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For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. Inspiration and ideas, every Friday – for free. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines.
Hey, starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ A few good robots
Advice ➠ Build something durable
Ideas ➠ Post-Japan Depression
Resources ➠ Small biz grants
Town Hall ➠ Community shoutouts
👋 For Starters is read by 9,200+ people, including new subscribers Fred, co-founder of Pary Moppins in London, and Marco, a product designer in Madrid. Welcome!
➠ Get inspired
Work in progress | Credit
1. Fix you. Over in Lisbon, Ricardo Bessoa has got something incredible going on. His business Coolnvintage restores old-school Land Rovers into works of art. His team of 17 people spends up to 3 years on a car (which costs upwards of £150,000). Peek behind the scenes of his workshop here. (They also publish books!)
2. A fashionable robot. More machines: loved learning about Oliver Davila Chasan and David Faes’s biz Kathedra, which builds robots tailor-made for upholstery. Find a niche, get going, execute.
3. Manufacture Métis. And Cédric Plumey quit his job at Louis Vuitton and traded Paris for Étupes, a town of 4,000 people in France’s northeast, where he's resurrecting an old-school weaving tradition. Absolutely love this story.
4. Show your true colours. If you’re not yet aware of the colourful, joyful, one-of-a-kind (like, really) shop Silly, located in beautiful Margate, UK, you need to remedy that – quick. If only more retail looked like this!
5. Print ain’t dead. Check out this interview in Marie Claire with Anika Jade Levy and Madeline Cash, who founded the mega-popular literary print title Forever Magazine, which has grown from “a 700-copy zine to print runs of more than 2,500 that sell out almost immediately.”
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➠ Starter wisdom
Most people can’t afford a personal trainer. Colin Raney thinks that’s a solvable problem.
The former IDEO vet and ex-PillPack CMO has teamed up with Android cofounder Rich Miner to build Ray — an AI-powered personal trainer designed to scale what used to be a luxury.
He’s throwing his hat in a very saturated ring at a time when getting an app off the ground is easier than ever. So… can Ray rise to the top?
→ Below, Colin shares how to stand out in a crowded market, why distribution is king, and why this is the best time in history to start something new.
Flexibility.
Hey Colin, what’s your story?
Hey Danny! I’d been doing software development in the Bay Area, lived through the dot-com boom and bust, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do after that, so I went to business school at Carnegie Mellon. It was a crazy quant finance school and I very quickly realized I wanted to make things and be more creative. I fell in love with design and spent as much time as I could in the design school.
You defected! What did a design-loving MBA do after that?
Yup. If you remember when we came out of the crash, everybody said innovation is going to save us. The word innovation was everywhere. IDEO was on the cover of Fast Company. So I hustled my way into an internship there. They were hiring business people – they called it business factors. The idea was there are human factors and business factors when you design. We were basically pseudo-entrepreneurs for an idea – how it comes together and how you build it.
Was IDEO where you got bit by the fitness and wellness bug?
Yeah, around 2011 I moved to Cambridge (Massachusetts) and I was running IDEO’s studio. We’d come through the great financial collapse. It’s interesting how all big change lives in the echo of one of those things, isn’t it? I became a mentor at a program called Techstars, which is where I met these amazing young entrepreneurs that ran a company called PillPack.
I invited them to come work at the studio for six months. We hit it off – they were design curious, I was startup curious, and that ended up being a great relationship. I eventually became their chief marketing officer. And in 2018 PillPack got sold to Amazon.
Damn, what a ride.
Everything is a challenge and an opportunity. Through that experience, I fell in love with the idea of helping people stay healthy. It’s so different from the paternalistic if you do this, you will be healthy. It’s about the service design of: How do you help people take their medications? How do you make it as easy and natural as possible?
After PillPack, I wanted to build a business that helps people live the best version of their lives. So we got out of Amazon. I was trying to find an idea. People told me you'll know when you know. I soon bumped into Rich Miner, one of the co-founders of Android. He’s a technologist. He wanted to build an iPad app that’s a personal trainer, that used computer vision to count reps and stuff. But I wasn’t so sure about the idea.
ChatGPT then came out and I was coding with my old software skills. I could start to see the possibilities of synthesizing voice and creating companions. You could build a thing with dynamic memory around you. Rich and I sat down again and started to talk about a new type of trainer, one that used AI. That ultimately became Ray.
Hey Ray.
AI was the unlock.
AI listens to what people want and then evolves the experience accordingly. So this personalization idea, the idea that you could design and build something that’s truly for an individual, lives on an epic scale that we’ve never been able to think about before. If you previously wanted to put that many preferences into something, it’d look like a piece of Windows software with 90 options all the way down.
But Ray listens to you and learns from you. It shapes the experience to meet you where you are. It creates the conditions for an experience in which people feel motivated and happy to exercise – a perpetual loop in which they do it again and again.
The habit-forming is the secret sauce!
With fitness, it’s about removing objections – all the things someone doesn’t like – and giving them the autonomy to feel like they have control. There’s a lot of intimidation in fitness. It’s like an hour of eating vegetables. And so the design challenge was… can you change that? And if you can change that and then get people to know about it, well… you could help millions of people stay healthy. That’s what I wanted to create. I couldn't think about anything else. Couldn’t sleep. The energy flowed. Everything fell into place at the right time – my life, that problem, and the technology.
