Dave Gerhardt's Founder Brand

Based on Dave Gerhardt's public method. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Dave Gerhardt.

When to use

Use this skill when a founder or supporting marketer needs to turn lived experience and useful beliefs into a recognizable relationship with prospective customers. It supports an audience before product launch, a founder narrative, social drafts, a recurring educational series, and a publishing and measurement plan. It also fits an established company whose founder knows the market but has little public visibility. The goal is relevant trust and business interest, with content that helps the audience. [S1] [S2]

Produce a founder-brand package sized to the request. For a single post, use the same reasoning but include only the necessary context and draft. For a strategy, include the narrative, evidenced beliefs, channel choice, starter content, operating cadence, and feedback decisions. Do not invent experiences, results, or opinions to fill gaps. Identify missing facts and keep provisional claims visibly provisional.

The procedure translates public interviews into an agent workflow. Its central cycle is story, publishing, and feedback. The exact deliverable fields, review gates, and example schedules are package adaptations, not a prescribed Gerhardt framework. Read references/method.md for the decision rules and consult references/sources.md for attribution and speaker boundaries.

Procedure

1. Define the assignment and available facts. Gather the intended customer, recurring problem, product capabilities, founder experience, existing channels, and requested output. Separate confirmed facts from assumptions. Use the intake guidance in references/method.md and record gaps in templates/output-template.md.
2. Check founder participation. Establish how the founder will supply ideas and review drafts. Offer writing, voice notes, or interviews according to comfort and capacity. If participation is absent, produce an interview brief rather than an invented persona. See references/method.md.
3. Choose a useful niche. Write an audience, expertise, and credibility sentence. Keep personal details that build connection, while making the business-relevant expertise recognizable. Evaluate topics against the rules in references/method.md.
4. Interview for the origin story. Connect the founder's backstory, experienced problem, dissatisfaction with current approaches, and reason for building. Choose a customer-relevant obstacle as the villain. Use references/method.md and compare the revisions in examples/worked-examples.md.
5. Extract substantive beliefs. Capture two or three positions, the experience behind each, and the implication for customers. Return to interviewing if the material is generic. Follow references/method.md.
6. Check the company promise. Match each material claim to product behavior, capability, or an explicitly future direction. Narrow unsupported promises before drafting. Use the alignment guidance in references/method.md.
7. Choose distribution and format. Start with the founder's audience or the company's customer reach, whichever is available. Choose a channel based on buyer evidence and state the audience benefit before naming a series. See references/method.md.
8. Capture and draft real thinking. Build an idea backlog and voice notes from interviews, existing writing, and customer conversations. Shape each draft around an observation, context, and useful implication. Use references/method.md and the content fields in templates/output-template.md.
9. Set a sustainable operating rhythm. Assign capture, drafting, founder review, publishing, and response ownership. Choose frequency from capacity and available ideas; do not turn daily posting into a guarantee. Follow references/method.md.
10. Design the feedback loop. Record audience questions, qualified replies, discovery mentions, and repeated themes. Specify which signal would justify the next post or longer asset. Apply references/method.md and the feedback table in templates/output-template.md.
11. Review, deliver, and iterate. Apply checklists/review-checklist.md, repair failures, and deliver the requested package with open questions. Assess reach alongside relationship and inbound evidence. Revisit the weakest underlying decision before increasing volume, using references/method.md.

Files in this skill

• SKILL.md: Entry point, use cases, and the agent's main loop.
• references/method.md: Detailed principles, decision rules, warnings, and edge cases.
• references/sources.md: Fetched public sources and their specific contributions.
• examples/worked-examples.md: Two invented illustrations showing weak drafts, revisions, and rule application.
• templates/output-template.md: Fill-in founder-brand package with guidance for every field.
• checklists/review-checklist.md: Pass/fail review gates and failure modes with fixes.