The Anti-Lonely Founder Starter Pack

The myth of the solo founder is so silly 🤣🤣🤪🤪🤪

We repeat stories about lone geniuses building products in garages, grinding away in silence until one day the worlds like OMG THIS IS SO GOOD.

It makes for great folklore.

It makes for terrible process (and inspo really).

In reality, the earliest stage of a startup is too fragile to carry alone. You’re guessing, learning, doubting, juggling life and work all at once. The emotional load is high, the uncertainty is constant, and the margin for error is teeny tiny.

That’s exactly why Launch Club is built around three forces that pull you out of isolation fast: a tight-knit community, mentors and squad leaders who have been exactly where you are, and a shared rhythm of accountability that keeps you moving when motivation dips (how good was that segue to launch club amiright).

Why the early stage feels so lonely

Idea-stage founders live in an odd limbo.

You don’t have colleagues who “get it”, but you also don’t have customers yet to validate what you’re doing. There’s no team to vent to, no investors to update, and usually no one in your day-to-day life who knows why you’re rewriting the same onboarding flow at midnight or panicking because your prototype broke again

*queue the tiny violin* 🎻🎻🎻🎻

People may cheer you on, but they don’t live inside your problem. They don’t carry the weight of “Is this even good?” or “Am I wasting my time?” the way you do.

The danger is that loneliness doesn’t just drain you emotionally, it leads to bad decisions. When you’re working alone, it’s easy to talk yourself out of shipping, to overreact to small bits of feedback, to stay trapped in perfectionism, or to give up the moment something feels hard.

Community and mentorship don’t remove the difficulty. They stop you from misreading difficulty as a sign that you should quit.

How squads work inside launch club

From day one, Launch Club founders are placed into small squads, like five or six founders, all working on different ideas but at similar stages.

This honestly becomes your first real safety net.

In these squads, you show up every week and share what you tried, what worked, and what didn’t. You get a space where you can say “this feels hard” and the people around you nod because they’ve felt it too. You hear how others are running interviews, testing assumptions, or hacking together early MVPs, and you start borrowing what resonates.

The most powerful part is quiet but so realllllllllll!!! 😭😭😻

When you see other founders making progress, you feel pulled forward rather than stuck. You stop being the only person in your world trying to build a startup and start being one of many ambitious people moving in the same direction.

The role of squad leaders

Each squad is supported by a squad leader, usually an alum of Launch Club or the Startmate Accelerator, or a founder/operator with real startup mileage. They’re the person who remembers exactly how confusing the early days feel, and they show up with context, empathy, and a bit of tough love when needed.

They’re not there to hand you a step-by-step blueprint. Their job is to help you filter your ideas, figure out what matters this week, notice patterns in your experiments, and hold you to the goals you set. Sometimes that’s encouragement. Sometimes it’s a gentle call-out when you’re hiding in busywork instead of talking to customers.

Either way, you’re not trying to self-coach your way through every new challenge.

Mentors and the wider startmate community

Beyond your squad, you get access to the wider Startmate mentor network (slay)

For Launch Club founders, that often means sessions with operators who have taken products from zero to thousands of users; technical leaders who can help you de-risk early architecture choices; or go-to-market specialists who know how to run your very first sales or discovery calls.

There are investors who understand pre-seed dynamics in Australia and New Zealand, and who can tell you, plainly, how they evaluate someone at your stage.

You can book office hours, join live sessions, and learn from people who are a few steps ahead, rather than people who built companies decades ago in a totally different world. The help you get is specific and grounded. It sounds like:

“Here’s how I would run your next five user interviews.”
“This onboarding flow is confusing, here’s how to simplify it.”
“This is how early angels think about your market.”

And when you hit a wall 🖐️ there’s always someone in the community who’s hit that exact same wall before.

What community does that content can’t

Plenty of founders try to replace community with content. They binge videos, collect courses, read every startup bible they can find. Those resources can be helpful, but they do not talk back.

Community does 🙌 🎉🍾 (bless)

Being a little boasty here but the Launch Club community looks like real-time feedback when you share a landing page or cold outreach script. It looks like peers who gently call you out when you’re hiding behind “research” instead of talking to users. It looks like shared wins that remind you why you started, and shared losses that remind you you’re not uniquely failing.

The information might not be new. The context is. You’re implementing it alongside people who are in the same season, under the same pressure, with the same stakes. That’s what makes it stick.

Building a startup in Australia or New Zealand can feel far from the world’s biggest tech hubs, both geographically and emotionally. Thas why Launch Club plugs you directly into a network of thousands of founders, operators and investors who are already here and building ambitious companies.

Cause hey, you don’t need to fly to SF to find people who care about the same things you do (they exist in your time zone too hehehe) 

If you’re tired of doing this alone, apply for Launch Club. 

We can’t wait to meet you 👋