Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

I've watched countless SaaS companies flatline because their technical founder couldn't escape "hero mode."

And I get it. I AM that founder at times. I feel that pull every single day.

You might be thinking, "I'll just do it myself." "It'll be faster if I handle it." "No one else knows the system like I do."

But today, I want to talk about why the very trait that got your startup off the ground could be the one that kills it—and what to do about it.

📒 DEEP DIVE

Why Saving The Day Is Killing Your Company

There's a point where your hero mentality becomes toxic, and it's earlier than you think.

I cannot tell you how frequently I run into SaaS companies where their growth has completely stalled because the technical founder was still stuck in hero mode.

Having that ability to "hero up" and build something from scratch—to go from nothing to something—is probably a requirement of all startups. It requires an enormous amount of domain knowledge, a huge amount of energy, and maybe some hubris that says, "Hey, I can even do this."

That aspect is admirable. There's a lot of hero worship that goes around, and I think it can be a bit addictive.

But here's where things go wrong.

When Heroes Become Villains

At some point, that same instinct to jump in and fix everything becomes a bottleneck.

The startup grows. The demands multiply. But instead of enabling the team, the founder keeps stepping in—handling the hardest problems, making the final calls, and often unintentionally hoarding responsibility.

It’s not always about ego. Sometimes, it’s just habit. The founder has spent years "saving the day," and it’s hard to let go.

But this has consequences:

• It slows the team down. People default to waiting for you instead of taking the initiative.

• It creates a single point of failure. If everything relies on you, nothing moves without you.

• It prevents scale. The company can't outgrow your personal bandwidth.

So how do you break the cycle?

Reframing Success

The antidote for this is reframing what success looks like.

Success isn't "What can I accomplish with my own hands?" It's "How many pairs of hands can I enable?"

This is a killer transition to make. There's enormous pressure. Customers need this, customers need that, it's all critical.

"I'll just do it real quick," you say. "Just assign it to me, I'll get it taken care of."

That's the death knell. You can't do it.

The key is going through this really hard period where you're going to walk or crawl so that you can later run. And the personality that causes someone to be successful at the beginning can make it hard to make that transition.

The AM/PM Update

One practical way to begin stepping back while staying informed is implementing what I call the AM/PM Update.

It's super simple: At the beginning of every day, team members post in Slack what they're going to do today. At the end of the day, they post what they did.

This does three things:

• It shows if people can prioritize and plan their day

• It builds a habit of clear, concise communication

• It gives you visibility without constant check-ins

You might think "anybody should be able to do that"—and I agree with you. Except it turns out a lot of people can't. Those are the people you need to identify quickly.

The beauty of this system is that it gives you visibility without requiring constant interruptions or status meetings. It's a small step toward breaking the hero cycle.

Building Trust By Stepping Back

Counterintuitively, the fastest way to build trust with your team is to show them you don't have all the answers.

Most leaders believe trust comes from being on top of things:

• Careful oversight

• Process building

• Proving yourself capable

That's wrong.

Real trust is built when your team is willing to ask for help. I've seen leaders try to play the hero—micromanaging and avoiding any signs of weakness. It always backfires, creating exactly what they fear: A team that doesn't trust them enough to execute without hand-holding.

So how do you actually build trust? You have to let them go out on the ledge first.

Let your team bleed a little. Not catastrophically—we're talking flesh wounds, not mortal wounds. Every small failure builds mutual trust. They learn to trust your support. You learn to trust their resilience. The team grows stronger.

When deadlines are breathing down their necks, being a hero isn't dedication—it's dangerous.

This transition isn't easy. You have to make a choice as a technical founder to work on the weak muscle (enabling others) when the stronger one (doing it yourself) would work better in the short term.

But the payoff is enormous:

• A team that operates without you.

• A company that scales beyond your personal effort.

• The freedom to focus on what only you can do—leading, not firefighting.

The hardest part is stepping back before you feel ready. But if you don’t, your company will never be.

🎙 EPISODE OF THE WEEK

This week on "Build Your Business," Matt and I tackle the hard question: Can AI actually make you a better decision-maker? 

(Spoiler: Yes, but not how most people use it.)

We break down how to build a custom "AI brain trust," essentially creating different AI advisors for different parts of your business.

I've been testing this approach for months, and it's dramatically cutting our research time while giving us better insights than we had before.

Listen wherever you listen to podcasts: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube

BEFORE YOU GO…

Your job isn't to create perfect employees. Your job is to build a team that trusts each other enough to get everything done.

But trust needs clarity. Don't make them guess what success looks like. Be clear about the target—then trust them to hit it.

Put down the cape. Stop being the hero. Start being the coach.

Talk soon,

Chris.