Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.
Hi founders,
It’s been almost 2 years since I started writing about founder psychology!
At the end of 2021, we shared our first-ever newsletter edition with the world, sharing it with our initial 10k subscribers who were creatives on our creative freelancing platform.
In 2 years, we expanded from 1 to 5 newsletters and pivoted to a media publication company.
Over the past 2 years, we transitioned from news-curating newsletters to B2B publications covering business psychology and expert interviews in multiple industries, with a team of brilliant writers, including psychologists and journalists.
But we have never shown our faces or worked on video content.
Today I have something so exciting to share: we’re launching the Insane Founder Docu-Pod!
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Vistage
Surround yourself with accomplished CEOs and an experienced executive coach to gain perspective, make stronger decisions and accelerate growth.
🤝 We partner with a select group of brands we use or admire, which keeps this newsletter free and independent. Reach out for your campaign here.
Why I started filming founders
Every week, I decode fascinating psychology research on how we think, operate under pressure, make decisions, and lead.
When we’re building a business, we explore who we are along the way. My goal has always been to translate academic psychology findings into practical insights for founders and their businesses.
But what does the psychology I write about look like in everyday work? How do founders who are a few steps ahead of us think, operate and make decisions?
So for the past few months, I've been working with an incredible team on a mini docu-pod series: part mini documentary, part podcast.
What a docu-pod looks like
We go where the business happens.
Each episode is filmed on location, in the founders' offices, factories, homes, gyms and shops, so we see behind the scenes how they operate themselves and their companies.
Then we get practical. Founders draw their scaling methods on a whiteboard, stage by stage, from the first customers to the first million and beyond: what they changed in their team, their systems and their pricing at each revenue stage.
We curated stories from founders from all over the world, and completely different industries. A few we'll meet this season:
A former investment banker who opened London's first luxury boxing gym, backed by a heavyweight world champion, and grew it to multiple locations across London and Qatar.
An architect who lost his job in 2018, made his first chocolates for a client's corporate gift order, and now owns a $5M+ chocolate brand with its own factory and a major airline as an exclusive partner.
A husband-and-wife team who took a popsicle that usually sells for $1, priced it at $5, and built an $8M business without outside funding.
How it connects to what I write
After each episode, I extract the founder's psychology into a business psychology playbook, which I will send here in Thursday editions.
Each playbook is the real-life case study of what I write about every week: how business owners in different industries, at different revenue stages, use psychology in their day-to-day, and how we can apply the same thing in our businesses.
Episode one is coming!
From now on, every docu-pod episode and its playbook will come out in our bi-weekly Thursday docu-pod editions.
And the first one is coming this Thursday!!
We have worked so hard for this show with countless revisions, and I can not thank the team enough.
I am beyond excited to hear your thoughts.
See you there!
Lavena & team
How's the depth of today's edition?
P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.
