When a top performer hands in their notice, the instinct is to look inward.

Why do high performers leave? Why did my best employee quit? Why are my best employees leaving right after their biggest wins? The answer most organizations reach for is familiar: compensation, culture, management, growth path. Sometimes it is those things.

But there is a pattern showing up inside high-performing teams that none of those explanations account for. It tends to strike at the worst possible moment — right after a major win.

The record quarter. The product launch that exceeded every target. The employee who finally got the promotion they worked years toward. The top performer who delivered their best year on record and handed in their notice two months later. On paper, everything was going right, which is exactly what makes this pattern so hard to see and so costly when you miss it.

I have spent years documenting this. What I keep finding is not a management story. It is a biology story that organizations have never been given the language to understand.

Why top performers quit after their biggest wins

For months leading up to a major goal, the brain runs on a specific neurochemical cocktail. Dopamine drives the pursuit. Adrenaline sharpens focus. Cortisol sustains the pressure. Your top performers are running on all three, and they are exceptionally good at it. That capacity is precisely what makes them top performers.

When the goal lands, all three drop. Fast.

The target disappears. Dopamine has nothing left to anticipate. What follows is what researchers call post-achievement depression, or the success crash: a biological comedown that hits hardest in the people who drove hardest to get there. It is why top performers leave after hitting their biggest goals, why an employee who just delivered a record quarter starts looking distracted two months later, why the person who crossed every finish line on the roadmap suddenly cannot seem to find their footing.

According to NIH research on burnout and the HPA axis, chronic stress leads to a predictable progression of elevated cortisol followed by exhaustion and suppressed function. Your best people have been running that system at full capacity. The finish line removes the reason it was running. It does not turn the system off.

The result looks like disengagement. It gets treated like a management problem. It is neither.

The people most likely to crash are your best ones

This is the part most retention conversations miss entirely.

The people most likely to crash after a big win are not your struggling employees. They are your best ones. The ones who care the most, push the hardest and have tied the most of their identity to what they deliver. Google’s research found that top performers produce up to 400% more than the average employee. That output does not come free. It comes from a brain that has been running in sustained pursuit mode, often for months, with the finish line as the only thing keeping the system calibrated.

When the finish line disappears, so does the calibration.

And the standard organizational response — celebrate the win and immediately load them up with the next project — is the fastest way to accelerate the crash. You are not giving them momentum. You are removing their recovery window and handing them a bill they do not yet have the capacity to pay.

Left unaddressed, this is not just a retention problem. The World Health Organization estimates that in a company of 1,000 employees, 1 worker will die by suicide every 10 years, and for every 1 who does, another 10 to 20 will have made an attempt. The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies management occupations as having the highest share of workplace suicides, and workers in finance and insurance, where many of your highest performers sit, face suicide rates more than three times the national workplace average.

These are not numbers about weak people or troubled people. They are numbers about driven people who were never given the tools to come down from the level they were asked to sustain.

What it costs when you miss it

Losing a top performer costs a minimum of three times their annual salary in recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity and institutional knowledge that walks out with them. That is the financial cost, and it is the one that gets tracked.

The more expensive cost does not show up in any dashboard. When your highest performers quietly disengage before they leave, the organization loses its engine while the metrics still look fine. Teams feel it before leadership sees it. And by the time anyone acts, the person is already halfway out. The managers who ask why their best employee quit after their best year are asking exactly the right question. They are just asking it too late, and looking for the answer in the wrong place.

Seventy-five percent of voluntary departures are preventable. Three out of four resignations did not have to happen. The conversation around top talent retention almost always starts too late and looks in the wrong direction. And almost none of it accounts for whether the departure followed a major win.

The ones that do look in the right direction have something in common.

What organizations need to build that almost none of them have

The organizations that keep top talent through high-output cycles are not doing it with better perks or faster promotions. They are doing it by building something most companies have never considered: a plan for what comes after the win.

That plan has three components. The first is awareness. Every leader and every executive needs to understand what the post-win crash actually is, what it feels like from the inside and why the people most likely to experience it are the people they can least afford to lose. Without that foundation, every other intervention is guesswork.

