What Are You Actually Building?

Another month with The Huddle, Boulder

This month we had a new face in the room. A contractor who builds fences and does metal fabrication, sitting alongside a realtor, a couple of media operators, the president of a pharmacy benefits company, and a founder working in the sciences. On paper, almost none of these businesses have anything to do with each other. In practice, that is exactly why the meeting works.

I have written before about what happens when you put operators from completely different industries in the same room.

The short version: the distance between industries is a feature, not a bug. Someone who has never thought about your business asks the obvious question you stopped asking years ago, and you get unstuck.

This month, something quieter happened. About two hours in, I realized almost everyone at the table was circling the same question from a different direction. Not “how do I get more customers” or “how do I use AI?”

The bigger one sitting underneath all of it: what am I actually building, and who is it for?

One was wrestling with it out loud. Grow into new markets, hire and train a real number two, and eventually sell to a firm that rolls up businesses like his? Or stay tight, keep quality high, and sell to a local competitor who mostly wants his top-three search ranking? Two very different businesses, two very different daily lives, and the strategy you pick today quietly decides which one you are building long before you ever sell anything.

I am in the same seat with the podcast network. I could try to build a tens of million dollar a year agency. I do not want to. I want a few million in revenue, a great life, and to pay my friends well while we professionalize a corner of an industry we love. Saying that out loud in the room mattered, because it changes every decision downstream: who I hire, what I sell, how hard I push, and what I say no to.

Another in the group is reeling things in rather than spreading out. Even the early-stage idea one of us is workshopping came down to the same fork: narrow to a single vertical, or stay broad. Same question, five different costumes.

Most of us do not have a tactics problem. We have plenty of tactics. We have a clarity problem. We are so busy working in the business that we never stop to decide what the business is supposed to become, so we drift toward whatever is loudest that week. A room full of smart people from other industries cannot answer “what are you building” for you. But they will not let you keep avoiding the question, and they have a way of reflecting back the answer you have already half-decided but have not said out loud yet.

Everyone left with something to chew on before next month; a question worth sitting with.

I sat with mine. It sharpened two nights later, in a different room entirely.

My friend Richey Hansen, who runs a fund called Ola Capital and whose advisory team I am joining, invited me to a health tech happy hour and spent the evening introducing me to other VCs and founders. Ola invests where athletic performance and healthy aging converge. Afterward he put words to something I had never quite named for myself. He called me a super connector, and said that of every role you can play for a business, the connector is the most valuable one: the link to capital, to advisors, to customers, to the next hire, to the media that will carry the story.

It stuck with me because it was true, and because it answered the question I had been circling all week. Underneath the podcast network, The Huddle, and the advising, the thing I am actually building is a place in the middle, the connective tissue between people who should know each other. The network connects brands to audiences. The Huddle connects operators. The advising connects founders to capital (and other things). Same instinct, different flavor, and it is the part of all of it I love most. The revenue is how it stays alive, and the connection is the point. Sometimes what you are building is not a company you eventually sell. It is a role you grow into, a spot in a network that gets more valuable the longer you stand in it.

Saying that is the easy part. The real test comes when it starts working, when there is enough money on the table to chase the bigger, less personal version. That is when I find out if I meant it.

We have room for one or two more in the Boulder cohort, a budding in-person cohort in Boston, and new virtual cohorts for people outside those areas. If you think about your business strategically and have real decision-making authority, whether you are a solo operator, running a small team, or leading a division inside a bigger company, this might be for you. Fill out the short form at findmyhuddle.com and we will set up a call to see if it is a fit.

Know someone who would get something out of a room like this? Pass it along.

Jon Levitt is the founder of Long Run Labs, an endurance and outdoor podcast network, and the host of For The Long Run. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.