Why Founders House was full on a Saturday

Hey it's Damian,

I worked from Founders House, our third space for founders, last Saturday. The room was full of founders with their heads down, building together. On my way over I passed a WeWork that was completely empty, lights on and nobody inside. The same Saturday in the same city just a few blocks away.

That contrast stuck with me all week, and it isn't really about the space, because I keep seeing the same thing in how a founder named Bjorn found us, in a friend's ad that's printing money, and in the software we're building ourselves at Founders House.

The specific thing is winning right now. Going broad and generic has become into a way to stay invisible.

This week I'm writing about why that is and the one thing that finally changed to make it true. First, what's coming up at the House (apply to join the next cohort).

📆 On the Calendar

Tue – Thu · Ongoing | 💻 Founders House Cowork Day Pass (22 Vanderbilt, NYC). Not a member yet? Come work from the House for a day. Pick a date and apply.

Tue, Jun 16 · 7am | 🏃 Founders Run + Coffee (NYC). Our weekly run, going three years strong. All paces, bag drop and coffee after at St. George.

Tue, Jun 16 · 7am PT | 🏃 Founders Run + Coffee (SF). Same run, West Coast. For the crew out in San Francisco.

Tue, Jun 16 · 5pm · Online | 💸 2-Hour Media Method: Personal Branding (Zoom). Free live session on turning content into a client-acquisition system. I'm hosting.

Tue, Jun 16 · 6:30pm | 🧘 Breathwork with Katia (22 Vanderbilt, NYC). A guided session to close out the day.

Wed, Jun 17 · 6pm | 🧘 Fireside Chat with Swami Chidananda (NYC). An intimate Q&A on meditation, purpose, and building a life that lasts beyond the mission.

Thu, Jun 18 · 6pm | 🥂 Members Social at Bergamo's Speakeasy (NYC). A members night at the speakeasy downstairs. Sponsored by MongoDB.

Tue, Jun 23 · 6pm | 🔥 Restorative Sound Bath (NYC). Guided by Marianna of Grata Wellness, in the gym's yoga studio. Members only.

Thu, Jun 25 · 6:30pm | 🎨 After Hours Club: Female Founders Meditation & Art (22 Vanderbilt, NYC). An evening of meditation and art for female founders.

See the full calendar → luma.com/foundershouse

The room we built for one very particular person

The way I see it, most people are facing the same choice, which is whether to build the generic thing for everyone or the specific thing for one person. Almost everybody reaches for generic because it feels safer. Like a bigger market means more ways in and less chance of getting it wrong. I've come to think that's actually backwards now.

A room full of people working on a Saturday isn't luck. It’s because we never set out to build a coworking space. We built a room for one very particular person: the founder who's locked in and wants to work hard and recover in the same place. The people who’d rather sit next to someone on a mission than someone who's just running out the clock.

WeWork built a desk for anyone who'd take it. But the trouble with building for anyone is that anyone shows up for a while and then drifts right back out the door just as easily. The objection I always hear is that if you niche down you shrink your market, but what actually happens is you stop trying to win everyone and you become the obvious answer for the one person who actually matters.

And the wild part is how the right people find the specific thing on their own. Bjorn joined last week from a ChatGPT search. He hadn't typed in "coworking NYC", he'd searched "workspace, community of founders, and gym." Which is three specific things at once, and we were the only place that was all three. The more specific he got the more it was always going to be us.

The same thing is happening with how operators get customers

This goes way beyond the space. It’s also how the sharpest operators I know are actually getting customers now. A health tech founder I know ran one talking head ad, just talking directly to one specific pain point and user. Then she let the algorithm go find the people who self-selected into it.

That one talking head video ad has closed over $100k in ARR. She didn't reach more people, she just got specific with the right ones and let that do the work.

Reply “content” if you want the playbook she used to fill her pipeline.

There's also a chiropractor here in the city who saw all of this coming before almost anyone, because he started posting content back when no clinician would go near it, and now most of his patients come straight off TikTok on this simple little playbook he runs every single week.

It's one specific person with one specific problem and the same few moves on repeat, and the algorithm quietly does all the sorting for him. You don't have to chase everyone, you just say the specific thing out loud and the right people raise their hand.

What actually changed since five years ago

Five years ago, building the specific thing was expensive, so people settled for generic. Take our own billing and onboarding for Founders House. We looked at a handful of vendors, but each one of them was built for a slightly different business. The features never quite lined up.

The old move there is to sign up anyway and patch over the gaps with a pile of spreadsheets. Instead, we built our own onboarding dashboard with Claude Code, everything we needed for our specific use case and nothing we didn’t. Rather than buying a list of features, we just solved our own specific problem, because nobody is ever going to understand it better than we do.

That's the lesson I keep coming back to, that nobody actually pays for features so much as they pay for the result. And the result lives inside the specific problem rather than the feature list.

The most valuable thing you can possibly know is which problem is even worth solving in the first place.

How to join the community

If you're a founder who can't sit still and wants to be around people who feel the same way, apply to join Founders House → or book a day to come cowork →. We read every application.

And if you just want to talk, reply to this and tell me the specific thing you're building, because I read those too.

Talk soon,
Damian