the co-founder stress test

Simão and I are about to incorporate noticed. We've known each other for years. He led AI at Talent Protocol while I was CPO, we've shipped things together before. On paper we're aligned, but on paper is often not enough.

Most co-founder breakups I've watched don't come from real incompatibility. They come from assumptions nobody said out loud.

So before we sign any papers, we're running a co-founder stress test. A structured exercise to surface everything that could go sideways later: ambition, values, money, bandwidth, concerns.

What follows is the actual exercise we used. Every prompt we answered, with our actual answers where we can share them, and a note where we can't. If you're starting a company with a co-founder, feel free to steal it.

what we're building

noticed is a personal networking agent. It learns your intent, maps your network across GitHub, LinkedIn, email, and calendar, and surfaces the right opportunities at the right time. No cold outreach, no performative networking.

We want to build a lean team, ship something people love, and get there without burning time or money. Most of the specifics show up in the answers below.

how the exercise works

Two parts.

Part 1: individual written reflections. Each founder answers the prompts alone, in writing. Written is important. It forces you to commit to a position before you know what your co-founder thinks, which keeps you from unconsciously converging.

Part 2: an in-person session to align. In our case, a long lunch. The written answers are raw material. The conversation is where alignment actually happens.

The goal is to find the places you don't agree while it's still cheap to resolve them. A divergence you surface over lunch costs you an afternoon. The same one six months in can cost you the company.

part 1: written exercises

1.1 values autopsy

Prompt: Pick 2-3 companies you admire and 2-3 you don't. Write a few words on why for each.

Filipe. I admire Patreon, Shopify, Linear, and Cal.com. Common thread: craft, transparency, mission, global perspective. I don't admire WeWork, X under Musk, Palantir, or Jasper-style growth-hacking startups. Common thread: hype without substance, opacity, growth over product quality.

Simão. Anthropic over OpenAI. Vercel over AWS. Notion and pre-pivot Cursor over post-pivot Cursor. Same aesthetic: frictionless over complicated, simple over complex, open over closed. Profitable without being extractive.

We came from different angles and landed on the same taste. If your values autopsies don't rhyme, you probably shouldn't start a company together. Ours did.

While we were at it, we also sharpened what "transparency" actually means to us, because every startup claims it:

• Public by default, but not dogmatic about it.
• Fully transparent about what we do with user data. Non-negotiable.
• Metrics and investor updates published openly.
• Salaries don't need to be public.
• The ethical line: assume everything we do will eventually be public, and act accordingly.

That last one is the real test. If the only reason you're okay doing something is that nobody will find out, don't do it.

1.2 what kind of company do you want to build?

Prompt: Pick the 1-2 archetypes that best describe your ideal outcome. If none fits, write your own.

We both independently landed on the Loom row. The specifics of team size, revenue target, and timeline are less relevant. What mattered for the exercise was the alignment: same archetype, same shape of ambition, picked in the dark.

1.3 strengths and gaps

Prompt: Write down your top 2 strengths and your top 2 gaps.

Filipe. Strengths: vision and product taste. Gaps: engineering depth (I can't build it myself) and saying no to too many things at once.

Simão. Strengths: ships fast, knows great work takes effort. Gaps: underestimates time-to-done, jack-of-all-trades.

Our strengths don't overlap, which is the whole point of having a co-founder. Our gaps overlap more than we'd like. We're both optimistic about what fits in a week. Useful to know going in, because now we can build around it (see rituals below).

1.4 money questions

Prompt: What's the minimum monthly salary you'd need to stay fully focused? Factor in rent, obligations, lifestyle. Also write down the financial outcome from this company that would make the risk worth it, bounded by a timeframe.

On salary. We each wrote down two figures: a floor to cover living expenses, and a minimally-comfortable number where we stop thinking about money for the first months. The gap between the two is the runway conversation you need to have.

On the outcome number. Your number is yours. What matters is whether you and your co-founder are in the same universe. If one of you is targeting $2M in five years and the other is targeting $500M in ten, you have a problem you should find out about now.

