THE FLYWHEEL
THIS WEEK IN THE ROOM
They don’t need your product. They need to know why you made it.
Inside: the Origin Swap, the founder behind Flywheel Friends, a two-minute platform fix, and this week’s picks from the deck.
THE ISSUE
Quick housekeeping before we get into it.
Flywheel Friends was one of ten finalists in the Startup Pitch Competition at AI Marketing World in Dallas last week. Live demo, no slides, five minutes. It went well — and a number of you found us there. If you’re new here: welcome. This is the weekly, and it’s short on purpose.
The other thing: I’m the featured founder this week.
That wasn’t the plan. I’d been recording an interview with Frank to test something, the software kept cutting me off, and after the third attempt I had enough material for a spotlight and no good reason not to run it. So you get my origin story this week, which is convenient, because that’s also this week’s play.
Short read. Real founders. Let’s go.
If You Build It, They Don’t Always Come
How Suzie Kane built Flywheel Friends to help founders grow together instead of going it alone.
Building a product has never been easier. Getting anyone to look at it has never been harder.
Suzie Kane knows that problem firsthand.
She runs Socially Square, a Los Angeles marketing agency, and has built software tools like TrendingTopics.io and Affiliate Kit Maker. Good ideas. Useful products. But every time she launched something new, she ran into the same frustrating problem.
Getting people to actually use it.
Marketing was her profession. And even she struggled to market her own products. Oh, the irony.
At networking events, she kept meeting founders with the same story. They'd built something they believed in. Now they needed customers, an audience, or simply someone to notice.
AI was making it easier than ever to build a business. But finding people who cared? That was another story.
“If you build it,” Kane says, “they don’t always come.”
So she decided to build something that might help change that.
A Better Way to Find Your People
Flywheel Friends matches founders with complementary businesses so they can help promote each other without spending a fortune on advertising.
Think of it as a dating app for founders. Only instead of looking for love, you're looking for someone who might introduce you to your next customers.
Founders describe their business, audience, and the types of collaborations they'd like. The platform calculates a Flywheel Score to show how well two businesses might work together.
Then comes the fun part.
You swipe right on founders you'd like to collaborate with. If they swipe right too, a chat opens.
No cold pitches. No awkward requests to strangers. And hopefully, a lot less ghosting.
“There's never a cold DM,” Kane says. “You're always approaching someone once both parties have said yes.”
Because partnerships work better when both people actually want to be there.
Small Audiences. Big Possibilities.
Kane wants founders to stop worrying so much about the size of their audiences.
A small, engaged audience can be far more valuable than thousands of followers who barely notice you're there.
“Chances are someone else’s audience already wants what you have created,” she says.
They just haven't heard of you yet.
She’s also introducing Flight Crew — small, hand-curated groups of four to six founders with complementary businesses who help each other grow over time. It’s part of Crew Membership, and early access is forming now.
Think of it as having your own little marketing support team, except everyone is building a business of their own.
Each crew has a shared space where members can ask for help promoting a launch, sharing a post, making an introduction, or getting the word out about something important.
And unlike those engagement pods where everyone is expected to like and comment on everything (whether they mean it or not), Flight Crew support is voluntary and based on what makes sense for each founder's audience.
No forced likes. No robotic comments. Just genuine support from people who want to see you succeed.
Because one good partnership is nice. But a crew that has your back? That's where the flywheel starts turning.
The Bigger Idea
Suzie didn't set out to build another networking platform. She was trying to solve a problem she knew all too well.
Then she realized something.
What if the people struggling right alongside us were also the people who could help us succeed?
One founder has a great product. Another has an audience that would love it. Both need to grow. Maybe they just need an introduction.
That's the idea behind Flywheel Friends.
Not another place to collect connections you'll never talk to. A place to find people who genuinely want to help each other succeed.
Because building a business is hard enough. There's no prize for doing it alone.
You don't need to know everybody. You just need to find your crew.
Ready to find yours? Join Flywheel Friends for free at flywheelfriends.com.
Find me: LinkedIn Socially Square
Suzie Kane — Flywheel Friends
A platform for founder partnerships.
Their audience: SaaS Founders | Developers | Startups |
What they're looking for: Guest Posts | Co-Marketing | Lifetime Deal Partnerships |
Suzie Kanes' take:
“Because one good partnership is nice. But a crew that has your back? That's where the flywheel starts turning.”
Think your audiences line up? Open their Founder Pass and tap the heart. If they heart you back, you're matched and chatting.
Want to be featured in The Flywheel?
Frank is our AI interviewer. You talk, he asks questions, and we turn it into a spotlight like the one above. Five or six minutes, no prep, no writing.
He also, as established, sometimes cuts you off. If he does, just call him back — my three partial takes still made a story.
The Origin Swap
Nobody shares a post about your product. People share the story about why it exists.
The Swap. You and your partner each write 150 words on why you built the thing — not what it does, why it exists. Then you each publish the other’s. Same day, both of you, with credit and a link.
Why it works. Your origin story is tired to you and brand new to their audience. You’ve told it a hundred times; they’ve never heard it once. And it’s the one piece of content that can’t be copied, which makes it the easiest thing in the world for someone to post without feeling like an ad. Their readers get a story. You get introduced by someone they already trust.
It’s also the lowest-friction play we’ve run. No one has to evaluate your product, try your software, or figure out what to say about it. You write your own 150 words. They write theirs. Ten minutes each.
The pitch. Steal it.
Hey [name] — here’s a swap that takes ten minutes each.
We each write 150 words on why we built our thing. Not what it does — why it exists. Then we publish each other’s, same day, with credit and a link.
Your people haven’t heard my story and mine haven’t heard yours, and an origin story is about the only thing that doesn’t read like an ad when someone else posts it.
I’ll send mine Monday if you’re in. Pick a day next week and we’ll both hit publish.
One rule. Publish it unedited. If you’re rewriting their 150 words to flatter your audience, it stopped being their story — and the thing that made it worth posting was that it was theirs.
PLATFORM TIP: Two minutes: log the swap before you do it
The swap tracker isn’t for after. It’s for the moment you agree. When you and a partner settle on something — a shout-out, a newsletter mention, an origin swap — open the chat and log it right then, with the date you both committed to. Takes about thirty seconds. Here’s why it matters more than it sounds like it should. Most partnerships don’t fall apart because someone bailed. They fall apart because two weeks went by, one person wasn’t sure whether the other had done their part, and neither wanted to be the one to ask. Written down, there’s nothing to ask about. This week: open any match you’ve agreed something with and log it. If you’ve got a swap sitting in a chat from three weeks ago that nobody followed up on, that’s the one — and if you pitch an Origin Swap this week, log it the moment they say yes. |
From the Discover deck this week:
Janak Mehta — Career Path Partners Launch your career in AI, cybersecurity, or software with a personalized roadmap
Michael Bitler — Meridian Persistent memory and coordination for multi-agent AI
Every card you see comes with a Flywheel Score — a 0–100 read on how well your audiences, products, and goals line up. High score? That's a partnership waiting to happen.
You’ve told your origin story so many times it bores you.
That’s not a sign it’s old.
That’s a sign you’re the only one who’s heard it.
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