Just to be clear – the fitness app space is incredibly saturated, right?
Brother… super saturated! So saturated we might even need a new word for saturated.
So you really gotta believe your solution’s the killer one!
I knew when we started it was going to be hard, but I also knew I tried all these apps and they prey on people. “Lose 20 pounds by next Thursday!” People in a desperate moment will fork over 20 bucks and get disappointed. I have a chip on my shoulder about those things. I’d worked with every app and they all kind of sucked. A lot of them do a real disservice. I think people deserve better. That was a motivator for me.
Are you worried about competitors ‘vibecoding’ with apps like Claude Code, Lovable, Replit? The time from idea to working prototype is shrinking.
I mean, certain parts of that have allowed me to get where I am today. You can’t hate the game. It depends on how you parse the world. If your view is I’m going to come up with the best idea and when I have that idea you can never, ever use that idea and I will be super successful…
Like pulling the ladder up behind you.
Yeah pulling the ladder up: I have a patent and that will be the end of it. But honestly, if you’re curious about the world and you want to learn and you want to make the best things you can, then there’s never been a better time to be alive. Because somebody who wasn’t conditioned by all these old institutions can come up with something that is just amazing. And if it serves the customer and it helps people, that’s what’s going to win.
Will gyms and trainers adapt to AI? Are they the losers in this scenario or will they ultimately use AI as part of their offerings?
My hope is that AI helps gyms and human trainers give better service. The world is such a huge place and only a small number of people get to use actual trainers. I wish everyone had a trainer. If you can pay $100 an hour to work with a trainer at your gym, that is such a high-touch service that, if that trainer is good, that’s what you’re going to do.
Ray’s customers are people who work all the time – they’re time-poor, they have kids, they’re making a lot of choices. They want to do the workout, but they don’t want to think about all the things that this entails. And so they’d love to have something that guides them through their fitness. Where they can push a button and it will give them a workout and adjust to their needs. They can rely on that almost as a companion that will always evolve.
Do you reckon that biz success is more about the idea or the execution?
It’s three things these days: idea, execution, and distribution. Lots of businesses have an amazing idea but no distribution.
I feel like a lot of starters don’t realize the extent to how important distribution is. Some people see distribution as the whole ballgame.
It’s true. And one of the great myths of starting a business is that a good idea or product falls out of the air. But product and distribution are a grind and you have to keep working on them. If you build a business that doesn’t retain people or help them, you don’t really have a business.
We’re talking about that habit-forming thing again, right?
Yeah, it’s about building something that people can come back to over and over again – that they’d invest in and pay for, that truly serves them instead of just delights them. Everyone confuses serving and delighting. It’s the difference between I made a fun thing and I put it on Twitter versus This is something that transcends ‘of the moment’ and serves the user for a really long time. Ultimately, the noise level is at 11 right now and the winner and spoils will emerge from who builds the most durable promise.
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➠ Good ideas
Focused (and profane) ☕️ → A new cafe in London (Flat White or F*ck Off) has a singular specialty.
Are you losing the attention war? 👀 → “If you don’t learn to command your attention, someone else sure as hell will.”
Make something heavy 🪨 → “We’re creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing.”
Post-Japan Depression 🇯🇵 → “Coming home from a trip that feels magical, safe, clean, punctual, aesthetic, peaceful… and suddenly – boom – back to reality.”
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
12 small business grants to apply for in 2026.
📚️ Reads
How to attract a global audience to your local brand. 1 Granary
Why Secondhand Is Now Better Than New. The Honest Broker
AI Can’t Touch These Skilled Trade Jobs. If Only Enough Humans Would Fill Them. At Crane Stationery, the craft of high-precision engraving is in danger of becoming lost art. WSJ
An interview with Natalie Felikian, founder of LAV. Brand Baby (by FS subscriber Caroline Albro)
The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2025. First Round Review
It’s a Farm, a Gym, and a Club Where Deals Get Made in the Sauna. NYT (worth clicking for the photo alone, lol)
🧠 Findings
6,000 to 10,000 → The number of new perfumes that will be released in 2026. Make sure you carve out your niche!
🙃 Fun
Why not rent this private Norwegian island? 1600€/night. Good spot for your first company retreat!
The work of Maine-based artist Jay Stern is so, so nice.
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➠ Town Hall
Quickfire congrats to some awesome For Starters subscribers:
…Ed Little, co-founder of London-based creative studio Roleplay, snagged this fantastic feature recently in Creative Boom. Love the work Ed and Hugo are doing.
…DK and Ashley, founders of Toothsome Magazine, had a lovely bake sale last weekend, jam-packed with food/drink starters. I was there and it was beautiful. Hope they have another one soon.
…Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick (who writes The Trend Report) and Ben Dietz (who writes [SIC]) are hosting a live recording of their podcast HIP REPLACEMENT. It’s at Air in Chinatown, NYC, on 27 Jan. Their guest is Willa Bennett, Editor-in-Chief at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. Grab a spot.
…And in LA, Lena Tavitian and Melvin Dilanchian, of Project Yeraz, just launched an incubator for Armenian entrepreneurs. Love it.
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