Founder to founder.

I've been starting and running businesses for twenty-six years. For almost all of that time I knew something specific was wrong with how I handled the operational layer: the admin, the follow-through, the contracts, the boring-but-essential work that quietly decides whether a business survives. I was diagnosed with combined-type ADHD in early 2026. The diagnosis explained the pattern. It didn't fix it.

I'd tried to fix it the traditional way long before that. In 2020, running a food business, I knew exactly what I needed: someone to hold the operational side so I could do the part I was actually good at. I tried to solve it with a human partner and I got burned. That's not a complaint about one person. It's the structural problem with the only solution that used to exist. Early-stage founders can't afford a full back office, the affordable help still needs managing (itself an executive-function task), and when a human scaffold fails it takes trust down with it.

Sontra exists because the tooling has finally caught up to what founders like me have always needed. Agent teams don't get bored, don't have a bad week, and don't quit, and they're cheap enough that an early-stage founder can actually run on them. What they need is configuration: someone to capture how a specific brain works and build the system around it. That's the job I've taken on.

One thing to be straight about: my diagnosis is ADHD, and that's the only neurodivergence I can claim lived experience of. Left unchecked, that would quietly drag everything Sontra builds toward ADHD-shaped assumptions, so we treat that pull as a bug and fight it on purpose. Autistic founders, dyslexic founders, dyspraxic founders hit their own versions of the gap, and they don't look like mine. The method starts from how your brain works, not from a template of mine. Where my experience runs out, I say so, and listen harder.

The first and most important user of this system is me. Everything Sontra ships gets run on my own business first, including the messy weeks. If the scaffolding doesn't hold for an ADHD founder under real load, it doesn't ship.

Where the name comes from

Sontra started life as two ideas with names. Sonder, the human half, coaching from lived experience. Traction, the digital half, agents that execute. The names mattered less than the shape, so these days we just describe the two halves plainly. But they're both still in the word, and both still in the product.

Join the waitlist if any of this sounds like your operation, or just email me: [email protected].