The second is a structured window. Every major win should come with an intentional recovery period, anywhere from 48 hours to seven days, where the expectation shifts from acceleration to integration. Not a vacation. Not a performance review. A guided process built around three questions every leader should be asking their top performers after a major finish: What did this cost you? What part of this actually mattered? What do you need before you can give us full energy again? Each person’s answer looks different. That is the point. A one-size retention policy does not account for the fact that the biological cost of finishing something significant is personal, cumulative and different for every high performer on your team.

The third is someone who can walk them through it. Employee retention starts with leadership, but leaders cannot guide people through a cycle they were never taught to recognize in themselves. The way you manage energy across your team after a major finish is not a wellness initiative. It is a skill. And like every skill, it improves when someone names what is happening, provides the right tools and creates space to actually use them.

Your best people are not leaving because of you.

They are leaving because nobody, including them, understood what finishing something that hard was going to cost. Nobody taught them how to come down. And nobody in your organization had a plan for the part that comes after the win.

That changes when we decide it does. And the cost of waiting is higher than most organizations have been willing to look at directly.

When a top performer hands in their notice, the instinct is to look inward.

Why do high performers leave? Why did my best employee quit? Why are my best employees leaving right after their biggest wins? The answer most organizations reach for is familiar: compensation, culture, management, growth path. Sometimes it is those things.

But there is a pattern showing up inside high-performing teams that none of those explanations account for. It tends to strike at the worst possible moment — right after a major win.

We’re living in the best time to build software. AI writes code faster than any team can review it, development cycles have collapsed, and barriers to shipping have never been lower. 

With the rise of vibe coding, almost anyone can be a coder now, and the market is already reflecting that. Twenty-five percent of Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 startups had codebases that were 95% AI-generated.

The first version of a product has never been easier to create. But software isn’t judged by how fast it shows up in a repo. It’s judged by whether it holds up once real users, real data and real attackers arrive.

However, every superpower comes with a blind spot — and ours is quality. Building got easy. Verifying that what we built actually works did not. In 2026, it quietly moved up the org chart. It’s no longer just an engineering problem. It’s a founder problem, too.

When quality breaks, the business breaks

A December 2025 analysis of 470 open-source pull requests found that AI-co-authored code contained roughly 1.7 times more issues than human-written code, with security vulnerabilities at up to 2.74 times the rate. 

At the speed teams are now shipping, the cost of missing quality shows up in ways that are hard to recover from.

• Security breaches: The assumption that AI-generated code is production-ready is one of the most expensive mistakes a team can make. Lovable, a popular vibe coding platform, had critical security vulnerabilities in over 10% of the live apps sampled from its own showcase. The root cause wasn’t a sophisticated attack. It was AI-generated code that simply skipped basic security configurations.

• Customer trust: Users don’t read incident reports. They don’t care whether the bug came from a human or an AI; they just know the product failed them. Moltbook, one of the most talked-about AI social networks at the time, exposed 1.5 million API tokens and 35,000 email addresses through a single misconfigured database in AI-generated code. The reputational damage spread faster than the patch ever could.

• Reputation and investor confidence: Quality failures don’t stay in the engineering team. They show up in board meetings, investor updates and press coverage. In 2026, software quality is a business risk, and founders are accountable for business risk.

• Regulatory and compliance risk: AI doesn’t understand compliance obligations; it just writes code. GDPR, HIPAA, data residency requirements — these don’t come baked into a prompt. And unlike a security breach that shows up quickly, a compliance failure can sit quietly in a codebase for months before anyone notices. By the time it does, it’s not an engineering fix. It’s a legal one.

These look like four different problems. They’re the same one wearing four costumes: speed that outran verification. When nobody owns the gap between how fast you ship and how well you check, it surfaces wherever the business is most exposed.

The accountability gap nobody talks about

In most companies, quality looks covered on paper. There’s a QA team, a review process, a definition of done. But a process that worked when humans wrote every line doesn’t automatically hold when an agent writes 95% of it and a human skims the rest. 

The checks were built for a slower kind of mistake. So when something breaks in production, the fallout doesn’t end at engineering. 

It travels up to the product lead, to the CTO and eventually to the founder. And by the time it gets there, it’s not just a technical problem anymore. It’s a company problem.

What I know from being in this space is that AI has made speed a commodity. Every team is fast now. Every team is shipping. Speed alone will not keep you afloat anymore. What will is quality, and for that, you need the founder in the picture, captaining the boat.

