hit reply. If you want more context, here’s what we’re building with Pronoya.

That’s it. That’s the end of my rant.

xx

Maya