FOUNDER. ISSUE 1.
- tmillan2012
- Sep 1
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 1
Marcus Aurelius, (121-180 AD), Roman Emperor, Meditations (Book 5, Section 20)
Today, September 1, 2025, marks the official launch of Founder—a monthly newsletter from within RIC-ORG, an AI Mentor app, and Founder tools crafted to enhance focus and prepare aspiring Founders to introduce their WHY to the world. This is achieved through daily, weekly, and monthly practices inspired by historical and contemporary figures.
The goal is simple: to show what we’re building, why we’re doing it, how we're doing it and what’s happening along the way. There isn’t one right way to build. What you’ll read here is the path we chose — sometimes by design, sometimes because the market forced our hand, and sometimes because that’s just how things worked out and always with a higher power guiding us if we can hear the message.
For us, it always starts the same: find a hill, plant your flag, and build your castle. We’ve done it many times over the years. The difference now is that we’re doing it with the full weight of modern technology at our side and as many eyes watching what we do as possible for posterity, to witness epic wins and epic fails when they happen. The key to success here isn't how much money we make or how easy or hard it is to get where our goals take us. For us its about how many times you pick yourself up from short term setbacks and learn the lessons the Universe is trying to teach us. A loss is only a loss if we don't learn from it and if it repeats itself we didn't learn the lesson it was trying to teach us.
Thirty years ago, the toolkit was nothing more than a phone, a ruler, and a stack of paper. Today it’s CRMs, dashboards, AI systems, and automation workflows. The tools have changed. The principle hasn’t. Pick your hill. Plant your flag. Start building. And never forget the oldest rule in the book: pick up the phone because “no” is still a founder’s best friend.
The Reset
This reset wasn’t about trimming dashboards. It was about shaping an ideology. We took the concepts we believed in — automation, lending, solar — and forged them into a framework that could support real, cohesive, bankable brands.
No founder starts with every tool in place — or even the right idea. Growth comes through alleys, accidents, and dead ends, all while experts shout that it’s the chatbot, or the funnel, or the drip campaign that will change everything.
The truth is simpler. What matters is what resonates. What carries your message in your voice, to your customer.
We learned this lesson years ago in entertainment. Creating a script or a show looked like making something from nothing — but the creation was hollow, a set, not a world. With companies, it’s the opposite: you build something real first, then the story follows. That’s the reset: rejecting the contrived in favor of the actual.
The Fork in the Road
When we started this path, we knew AI would be at the center of everything we built. That conviction pulled us into every circle we could find — newsletters, dev forums, cold pitches, Upwork, Fiverr, conversations with engineers from Pakistan to the Philippines.
And every single one promised the same thing: the magic key. For $5K, $10K, $25K, they’d hand us the formula to become the next unicorn.
The problem? Most Founders don’t have that kind of runway. Most are pre-revenue, building in real time on shoestring budgets while their friends, family and significant others quietly support them with their time, money and encouragement. For a lot of us we burned the ships behind us because failure is not an option and the never turning back ethos burns bright in our hearts and fires our creativity.
So we learned how to build websites from scratch, create blogs and social engagement. We learned that AI is the future and writing big checks to developers is a thing of the past. There is no secret formula. No Glengarry leads waiting behind a paywall. Just numbers, no code programming, due diligence, resilience — and the at-bats we create, put in place to put our products or services in front of our customers.
Maybe you've heard that chatbots can take six months to build or your SEO strategy isn't working even though it's built into your CRM or a million other tiny lies designed to make you feel powerless and accept the price tag which can climb into 10s of thousands of dollars. There’s no magic workflow that changes everything overnight or in 6 months. The value being sold isn't expertise. It's the illusion of mystery being sold by an industry that is fast becoming obsolete by the very automation they are trying peddle.
The real value comes when founders take the tools freely available to the public into their own hands and apply them.
That’s what this newsletter is: a record from founders who chose the hard road, who understand if you don't have your first round of funding to pay third parties you do the work yourself or it doesn't get done.
Founder Takeaways
Every Founder will eventually come the same crossroads: the noise of easy promises vs. the grind of learning it yourself.
The shortcut always looks tempting. Pay the invoice, hand off the problem, and wait for the magic. But the truth is, outsourcing too early often means outsourcing the very skills that make you viable and dangerous to the companies trying to take your power and your money.
Founders don’t need perfection. They need working knowledge, a roadmap — just enough to see through the smoke, to know when a tool is real leverage and when it’s theater.
The reset this month was about reclaiming that ground. About reminding ourselves — and every founder reading this — that the path forward isn’t about buying secrets. It’s about building fluency.
Resources
If you’re staring at your own reset, here are a few starting points that cost time, not $25K invoices:
Learn the basics yourself. Pick one tool — a chatbot builder, an email automation, an SEO dashboard — and deploy it. Even a rough draft teaches you more than outsourcing the whole thing.
Track your state. One word a day (focused, scattered, drained). You’ll see patterns long before burnout sneaks up.
Build your own “single pane.” Whether it’s a whiteboard, a CRM, or a custom dashboard, find one place where the truth lives. Don’t let five different screens tell five different stories.
The goal isn’t mastery. It’s fluency — enough to know what matters and enough to spot when someone is selling you smoke.
The Monthly Challenge — September
Your move for the next 30 days: pick one system or workflow you’ve been circling but haven’t committed to. It shouldn’t cost you a dime. It should automate a task you’d otherwise do yourself or pay someone else for.
Don’t overthink it. Just pick one. Commit. Track the ROI.
When October’s issue of Founder lands, we’ll call for your notes and submissions. Share what you built, what you automated, and what you learned. We’ll feature select stories alongside our own.
👉 Submit your results through our sites:
This is where the map becomes real. We’ll show you our receipts — and we want to see yours.
Closing & What’s Next
Before you stack tools, build funnels, or chase the next shiny platform, ask the only question that matters: How are you getting paid? Every system, every SOP, every workflow has to bend toward that one outcome — getting paid cleanly, quickly, and predictably.
Because at the end of the day, we’re not here for dashboards or lead funnels. We’re here to feed families, satisfy customers, and build companies that last. Money first, systems second. Everything else builds around that.
Looking ahead:
Founder will evolve into the Founder App — a practice founders can use to reset, track, and grow in real time.
We’re rolling out the Founder YouTube channel and launching our The Platform podcast to expand the conversation.
And as always, we’ll keep tying the threads back: capital through RIC Org, automation and media through The Final Word, solar through SOS Now.
For those who need it now:
Term loans, lines of credit → RIC Org
Drip campaigns, automation builds → The Final Word Media
Commercial and residential solar services → Save On Solar Now
One-on-one conversations are open. No cost, no obligation. If you’re a founder who needs funding, guidance, or strategic support, reach out.
Stay Connected
This is where the map becomes real. We’ll show you our receipts — and we want to see yours. If you’re reading Founder, don’t stop here. Join us across the channels where we’re building in public:
Solar & Sustainability → Save On Solar Now YouTube | SOS Now Facebook
Capital & Automation → RIC Org YouTube | RIC Org LinkedIn
Media & Storytelling → The Final Word Blog | The Final Word YouTube | The Final Word Facebook
As a Founder subscriber, we ask one simple thing: pick the lane that speaks to you most and connect. Whether it’s solar, capital, or media — subscribe, like, follow. Join the conversation, share your progress, and become a collaborator. Building together is how we create what comes next. Welcome to Founder. Chart your path.
Become a Member : https://www.realinnovativecapitalinc.com/members
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