This is something I’ve learned firsthand at TestMu AI. Across hundreds of conversations with engineering and product leaders, from early-stage startups to large enterprises, one thing stays constant. 

The ones shipping with confidence aren’t defined by their size or their headcount. They’re defined by how seriously they take quality. Whether you’re a team of five or 500, quality has to be the goal.

What changes when the founder owns it

Founder-level accountability isn’t about the founder reviewing pull requests. It’s about three shifts in how the company treats quality.

First, quality becomes a number of leadership watches, not a status QA reports once a sprint. If revenue and burn get a dashboard, so should escape rate, security findings and time-to-detection.

Second, AI output gets treated as a draft, not a deliverable. The default assumption is untrusted until verified, the same way you’d treat code from a contractor you’ve never worked with.

Third, verification moves into the pipeline instead of sitting at the end of it. When code is generated continuously, quality has to be checked continuously. A gate at the finish line can’t keep pace with a team shipping every day.

None of this slows you down. It’s what lets a team keep moving fast without quietly betting the company on code nobody actually verified.

The assurance gap is real. And it widens every quarter; nobody is watching it. Founders, product teams and engineering leads — everyone has a role in closing it. But it only becomes everyone’s priority when it starts at the top.

We’re living in the best time to build software. AI writes code faster than any team can review it, development cycles have collapsed, and barriers to shipping have never been lower. 

With the rise of vibe coding, almost anyone can be a coder now, and the market is already reflecting that. Twenty-five percent of Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 startups had codebases that were 95% AI-generated.

The first version of a product has never been easier to create. But software isn’t judged by how fast it shows up in a repo. It’s judged by whether it holds up once real users, real data and real attackers arrive.

Selena Gomez faces allegations of fraud from investors in Wondermind, the mental health startup she co-founded, after the company reportedly faced setbacks last year, including layoffs and missed payrolls.

A group of investors in Wondermind filed a lawsuit this week accusing Gomez of failing to follow through on commitments that persuaded them to back the business. They also name Gomez’s mother, Mandy Teefey, and business partner Daniella Pierson, founder of pop culture newsletter Newsette, as defendants in the case.

According to the complaint, which the investors filed on Thursday in Delaware District Court, the plaintiffs expected that Gomez would use her enormous public profile and social media reach to help market Wondermind. Gomez is the most-followed woman on Instagram, with about 404 million followers. She has an audience of 58.7 million followers on TikTok. 

The investors believed that Gomez’s social media platforms would give the young company an immediate marketing advantage and a direct line to a highly engaged audience. 

They argue that Gomez’s role was central to Wondermind’s appeal. Investors said they understood that much of the startup’s early value rested on her involvement, particularly her ability to promote its mental-health content and future products to followers who already trusted and paid attention to her.

They also allege that Wondermind positioned itself as a mental wellness platform that was exploring products like a “groundbreaking” mobile app. They allege that the company ultimately failed to deliver the products and revenue it had projected. 

“The initiatives never materialized,” the investors allege in the complaint. “The app was never built. And for three years, while the company quietly collapsed around them, not one of its founders, officers, or directors said a word to the investors.”

Pierson said in a statement to NBC News that she denies the allegations against her and “welcomes the opportunity to present concrete documentation and financial records that establish the facts.”

“To be clear, she has never used investor funds for personal expenses,” the statement read. “Quite the opposite: Daniella invested her own money into the business and did not draw a salary from the company.”

Other allegations

Gomez started Wondermind in 2021 with the intention of focusing on mindfulness and “mental fitness.” The company sought to promote routines to maintain mental health, just like people use gyms to stay physically fit. 

The startup sought outside funding in 2022 at a reported valuation of $95 million. The suit describes Gomez as the company’s chief impact officer and head of marketing. The investors contend that the venture overstated its prospects, leadership and readiness to build a viable, differentiated mental-health business.

The suit also alleges that Wondermind overstated how far along its business was. Investors claim the company said it had lined up employer partnerships with JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity, while also building revenue through advertising agreements and celebrity-driven cover stories.

According to the investors, they did not learn the extent of Wondermind’s financial and operational problems until a September 2025 investigation by New York magazine’s The Cut. The complaint says the article portrayed Gomez as disengaged from her responsibilities and attempting to distance herself from the company as its condition worsened.

