A Field Guide for Founders · 2026 Edition
You are not overwhelmed.
You are under-leveraged.
Every founder who has ever scaled a real business has passed through one of two states. Indigestion — more demand than you can deliver. Starvation — more capacity than your pipeline can feed. This guide names yours, then walks you out of it in ninety days.
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40 pages · instant PDF · one dollar
A Field Guide for Founders
Indigestion
— or —
Starvation
The two states every founder hits before the breakthrough. And the ninety-day path to neither.
Italo Campilii
Co-Founder, MentorMe
Which one are you?
Read both honestly. One of them will feel uncomfortably familiar. That feeling is the diagnostic working.
State One
Indigestion
Clients are signing. Work is backing up. Your nights are spent doing delivery work that should have been delegated months ago. Quality is slipping in small, defensible ways. Revenue is high — margin is collapsing. You are working harder than ever and feeling less in control than ever.
State Two
Starvation
Great service. Real team. Working systems. Thin pipeline. Competitors who are objectively worse are growing faster, and you cannot name the mechanism. Revenue is steady but flat. The team is waiting. You are the bottleneck of growth itself.
You do not have a discipline problem. You do not have a mindset problem.
You have a structure problem.
Ideas arrive faster than the day can hold them. You see connections other people miss. You carry more unfinished projects than you would ever admit out loud.
That wiring is not a flaw to fix. It is horsepower without traction — and this framework is the traction.
Inside the guide.
Two States. One Diagnosis.
Every founder who has ever scaled a real business has passed through Indigestion or Starvation. Name yours.
Who This Is For.
Three founder tiers, from solo to growth-stage. Plus a word for the founder whose ideas arrive faster than the day can hold them.
The Diagnostic. In Detail.
What each state really looks like — and the expensive wrong move founders make in each.
The Five-Step System.
Audit. Separate. Translate. Build. Reclaim. The full framework, held back from nothing.
The Window Is Open.
The last time a window like this opened, internet real estate made the people who acted early. This window is bigger.
What This Produces.
Six measurable outcomes. Numbers earned, not promised.
The Founding 100.
The first commercial cohort MentorMe has ever opened — and the free path that exists beside it.
Plus: the honest map of which AI to use for what, the compounding effect most founders miss, and your Founder's Pitch — the line you'll want every conversation to end with.
From the author
“I started at thirteen, selling candy out of my backpack. At fifteen I was flipping penny internet domains into real money — my first lesson that the internet has real estate, and the people who see value early get to build on the best corners. Twenty-five years of building later, this guide is everything I know about getting a founder out of the middle of their own business. I wrote it for the younger version of me — the one who missed dinners he cannot get back.”
Italo Campilii — Co-founder, MentorMe. 25+ years building businesses. Former CMO of a billion-dollar family firm. BBA, Information Systems.
Why one dollar?
A dollar is not a business model. It is a handshake. It keeps this guide in front of the founders who will actually read it, and it lets us earn your trust the honest way — by being useful first. If the guide does not give you back at least one evening, write to me. I read every message.
Secure checkout via Stripe. Instant PDF download. No subscription, no upsell at checkout.