1.5 letter of concerns

Prompt: Write down 3 things that worry you about this venture. Risks, fears, doubts. Anything. Be honest. The point is to get them on the table early, not solve them yet.

One concern from each of us, to give you the flavor:

Filipe. Echo chamber. Two co-founders heads-down without enough customer contact or outside input is a classic failure mode. The fix is baked into the rituals below.

Simão. Whether our tech can be meaningfully better than the alternatives, and whether we can raise soon enough to find out.

part 2: reflection prompts

For these, no need to write full answers beforehand. Just come with a point of view.

2.1 why do you want to be a founder?

Filipe: creative expression, personal reputation, and my best chance at outsized returns.

Simão: he's only really happy when he's shipping. Corporate bullshit, politics, and bureaucracy grind him down. His happiest moments have been building. InputReach, Talent Protocol, and now noticed.

2.2 what is non-negotiable for you?

Filipe.

1. Disagree openly, then commit. I can handle conflict. I can't handle politics. No passive resistance after a decision is made.
2. No assholes, no matter how talented. Cultural fit over capability. Every single time.
3. No hero culture. If the company can't survive any one of us leaving, we've failed structurally.

Simão. Low ego, transparent conversations, equal effort and equal risk for equal compensation, one voice externally.

2.3 first seed spend, and first hire

Same answer for both: distribution. We know we can ship noticed. The open question is whether enough people will notice. So the first dollar and the first hire go to growth: a content lead or an in-house creator.

Simão adds product investment to the list: better data indexing, subsidized agent usage on day one so early users get the magic without worrying about cost.

What we'd both refuse to spend on: fancy office, marketing agencies, premature hires, conferences before product-market fit.

2.4 personal risk check

Prompt: Is there anything in your personal life that could derail your focus or commitment in the next 12 months? Health, family, finances, housing, relationships. Come ready to talk about it.

Every founder has something. Your co-founder just needs to know what's on your plate before you commit.

2.5 if we can't raise the angel round, what do we do?

Example answer: Self-fund for three months and push to revenue fast. Change scope, not vision. Don't reassess the team.

The reflection here is less about the plan and more about the fact that we had one. A founder who can't answer this question is a founder who's banking on one outcome.

2.6 what is the earliest signal to stop?

Most founders answer this with something dramatic. Running out of money, losing a key customer, a public failure. Those are death spirals. Too late to matter.

My real answer: when showing up feels like a drag and it doesn't self-correct within a few weeks. Or when we stop using noticed ourselves. Those are the leading indicators. The metrics follow them by months.

If I'm not using the thing I'm building, the thing I'm building is probably wrong.

the rituals we committed to

The exercise surfaced a shared weakness: we're both ambitious, both love to build, both bad at saying no. The risk is that two people who love building will ship five half-done things instead of one great one.

So we put a system on the calendar instead of relying on willpower.

Thursday founder sync. Weekly.

1. Metrics and milestones. Where we are on the numbers that matter. External commitments act as accountability anchors: investor demos, public ship dates. Internal deadlines slip. External ones don't.
2. The one priority. Each of us names the single most important outcome for the week. If only that ships, the week was a success.
3. Agenda. Strategic topics that need both brains but aren't on fire.

Friday essay. Weekly.

• One of us goes deep on one thing he's working on and writes a short essay. Format option: founder-to-founder call, transcribe, turn it into a blog post.
• This one does triple duty. It fights tunnel vision. It guarantees we share something meaningful with each other every week. And it builds in public, which is free marketing for a product people haven't heard of yet.

Thursday is inward accountability. Friday is outward. Together they address both failure modes: drift and echo chamber.

the blueprint

If you're about to start a company with a co-founder, run this. It takes 1-2 hours of individual writing and one long lunch. The cost of doing it is a few hours. The cost of not doing it is every startup story that ends with "we just grew apart."

Download the template (.md) or copy/paste into any AI of choice.

Eleven prompts. Use it as-is, edit it, or write your own from scratch. What matters is that the conversation happens before you incorporate, not after.

If you run this with your co-founder, tell me what came up.