Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

mashley.com ↗

I’ve spent the better part of 25 years trying to understand two things: which problems are worth solving, and what is the simplest way to solve them. That pursuit has led me to start companies, build products, teach entrepreneurship, coach hundreds of founders, and participate in four startup exits—one as a founder and three as an advisor. Along the way, I noticed a pattern. Founders are usually very good at solving problems. The trouble is that we’re often solving the wrong ones. What looks like a sales problem might really be positioning. A marketing problem might begin with not understanding the customer. An execution problem might simply be too many priorities competing for attention. I came to think of this as finding the problem under the problem. When you find it, complicated decisions get simpler, teams align, and a surprising amount of work disappears. Today I coach founders and startup teams around the world to do exactly that. Sometimes it’s a team scaling a company worth billions. Sometimes it’s one person turning what they know into a consulting business. The scale changes, but the work is remarkably similar. Find the problem worth solving. Find the simplest way through it. Then get on with the work that matters.

Going Independent Founder-Led Content Positioning Customer Discovery Founder Mindset Reputation Building Go-To-Market Founder Stories

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 7, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

I’m not that great at making LinkedIn videos… but I’m getting better. I’m trying to do the selfie video thing so I can have content that’s clearly not AI - and since AI creates mostly perfect images and even video now, I figured seeing my amateur attempts will add some HUMAN to your day. If you’re up for it, I’d love to see your videos too. Don’t worry if they suck. It’s way more interesting than a perfectly written manifesto on getting rich quick. …more

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Marketing AI Content Creation Authenticity Founder-Led Content Video Content

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 7, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

What's actually being evaluated when someone decides to hire you? It isn't your resume. A resume is a list of claims, and everyone's list reads impressive. What people trust is evidence... the posts, the talks, the work they can watch you do before they ever pay you. That's the part that compounds. A good piece keeps working a year later, sitting next to the next one, and the next. I learned this the slow way. For years I trusted the work to find me, because inside a company it did. On your own, nobody vouches for you but the body of work you've made public. If you're building a practice and you want to be in a room with people making the same leap, click through and see who's inside Inspiring Founders: https://inspiringfounders.com It's the room where the reputations get built out loud. Come start yours. …more

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Entrepreneurship Founder-Led Content Going Independent Reputation Building

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 7, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

I got a new mount for my iPhone that makes it really super easy to record these Teleprompter videos now. It’s the one that has the round magnet on it so you can just slap the phone right on the mount and start reading from the Radi8 Teleprompter so this is an example. I’m doing it as we speak. …more

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Teleprompter Video Content

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 4, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

“Vitamin or pain killer?” - advisors love to ask this question about your product. And they love to tell you it has to be a pain killer, because it’s easier to sell. But the truth is less about pain and more about understanding your customer. When I was 23 I worked at Threshold, one of the largest distributors of vitamins and supplements to the industry. They easily sold hundreds of millions of dollars every year into supplement stores all over the country. What made them special wasn’t their inventory. It was their sales organization. Every sales rep would spend time on the phone with their customers, they knew them by name, they talked like old friends. But more than that they spent time educating. And in turn their customers, the shop owners, educated their own customers. What they created was an environment of conscious empathy and learning for people who didn’t want pain killers. So here’s the question for your business: Are you chasing the same customers as all your competitors? The ones looking for pain killers? Or are you building a community that’s tired of popping pills and wants a real, long-term solution? Selling “vitamins” isn’t bad, it’s just very different from selling “pain killers” …more

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Entrepreneurship Client Acquisition Content Marketing Networking Product-Market Fit

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 3, 2026 · X ·

Why isn't more content winning you more clients? Often it's not a marketing gap... it's fuzzy positioning nobody can repeat. See how I'd untangle it: https://mashley.com …more

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Marketing Client Acquisition Founder-Led Content Positioning

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 2, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

Smashburger with Marcelo today! Years of friendship, and somehow every story we tell starts the same way... a motorcycle. The crazy ones. The stupid ones. The ones we probably shouldn't repeat in public. And today there's a new one for the pile — Marcelo completed the Baja rally and came home with the King of the Cactus award. Congratulations, my friend! Here's the thing about Baja. You can't talk your way through it. You can't negotiate with the desert. You prepare, you show up, and then you keep going long after the fun part ends. (Marcelo was the only one to finish - out of 9 riders.) I’ve taken my moto all the way to the tip of Baja and it’s not easy. I've watched Marcelo do exactly that for years. And it's the same thing I keep seeing in the people I work with now — coaches, consultants, folks who walked away from a title to build a practice of their own. You don't get to control the outcome. You get to control whether you prepare, whether you show up, and whether you finish. Marcelo finished. King of the Cactus… and he wouldn’t even let me buy the burgers. Who's the friend who taught you what finishing actually looks like? #GoingIndependent #Solopreneur #Coaching #IndependentConsultant #PersonalBrand …more

