http://www.thehaiway.com/, https://www.instagram.com/gothehaiway/

The HAIway, Kansas City, MO (2026)

08/20/2026

So yesterday, someone I care about t :

“Man, Kent, you always need a grand theory for everything.”

I felt myself getting defensive, paused a beat, and realized they were just giving me a hard time. Dudes like to do that, you know. 😬

But they were also right. I want to UNDERSTAND. And when I think I do, oh man, I can become convinced I am RIGHT. That matters for bootstrapping founders because our savings, time, reputation, and belief may all be tied to the idea. That commitment gives us conviction when few people see what we see.

But it can also make correction feel like rejection.

A customer does not understand, so they need more education.
Sales are slow, so the market is not ready.
Someone questions an assumption, so they just do not see what we see.

And many times we ARE right. 😏 But being open to correction does not mean changing direction after every objection. If every disagreement sends us back to zero, nothing gets built. It DOES mean taking a beat before saying, “They just don’t get it,” and honestly asking What if they are right?

That is my “Bayesian way.” Relax, no probability math before lunch. 😂 Just pause long enough to check your assumptions. For founders:

1. Be teachable: Can someone show me something I missed?
2. Examine yourself: Am I protecting the idea—or my identity?
3. Be open to correction: What evidence could change my mind?

Also, can someone tell you that you are wrong without paying a price for it?

This is why I keep talking about a practice field: Give reality a chance to speak before the systems around the idea become expensive or hard to reverse. I am not suggesting you care less about the idea. It’s our baby, for God’s sake. Care enough about the people you want to serve to let truth correct you.

That is my grand theory about it all. 😬

08/12/2026

Convenient for whom?

That's the question I asked myself this morning when I realized I was making an assumption that making something more convenient isn't always the benefit you might think it is. Isn't fewer choices, faster decisions, less friction always good?

There is no doubt that those things are often helpful for our audiences. But I ran across a study that looked at algorithmic movie recommendations and it very quickly highlighted my bias. In this study, it looked at the same kind of forced movie recommenation, showing people recommendations they did not ask to see. It was associated with more perceived autonomy in making the decision in one sample and less in another.

Quick sidenote: that does NOT mean one group liked being told what to do and another does not. Any grouping of people is not one kind of person, and a survey like this can't prove that the recommendations caused the difference in their perceived agency of making a choice. There's way too many confounding influences.

Still, I think it gives bootstrapping founders a helpful question early on to allow them to get to the scope of their MVP:

Can we truly make a choice easier and improve the experience, or are we simply making a the decision before the customer arrives and deprive them of something they want to be a part of?

If the decision systems around your idea decide what deserves someone’s attention, convenience and feeling included may not move together. A fast decision can feel like someone else’s decision.

Honestly, I would test this before treating “less friction” as a given. Which I'm marveling at because prior to realizing this today, I have to confess I would have confidently proclaimed that less friction is always better.

Try this: put the recommendation experience in front of five people from at least two different user groups and ask:

1. Did you understand why this appeared?
2. Could you see other options?
3. Do you want to see other options?
4. Could you change direction easily?
5. Did the final choice still feel like yours?

If the answers differ across the groups, don’t assume your decision simplification is always good. In fact, it may be the most useful design inputs you receive.

And I would keep one final point in mind: getting someone to click something is a business result. Helping them make a choice they still recognize as their own is a human result.

So yes, convenience matters, I’m just less convinced that it answers the whole question.

Anything you would add to this?

AI Disclosure: ChatGPT for image generation, post grammar and editing comments.

08/06/2026

I had a call with one of the startups I'm trying to support, and they were describing a meeting they had and some advice they had received. Quick sidenote: As a bootstrapping startup, you'll get a LOT of advice, often contradictory. 🤪 But I digress...

There were two words in particular that this founder heard when receiving the advice, and as they described them I realized how easy it is to throw out the words without clarifying the meaning underneath them, The two words were:

MVP
Beta

Any self-respecting startup founder would say "of course I know what those mean." But I'll just bet if I asked 100 different founders, I'd get 100 different answers. So let's take a minute and clarify these terms, and then introduce a new one!