The investors are seeking to recover their investments, which reports put at nearly $1.2 million, along with damages and legal costs. 

Selena Gomez faces allegations of fraud from investors in Wondermind, the mental health startup she co-founded, after the company reportedly faced setbacks last year, including layoffs and missed payrolls.

A group of investors in Wondermind filed a lawsuit this week accusing Gomez of failing to follow through on commitments that persuaded them to back the business. They also name Gomez’s mother, Mandy Teefey, and business partner Daniella Pierson, founder of pop culture newsletter Newsette, as defendants in the case.

According to the complaint, which the investors filed on Thursday in Delaware District Court, the plaintiffs expected that Gomez would use her enormous public profile and social media reach to help market Wondermind. Gomez is the most-followed woman on Instagram, with about 404 million followers. She has an audience of 58.7 million followers on TikTok. 

The right message and the wrong method lead nowhere: The problem isn’t what you said. The problem begins before you even open your mouth.

When you discuss things with your staff or with your customers, do you listen to what they say? Do you pay attention, or do you just wait for your turn to present your ideas?

Are you a leader who just waits for your turn to speak and puts all your effort into getting your employees to like you? But the most important question to ask yourself is: Do you want your employees to like what you say or what you execute?

Why mirror method works

One of the most effective communication methods to try is the mirror method, focused on reverse communication. Let’s say a person comes to you with a problem. They explain the problem in detail while you carefully listen without interruption.

Once they’re fully done with expressing the problem, it’s your turn. Tell them their exact problem in detail, but use technical vocabulary relevant to your industry.

According to psychologist Carl Rogers, people are more likely to accept change and direction when they feel understood and not evaluated. In his person-centered theory, Rogers argues that psychological safety is built on reflective listening.

To increase the feeling of psychological safety in the business environment you lead, the first step is to master the skill of reflective listening.

Reflecting back on their problem ensures you several things:

• They comprehend that you’ve listened carefully and deduce that you care enough for them, which makes them feel heard and safer in your environment.
• They comprehend that you understand their problem, and they start building trust in you as an expert in the field.
• They are ready to act with less defense and more trust towards a person who knows about their problems as much as they do.

In the context of a doctor’s office, for example, this translates to: If this doctor knows my problem better than I do, they must be the person capable of fixing it!

How to make reverse communication part of your leading system

In businesses, staff often refuse to execute proposed tasks not because the tasks feel too difficult, but because they don’t feel heard. They don’t feel psychological safety in that environment. They don’t feel their reality is acknowledged before a new task is proposed.

When you apply the reverse communication method — listen first, and reflect back at them — they will generally respond with less pushback. This method may look like people-pleasing, but the two have completely different goals.

The reverse communication method is different from people-pleasing. If you’re a people-pleaser, your ultimate goal is to fit in and reduce your own anxiety from potential pushback. When you apply the reverse communication method, your immediate goal is to get staff in a psychologically safe state, where they’re the most receptive to taking instructions and executing.

While Rogers proves why the mirror method works psychologically, former FBI negotiator Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference, explores why the method works strategically. According to him, mirroring is one of the most powerful communication tools, and it has nothing to do with people-pleasing. It disarms people and makes them ready to move forward.

Do you want your business to move forward? It can’t be done without effective leader-team communication. Use the mirror method as your leadership strategy to build an environment focused on safety. It is what your staff and even your customers need.

Leaders don’t need likes

The purpose of the mirror method isn’t to make your staff like you. You don’t need staff to be your friends, and neither do they need you. You’re not there to be liked. You’re there to lead and to be respected.

Sometimes, likability can be a byproduct of respect built through an environment that makes people feel heard. But it should never be the goal.  

When the building is on fire, nobody looks for the leader they like. They look for the leader who will make the right call. The mirror method helps you gain respect from your staff. People-pleasing doesn’t. One signals that you see and understand the staff clearly. The other signals that you constantly agree with them despite logic.

Create a performance culture

When applied consistently and on all business levels, the mirror method has a strong impact on your business culture. Your staff stops performing for approval and starts performing for purpose. Top performers want to know where they’re going and that their leader sees them clearly enough to get them there.

Comfort was never a motivation for people at the top. