Daily Content & LinkedIn Insights • Founder at I.Am.U Media • Content and LinkedIn Consulting for Founders & CEOs

Before joining The 216, most of our clients were struggling with:

→ No clear offer (or an offer nobody understood)
→ An inconsistent way to generate qualified leads 
→ No process to have sales conversations with confidence

Many felt like impostors when talking about their business.
Others seriously considered going back to their 9-5 jobs.

And in general, they were constantly worried about when they would sign their next client.

After joining The 216, they all walked out with clear frameworks around:

1️⃣ Niching and Positioning: Explaining their business in a way that people instantly “get”.
2️⃣ Offer Creation: Building a premium, outcome-driven offer built around real client pain.
3️⃣ Repeatable Outreach System: Having a simple process anyone can follow to start conversations every week using only LinkedIn.
4️⃣ Natural Sales Process: A sales process that feels natural, easy, and with improving close rates. 

It’s the same system that helped:

📌 Adina Samuels (Manuscript Ghostwriter): From corporate job → $200k solo business
📌 Christian Mather (Wealth & Exit Planner): 4× monthly income to $23k in under 10 weeks
📌 Matthew Mercer (Recruitment Coach): Consistent £10k–£15k months
📌 Allison Paley (CS Consultant): From self-doubt → landed a $36,000 client
📌 Efe Buyuk (Data Systems Designer): Made 6× the program fee in under 12 weeks
📌 Priscilla Leigh (Psychoaudiologist): First high-ticket client in 21 days
📌 Chris Corridore (Brand Strategist): First $15k month and best year ever

These are all real people. You can find their profiles in my Featured Section. 

I invite you to message them and ask what their experience was like. 

And if you're ready, and you want a business that runs with clarity, control, and clients you can count on, send me a DM and I’ll share how The 216 works.

—

Mat Lehnhoff

I build decks (sales & pitches, not patios) | professional magician | out here makin' friends

I used to help founders raise/sell millions with beautiful decks.
Now, I’m using AI to help humans heal their inner world.

Same storytelling skills. Different stakes.

I’m Head of Product & Ops at a stealth mental wellness AI startup, building games that help humans heal their relationship with self (the ‘what happened to you’ pieces).

On here, I talk about:
- Mental health & dopamine: the games our brains play, how tech makes it worse/better
- Storytelling: whether it’s a deck, a product, or a habit… story drives behavior
- Ops & product in the wild: what’s working (and not) as we build
- Books: I read 100+ a year and steal the best ideas shamelessly

For you? Well, you tell me…

Founder? Need a deck or website → DM and I’ll intro you to my partner. 
Ops/prod person? Follow for ops + AI wisdom from the trenches. 
Interesting human? Send me your favorite book rec.

Now we’re friends!

John Linford

Remember that incredible girlfriend? 
The one doing the nonprofit? 
She’s my fiancée now :) 

Happy to share a glimpse of my personal life with my professional circle. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming 😂

Helping humans heal | talking ops, AI, & books | professional magician | out here makin’ friends

Hot take: think Apple’s gonna die.

They’ve done a beautiful job with their products.

I’m an Apple guy, writing this on a Mac.

That said, in the coming days/times, what’s going to be prioritized are the interconnected, well-trained, and ubiquitous AI platforms. 

And for all the merit a closed ecosystem had..
It might be killing them for the future.

Case in point: swapped their AI to Gemini.

I think it’s because they didn’t have sufficient stuff to train models on. 

Couldn’t make it good.

I think they need to pivot, and become die-hard hardware / physical product gurus (more than they already are), open up their ecosystem, and figure out a way to intersect with the growing tide.

Else their phones / computers are gonna get left in the dust by the coming AI-enabled wave.

Right? Wrong? 
Would love to spark some debate here.

Quickly seeing these skills becoming valuable in an AI world:
1.	Reading fast
2.	Generalist education
3.	Passion for liberal arts

Seems like a full circle moment to me.

The people thriving with AI (excluding builders) are the ones who know how to connect dots across disciplines, who see context, who ask better questions than machines can answer.

It's the: "I really like to code but in my spare time I research the intersection between over the board chess strategies and macroeconomics"

or 

"Somedays, I just wanna quit my high-level corporate product job so I can start a woodworking shop, designing custom iPad cases"

That kinda vibe. 

David Epstein called this years ago in Range:

“In a wicked world, breadth beats depth.”

In his lingo, it’s all about kind vs wicked frames.

Kind systems:	
- Clear rules
- Repeating patterns
- Immediate, accurate feedback
- Skills gained through repetition

Think: chess, golf, math

Wicked systems: 

- Feedback is delayed or misleading
- Rules are unclear or incomplete
- Patterns are inconsistent
- Experience can mislead

Think: business, leadership, innovation

Important to notice,
Wicked systems 
(almost always)
Involve people!

(only broke that up for emphasis lol)

As AI takes over kind tasks, 
humans become orchestrators,
Managing chaos thru minion-power. 

Which means the skills of managers become preeminent. 

Really seems like the system of STEM-focus, being technical, is about to flip on it’s head.

I’m trying to split my brain.

One half is slow.
Dialed.
Logical.
Meditative.
Principle-driven.

That’s the brain taking pen/paper notes.
Going on long walks. 
Sitting in silence.
Built for an older time. 

Other half is fast.
Task-switching.
Instictual. 
Keen. 
New. 

That’s the brain running four parallel agents.
Composing and responding instantly.
Referencing internal docs rapidly.
Built for a new age of speed. 

I think both are important. 

And learning about “fast-twitch” and “slow-twitch” brainpower is critical, and Thinking Fast and Slow is one of the best primers I’ve found for that.

Highly recommend, you read this one?

Amazing how many conventions from previous bosses carry over.

I still:
- run trainings like Dave Lainhart
- do sales calls like James Dawson
- do my calendar invites like Matt W Gore 
- adjudicate pro formas like Jed McCarthy
- think about strategy like Mark Josephson
- orchestrate project management like Matt W Gore
- run convergent/divergent thinking like Nathan Wallace
- think about stakeholder needs like Anna Schena Walsh

And so much more. 

Feeling grateful on this Friday. 

I’d love to hear about your conventions.
Who’s inspired you.
Let’s get some feel-good in the comments.

Lenny’s Podcast has been a hack.

One of the recent episodes with Lazar Jovanovic (professional vibe-coder at Lovable) helped me immensely as I’m trying to build out workflows that massively increase my productivity. Two salient points: 

- don’t spend credits iterating
- build in parallel

The first bit is counterintuitive.
How we used to use AI (read: chat) was like this:

‘Here’s an idea’
*ok interesting response*
‘Here’s some clarification’
*ok now that’s slightly better*
‘Here’s even more conversation’
*oh shoot now we’ve lost the plot*

AI loses memory/context quickly.
It’s getting there, but not there yet. 

So, better to start, feed it some ideas, but then take that *slightly* better idea, and toss it into a new chat/tab, then slightly improve with one extra bit of brainstorming. 

Then, when you have all the pieces built out, you feed the final framework, implementation plan, design inspiration in one swoop, and let it run. You can build with confidence then. 

The other piece should have been obvious:
Build with multiple agents/chats at once.

Instead of staring down at the one chat screen,
I’m now in Code, Cowork, and Chat (Claude)
All at one, running different projects. 

Once they have good prompts, the rest is just reading and prompting for the AI to continue on it’s track, which means you can context switch easier.

Starting to feel the additional benefits in a big way.

Feeling like I’m tapping at the promised productivity hacks of AI. 

What’s been a helpful hack you’ve been using as you’re building with AI?

Product at early-stage startup means trampoline.
Bouncing from strategic to tactical, up n’ down. 

Acting as:

Product manager
(what are we doing this sprint)

Head of product 
(what are we doing this quarter)

Chief product officer
(what’s happening in five years)

Curious, what are the rules of thumb that guide when you hire to separate and reassign these combined roles? When should we think about giving other people my 3-4 extra jobs?

I might have just seen the death knell of Saas. 

We implemented EOS over the last few months.

Highly recommend, gets everyone rowing well.

But we’ve been using this software to run mtgs. 
Called Ninety, it’s…fine. Does the job.

But I’ve been meaning to play around with Replit. 

So, I went to Claude,
Fed it a bunch of context,
Few images and tech docs,
Created a solid Replit prompt…

And in two hours of tinkering,
I remade Ninety.

Full stop.
It works. 

We’re gonna start using it next week. 

For reference, we were about to add a bunch more team members to this platform. At $10/seat, we were gonna be paying $100/mo for this thing.

The money isn’t the point.
The point is that I built it. 

And dumb SaaS should be quaking in their boots. 

If you’ve got a simple web page that you’re charging a comfortable monthly price for…beware. Me and my little army of AI agents is coming for you. 

Whaddya think? There a reckoning coming? 
And if this is ‘dumb SaaS’, what’s smart?

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The Battle

Mat Lehnhoff

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