Ever feel like you're winning and burning out at the same time? That's the tension at the heart of this episode of Standing in the Fire, the show where SaaS founders Chris and John skip the highlight reel and get into the actual heat of building businesses. What's In the Fire This Week John opens up about hitting a wall after weeks of peak AI productivity. The work was getting done, more than ever, but the cost was invisible: no mental space, chest tightness, podcasts in the car, laptop on the couch, doomscrolling AI Twitter at midnight. He breaks down what recovery actually looked like: basketball, pantry shelves, a journaling workbook, and an E Ink notebook for thoughts he doesn't even need to keep. Kris brings the counterweight: a trip to Austin for pre-South by Southwest events with a room full of women founders at varying stages (bootstrapped, PE-backed, VC-funded, exited, bought back). The caliber of story and the in-person energy reminded him what's been missing: community, events, and the kind of conversation you can't get from a podcast. "It's not a different caliber of people, it's different experiences. And that changes everything." Fan the Flames: What's Been Inspiring Brainstorming with Claude as a thinking partner, not just a tool, exploring business ideas you don't have to build Reading Cornelius Vanderbilt and wondering: what gave historical figures their relentlessness? Was it just that there was nothing to do after dark except sit by the fire? Watching teammates build the impossible, like Box Out's OCR feature that extracted a name from a photo where a spiral notebook was covering half the letters Ember Updates: Small Wins Worth Noting Segmented email onboarding finally live for Speaker Deck - and the lesson: just launch with three emails, don't wait for seven Geo SEO / AI visibility auditing - a WordPress plugin that scores how well your site shows up in LLM responses, generates an llms.txt file, and gives you a prioritized fix list you can paste straight into Claude LLM self-verification as a design pattern - the insight that AI output is only as good as its ability to check its own work. Give it an API to render what it just built, compare against a reference, and let it loop until it gets there. Game-changing for template generation at Box Out. The Thread That Ties It Together Whether it's burnout recovery, event planning, email automation, or AI architecture, this episode keeps circling back to the same question: how do you define success clearly enough that the system (human or AI) can actually get there? Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.