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Entrepreneurship Founder Mindset Founder Resilience Going Independent

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 1, 2026 · X ·

Expertise stuck in your head, sold one custom project at a time... how do you turn it into an offer that compounds instead of a treadmill? Work it out with peers making the same leap: https://inspiringfounders.com …more

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Entrepreneurship Going Independent Positioning Scaling

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Sep 1, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

My friend Joao de Brito is an artist, and he's the reason I rebuilt a page in Radi8 last week. I showed him the new Create feature. It makes images, you can touch up a photo or drop your work into a different gallery with AI, and Joao started using it right away. Then he kept pasting his photo captions in as prompts and couldn't understand why the thing was behaving so strangely. He wasn't doing it wrong. Create meant something different to him than I had intended it to mean. He read it as where you go to create a post, which is an entirely reasonable thing to read it as, and once I saw it happen in front of me I started seeing it everywhere, the same wrong turn at the same spot. For about a week before that I'd been treating it as a labeling problem. Clearer heading, better button. People kept doing it anyway. That's the moment that used to cost me months. You know what you designed, you can explain it, the explanation is even correct... and being correct is completely beside the point, because the people using it have already decided what it's for. So I stopped defending the design and rebuilt the page to do the whole job. This is why you talk to customers regularly, and why you shouldn't be afraid to let them complain! Joao never filed a bug report. He just got confused in front of me, which is about the most valuable thing a customer can do for you. The signal is rarely in what people say, it's in what they keep trying to do after you've told them not to. Where are your clients repeatedly trying to use you for something that isn't on your services page? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #CustomerDiscovery #Positioning …more

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Entrepreneurship Customer Discovery Positioning

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Aug 31, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

Everyone wants to look like the professional, but the truth is you just have to practice until you don’t suck anymore …more

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Entrepreneurship Founder Mindset

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Aug 31, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

Last week Radi8 put an event on my calendar that I had never agreed to host. I ran one last month, on the last Thursday. So when it laid out this month's content plan it produced a date for the next one, same slot, delivered with total confidence, as though I'd asked for it. It wouldn't have been a disaster, I'd have just forced myself to run the event! But nothing had asked for that date. No calendar entry, no input, no rule that generated it. It filled a gap with something that looked right, and nothing broke, no error, no warning, just a plausible answer that would have gone out looking exactly like the real ones. Earlier in my career I'd have logged that as a bug and moved on. Building an AI product teaches you it's a whole category rather than a defect, because a model has no way to feel uncertain, it produces the most likely next thing, and a fabricated date looks every bit as likely as a real one. I see the same failure when someone hands their positioning to an AI. What comes back is fluent, and it is somebody's positioning, rarely theirs. Fluent is hard to argue with, which is exactly what makes it expensive. The fix wasn't a smarter model, it was making the thing show its work. Every date Radi8 writes now has to name where it came from, and anything that can't gets flagged before a person ever sees it. Ask that of any draft that lands in front of you. Where did this come from? Which client actually said it? If the honest answer is that it sounded right, you're reading fiction in your own voice. What has an AI told you about your business that you accepted a little too fast? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #AIforBusiness #Positioning …more

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Future of Work AI Content Creation AI Hallucinations Positioning

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Aug 30, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

The new Radi8 Teleprompter is a big hit for people who want to post more, but have had trouble creating videos. PLUS, the all new AI Image builder will take your images and make them 100x better... or generate new images completely. …more

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AI Content Creation AI Marketing Tools Teleprompter

Michael Ashley

Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast

Aug 28, 2026 · LinkedIn ·

I spend an hour on every client call so it’s impossible to scale beyond 4-6 calls per day. That’s why it’s so important to capture your message and go from 1:1 to 1-to-many. You can do this through webinars, workshops, speaking engagements, events, publishing books, YouTube videos, even small groups. You have to figure out how to scale your message if you want to scale your business. How are you scaling today? Need help, send me a message. …more

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Entrepreneurship Coaching Business Scaling