Business researcher writing for founders. Independent. No VC, no paid placements, no AI ghostwriting.
I am not a founder pretending to be a teacher. I am a researcher whose job is to read the things you do not have time to read, and turn them into guides you can act on.
Groundwork is written for the person running a business alone: no technical co-founder, no outside funding, and nobody to delegate the reading to. Most business writing quietly assumes all three. That gap is why this site exists.
Every guide is built from primary sources where they exist, published industry research where they do not, and founder accounts shared publicly on Indie Hackers, Acquire.com and Reddit. Working this way means a claim stays traceable, no single anecdote gets mistaken for a pattern, and a conclusion comes from many operators rather than one lucky path.
If you find a number in here you cannot trace back to its origin, that is a bug. Tell me and I will fix it.
Statistics are hyperlinked inline to the source they came from. If a claim cannot survive a click through to its origin, it does not get published.
A guide has to be deeper, better sourced and more specific than the three results already ranking above it. Where they write 1,200 words, this site writes 3,000 better ones.
No sponsored tools, no affiliate-driven recommendations, no rewritten press releases. The advice is what I would tell a friend who asked.
I started this because every business blog I read assumed I already had an MBA, a five-person team and a Series A. The audience that actually needed the writing did not exist in the writing. Editor's note
Every financial system a business of one actually needs, in the order you need them.
14 min AI & ToolsFive stages, and the gate that has to be true before you move on to the next one.
11 min MarketingHow to calculate CAC correctly, what a healthy one looks like, and how to cut it.
11 minOne person reads this inbox, and that person is me. Corrections to a guide, a figure you think is wrong, a question a guide did not answer, or a request for something I have not written yet.
If you are writing about a specific guide, paste the URL and the sentence you are asking about. It gets you a faster and more useful reply.
Everything scattered across the site, in one download, kept current.
The three tools on this site ask for nothing and never will. This download is the exception, because it is the only thing here that has to be kept current: the benchmark is repriced every quarter, and a stale price is worse than none.