Your MVP is testing the product/market fit. Will people use or buy it?
A Beta is testing if your product works with real users. Does it work reliably?

But here's the rub: neither asks: How does repeated use by users change our company? I think this is a really important dimension that I'm going to start adding in to my discussions with startups in the early stages. Questions that are oriented toward the systems that surround the "thing" you've built. Questions like:

Who decides whether we like what the systems are producing?

Who checks outputs and deliverables before it reaches a customer?

Are the results and workflows getting better or only coming faster?

Can a customer question a wrong result and get it fixed?

Can we still do the work if the systems go down?

If problems appear, can you address them without losing data or stopping customer service?

This is where idea of a "practice field" (the new term) begins. And I'll try not to use too many sports metaphors. 😬 A practice field is not a replacement for an MVP or beta. It is the decision-making around them: a bounded, real-world environment where you test the systems around your idea before you scale them.

The goal, of course, is not zero risk. That will never happen. It is to discover what the usual product metrics miss while the consequences are still reversible.

So, after getting your beta in the hands of potential customers, and before deciding to invest in systems that will automate and improve the ex*****on of your business, use a practice field as a scale gate:

1. What did the product prove?
2. What changed in human behavior and judgment?
3. Which failures occurred and who detected them?
4. What new dependency did we create?
5. What evidence supports scaling and what would stop us?

The MVP tells you whether the market wants what you built. A beta informs you how people use a specific product. A practice field helps you decide whether the way it works is worth multiplying.

Anything you would add?

07/13/2026

A couple of years ago, I was helping a private school think about their brand. I interviewed a number of students and I remember marveling at how these young students had a remarkable sense of their direction. They knew what they wanted to do in life.

That sent me of in exploration about why this happens, and I learned about Self-Determination Theory.

It has turned out to be a very useful tool in my analysis tool belt across a lot of studies. It identifies three basic psychological needs:

Autonomy: I have meaningful agency.

Competence: I can grow and become capable.

Relatedness: I belong and matter to others.

When these needs are frustrated or prevented, people still function but they rarely flourish. By flourish, I don't mean prosperity or happiness. I mean it as being wholly satisfied with the direction and quality of one's life.

This applies to classrooms, workplaces, families, communities, all the systems we build around people.

We need more than incentives or possessions or power. We need agency, growth, and belonging.

06/26/2026

Something I teach at the beginning of every semester in my Intro to Social Media class is the concept of belonging and a sense of community. Before we start discussing platforms, strategies, techniques, etc., I want to build a strong foundation of what we're actually trying to do through social media.

We review McMillan's work on sense of community, looking at different stages of community, starting with a person's exploration of a group to see if they think they even belong. Today's morning scan revealed an interesting insight on how to let possible members of your community explore who you are with no pressure.

We don't need to sell people on joining a group, hyping up the status or making people feel they are missing something. We simply need to give them a really easy way to take a first step of experiencing what belong in your community feels like. Let's them see who is there so they can answer the question "Are they like me?"

Startups, think about how to give people a low-risk on-ramp to your community. What is a low-friction, safe way you can invite them to check you out without making them feel trapped? That means not forcing them to identify themselves, give an email address, or mobile number right away. I know, I know, that's heresy to marketing best practices, but over the last year I can't tell you how many times I've stopped exploring something I was interested in because the only way in was giving my contact information, and I didn't want to get spammed with emails or texts.

People do not need to be sold on belonging to a group they feel connected to. But they increasingly avoid places they don't know or trust yet, and they need a less awkward (forced) entry into your community before they are ready to.

“I’m interested, but I don’t trust this place yet. Let me look before you ask anything from me.”

06/24/2026

I’ve been thinking about social capital differently.

The pure social science definition focuses on the strength of relationships and networks between people. That is still true, but I’m using it more broadly.

To me, social capital is the outcome of how all the other forms of capital interact: financial, material, natural, intellectual, human, relational, experiential, spiritual, and cultural.

The key measure is trust. And trust does not grow just because people say they value community.

It grows in repeated places and practices: the coffee shop where people linger, the porch, the library room, the church basement, the local class, the park bench, the table where people keep showing up.

So here’s an idea I’m playing with:

A no-technology social space.

You could read, talk, play board games, drink coffee or tea, or just hang out. You could NOT scroll your phone, work on your laptop, or watch something on a tablet.

Maybe it is a daily fee, maybe a monthly membership. Occupancy would be limited so it stays peaceful and quiet.

The point would not be networking. It would be presence.

Would that kind of space appeal to you, or does it sound like a little too much forced virtue? Ha.

06/04/2026

I keep coming back to this thought today:

For startup foundes, one of the biggest unmet needs right now is not more information, answers, or AI access. It's trustworthy advice.

We already have more answers than we can deal with. There are so many tools that can summarize, recommend, coach, search, draft, and analyze almost endlessly now.

But more answers ≠ better judgment.

What matters more is whether those answers are connected to anything meaningful. Because answers are never truly neutral or objective. They always carry some assumption from the provider's worldview.

I think that is why a lot of people feel uneasy right now. Not because they are anti-AI or they want to go backward. But because they are trying to stay human while everything around them feels less human.

The best entrepreneurs want help thinking more clearly. But they also want to preserve agency, relationships, judgment, responsibility, faith, conscience, and the ability to say no.

Aside from access to capital, I am becoming more convinced that building with alignment may be one of the biggest factors in staying around for the long haul.

05/31/2026

Well, it's Sunday and I'm thinking about how to spend the next week. An important part of that is, what am I carrying over into next week?

I do know that some things from last week need to come with me.

Was there a lesson I learned?
Any small rhythm that worked?
Some conversation I need to finish?
A responsibility that I need to reinforce?
A truth I let slip and need to reorient with?

Likewise, there are a few things that definitely do NOT need to come with me. 😏

Any false urgency.
A repeated distraction.
The stories I keep telling myself.
A pressure I felt from someone else.
A system that seems to make everything not fun.

So what I'm doing with these are sorting through and asking:

What should I keep?
What should I release?
What needs a small adjustment?
What do I need to trust rather than try to control?
Big one: Does this fit with my values?

Maybe that is part of living with more alignment. Deciding to not carry everything forward, but only what belongs on the path under my feet for these next few days.

05/30/2026

I’ve been having this conversation more and more, young and old alike:

What does a human-first life actually feel like?

I'm not talking about a perfect or "optimized" life. I'm talking about a life where every hour doesn't have to be productive or every decision has to be perfect. I'm talking about a life with proportion. Balance may be the word we more commonly use. A life where there is:

- Enough time and space to notice what's in front of you.
- Enough steadiness to notice what matters.
- Enough closeness to be known by other people.
- Enough quiet to hear what your life is trying to teach you.
- Enough trust to not need to control every outcome.

I feel like this current version of things make us feel too scattered, too rushed, too exposed, or too responsible for things no one can actually control.

It makes me think to myself that maybe the work is not just building better systems. Maybe it is asking if the life we are building is still scaled to our humanity.

I know this runs counter to 90% of what you see on social media from influencers and life-coaches. And I may seem contradictory because I'm a huge believer in the tools that are helping small entrepreneurs operate like large entities, like AI. But my point is that none of this matters if we aren't living in alignment with our values. And figuring that sh*t out is far more important than writing a killer prompt, over the long term.

05/29/2026

A reflection I’m carrying into the weekend:

What did this week keep proving?

Not to judge it. To learn from it.

Sometimes the week shows us where we are aligned. Sometimes it shows us where a system, rhythm, or assumption is quietly pulling us away from what matters.

Either way, the evidence is useful and I can consider some SMALL adjustments for next week.

The HAIway

08/20/2026

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