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- Idea Of The Day - Build the Founder Gym That Finally Gives Forgotten Middle Operators Their Cheat Codes
Idea Of The Day - Build the Founder Gym That Finally Gives Forgotten Middle Operators Their Cheat Codes
Needs To Exist
August 18, 2025
GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), serving up a startup idea that gives $500K–$5M founders the playbooks and peers they’ve been missing
NTE Pro – $99/year makes you the friend who casually drops billion-dollar ideas at brunch. Nearly 5k plays, all still on the bench
Drowning in half-baked ideas that never see daylight? NTE Zero to One is the oxygen that turns sparks into wildfires.
Check out all the past newsletters here
Here’s what we’ve got for you today.
Daily Idea - Cheat Codes Inside
Shark Tank Rejects
Cheat codes for real operators
Tired of eating scraps between small biz courses and Y Combinator steak dinners?
NTE Zero to One can show you how to build the founder gym you are waiting for.
The One Liner
Startup GPS for the “forgotten middle” founders.
The 140 character tweet (or X) version
Too small for Y Combinator, too big for courses. Give $500K–$5M owners playbooks + peers that actually fit into their workday.
The Longer Story Version
The Problem
Running a $500K–$5M business is like being the middle kid at Thanksgiving.
The little cousins get all the attention (“here’s your free Shopify course!”), the big dogs get steak dinners with Y Combinator.
You? You’re stuck eating cold mashed potatoes alone. You’ve outgrown the beginner junk, but you’re not shelling $15K+ to sit in a beige Marriott ballroom with Greg from Vistage talking about “culture.”
You want speed, leverage, and peers who speak your language, not fluff. Right now, nobody’s serving you.
The Solution
Imagine EO and YPO had a baby… but it was raised on Slack and coffee instead of steak dinners and keynote speakers. That’s this.
Plug & Play Playbooks → Branding, hiring, ads, ops, no 300-page PDFs. Copy. Paste. Done.
Slack War Room → Small curated squads of operators at your stage. Think group chat, not ghost town.
Experts on Tap → Naming, SEO, site setup, like having a cheat code for all the boring-but-critical stuff.
No beige conference rooms. No Greg talking about “synergy.” Just a founder gym that fits in your pocket.
How We’d Build It
Stage 1 — Garage Band
Stage 2 — Stadium Tour
Platform: Move to Skool or Circle for structure, Clay for outreach, Grain to turn expert drop-ins into 5-min Netflix-style clips.
Playbooks: Drop pre-built “weapons kits” like:
Contractor Marketing Kit → ads + hiring templates to land jobs fast.
DTC Ops Kit → Shopify automations + retention hacks.
B2B Cold Email Arsenal → ready-to-fire sequences with tested copy.
Vibe: No 100-page PDFs. Just “do this on Monday, get results by Friday.”
Stage 3 — Arena Rock
AI Copilot: Bundle Rewind + Jasper + Perplexity to auto-draft SOPs, campaigns, even job descriptions like having a ghostwriter for ops.
Perks: Vendor discounts + partner deals = mini-YPO perks package without the tuxedo price tag.
Distribution: Bundle with Shopify/ Gusto, : “Congrats, you started your business now here’s your founder gym.”
Why It Needs to Exist
Because business isn’t won by working harder, it’s won by having the right cheat codes. Big companies buy their shortcuts (consultants, exec hires). Tiny businesses don’t need them yet. The $500K–$5M crew? They’re left naked in the middle.
This fixes that. It hands them the shortcuts: ready-made playbooks, curated peers, and an AI copilot that turns “I’ll figure it out later” into “handled in 10 minutes.”
Every founder in this tier is one good system or one smart intro away from doubling their business. This makes those wins inevitable.
Stop living in spreadsheets
A Message From Our Partner
Glide Apps turns your data into slick web or mobile apps in minutes, no code needed.
Build faster. Look pro. Launch today.
Remember Tamagotchi? You had to feed it or it died
Your idea’s the same way. Ignore it long enough, and poof, it’s gone. Worse, someone else will raise your Tamagotchi into a unicorn.
NTE Zero to One is like a babysitter for your startup idea: playbooks, tools, and accountability so it doesn’t starve on your Notes app.
$49. We turn “someday” into “shipped.”
Founder walks into the Tank: “We’re at $2M in revenue, scaling, but stuck. EO ignores us, beginner courses bore us. We need a Founder Gym, curated peers, async playbooks, and shortcuts for the forgotten middle.”
And the Sharks start circling.
Shark 1 (the skeptic):
“Wait, so you want to build a gym for founders? Cute. But founders don’t need gyms, they need grit. If you’re real, you’ll figure it out alone. Why should anyone pay for glorified Slack groups and PDFs?”
Shark 2 (the believer):
“Because this ‘forgotten middle’ is massive and underserved. Think about it: millions of businesses in the $500K–$5M range. Too scrappy for EO, too advanced for Udemy courses. These folks are on an island. Give them a place with peers who get it and playbooks they can copy-paste, that’s not fluff, that’s leverage.”
Shark 1:
“Or it’s noise. Slack communities die. Playbooks get dusty. The ‘middle’ is messy for a reason, most of them will never break out. Why build a business serving companies that might not make it anyway?”
Shark 2:
“Because one small shift at this stage has massive impact. A new sales funnel, a smarter hire, an intro to the right vendor, that can double a $2M business in a year. At $50M, those moves barely move the needle. Here, they change everything.”
Shark 1:
“But will they pay? EO charges $15K+ and people write the check because it feels exclusive. Will a $2M founder cough up $200–$500/month for your ‘gym membership’?”
Shark 2:
“Of course. These founders understand ROI. They’re already paying accountants, lawyers, fractional CFOs, anyone who saves them time or stress. Founder Gym says: ‘Pay $500, save 100 hours, land a new client worth $100K.’ That math works all day long.”
Shark 1 (still pushing):
“Even if the math works, what stops this from becoming just another ghost-town community? Everyone loves the idea of peers… until nobody shows up.”
Shark 2 (smirking):
“That’s the secret sauce: curation. Not open to everyone. Only to real operators in the $500K–$5M zone. Put 20 killers in a room together and you don’t get tumbleweeds, you get fire. Add expert drops and AI tools that auto-build their SOPs, and suddenly this isn’t a ghost town, it’s Disneyland for founders.”
Shark 1 (pausing):
“Alright… so let me get this straight. You’re building a middle lane for founders — not the $50M sharks, not the $50K minnows. A gym where the scrappy $2M hustlers finally get their cheat codes.”
Shark 2:
“Exactly. And that’s the joke: the Tank said ‘too small,’ the courses said ‘too big,’ but in reality, this group is the perfect size. Hungry enough to grow, big enough to afford it, ignored enough to crave it. That’s why the Founder Gym exists.”
Narrator: The debate rages on. But one thing’s clear: the ‘forgotten middle’ just got their own arena.
Some startup ideas are harmless
Others feel like they shouldn’t even be public.
We dug into the NTE Pro vault, and three “sensitive” files slipped out:
🦟 Autonomous Drones for Safe Mosquito Control
What if you could nuke mosquitoes with precision drone strikes? (Summer BBQs will never be the same.)
🧠 Mind-to-Text App Revolutionizes Thought Transcription
Forget typing. Forget dictation. Just think and watch your essay, email, or tweet appear. Creepy? Yes. Useful? Absolutely.
🎲 Autonomous Event Betting: Risk-Free Probabilistic Hedging
Prediction markets are slow. AI wants to gamble instantly on every micro-event. Think “Vegas, but for agents.”
The other 4,953 ideas? Sealed. Redacted. Locked down tighter than your high school diary.
Stop wasting hours guessing which ad will actually convert.
A Message From Our Partner
AdCreative.ai uses AI to instantly:
Generate high-performing ad creatives
Predict which ones will win before you spend a dollar
For NTE readers chasing fast launches and cheap experiments, it’s like having a full marketing team in your laptop.
✅ More tests
✅ Faster results
✅ Lower CAC without hiring a designer
If you’re serious about turning ideas into traction, this is your unfair advantage.
One More Meme
