Bootstrapping a Unicorn: Day 13

Bridges and Distractions

Kim and I used to have a ritual in the editing room. After the first rough cut, we sat down with every clip and asked a single question. Does this move the story forward. There was no negotiating. If a clip was beautiful but did not serve the narrative, it was gone. The image never judged the story. The story always judged the image.

I did not think about that ritual for years. It surfaced again today while I was trying to answer a question about what belongs and what should be cut.

Running Lean has a warning about early adopters. The danger is adding features while still learning from the first users. Every shiny possibility looks like progress. Every new capability feels strategic. Founders clutch these possibilities like they might be the missing piece. Most of the time they are not.

I feel velocity right now. Real velocity. Not motion. Velocity is what happens when the system starts aligning itself. The connection between Court 4, the Founders Room, and the broader architecture is clearer than it has ever been. IEDE is sharpening. And yet I am still pre MVP. I have no product in the market. I have a pattern I hold together by hand.

Black Friday is five days away. I am opening presales for something I have been building toward for months. That deadline changes everything. Velocity plus fragility is a dangerous combination when there is no clock. With a clock, the combination becomes focus.

So I kept coming back to the editing room question. Does this move the story forward. But I started to sense a third possibility. Sometimes the hardest decisions are not about what to cut or what to add. They are about recognizing what already belongs together.

The problem is that I have two businesses. EKH Media exists. It pays bills. It keeps me inside attention rich environments. Communiplasticity Solutions does not exist yet. It is the architecture I believe in. It is the future. But the future does not write checks.

I found myself stuck on a question that sounded simple but was not. If I spend time advancing EKH Media, am I building a bridge or creating a distraction.

Then I thought about Michelangelo. Not the mythologized version. The working artist. The man who took commissions because commissions paid for marble. The Sistine Chapel did not pull him away from sculpting. It funded his sculpting. It expanded the boundaries of what he could do. It forced him into territory that strengthened everything that came after.

That reframe changed the question. The commission was not a distraction. It was the funding that made the deeper work possible.

EKH Media is my commission work. It is the structure that buys time for the real architecture to form. It does not compete with Communiplasticity Solutions. It nourishes it. Until the new work generates enough on its own, the older work is not a detour. It is the road.

But understanding the road means recognizing the vehicle you are already driving.

The Court 4 RV solves a broadcast problem I have faced for years. It is infrastructure I already need for EKH Media. Adding Founders Room capability inside the same vehicle is not adding a feature to a startup that does not exist yet. It is consolidating functions I already perform into a single mobile environment.

This is different from chasing a shiny object. This is removing fragmentation.

For months I have been thinking about Court 4 and the Founders Room as separate projects. One for measurement. One for development. One that captures the moment. One that transforms it. I kept treating them like siblings who happened to share a last name but lived in different houses.

Today I saw them as pieces of the same envelope.

The RV is not a vehicle. It is the IEDE loop made physical. Intention. Experience. Debrief. Evolution. All four phases can happen inside a single mobile environment. The athlete sets an intention before stepping on court. The experience is captured. The debrief happens in the Founders Room section of the vehicle. The evolution accumulates across sessions.

Combining these functions does not dilute focus. It removes the walls between things that should never have been separated.

I can broadcast from the RV. That is EKH Media. I can capture Court 4 sessions from the RV. That is the diagnostic layer. I can run Founders Room reflections from the RV. That is the development layer. All three functions strengthen each other. All three generate revenue. All three feed IEDE.

The question from this morning finally has an answer. This is not a distraction. This is integration.

The editing room ritual taught me something I forgot until today. The question is never whether something is good. The question is whether it moves the story forward. Good footage that does not serve the narrative is still footage that gets cut. Good ideas that do not serve the architecture are still ideas that drain attention.

The RV moves the story forward. EKH Media moves the story forward. The integration of Court 4 and Founders Room inside the same mobile envelope moves the story forward. None of these are compromises. They are structural necessities.

The hardest part of building something is knowing what to include. The second hardest part is knowing what to cut. Today I realized a third part exists. Sometimes the things that look separate are already the same thing. You just need to stop treating them like strangers.

This essay is its own proof. The act of writing it runs the same loop I am trying to productize. I set an intention for the day. I lived through the experience. This is the debrief. And if anything sticks, that is the evolution. IEDE is not just a framework I am building a course around. It is how I think. It is how I have always thought. I just did not have a name for it until now.

Day 13 did not give me a new direction. It gave me permission to stop splitting what was never meant to be divided.

If this work aligns with where your organization is heading, I’m open to serious conversations about partnership and collaboration.

Performance Architect | Founder, Communiplasticity Solutions
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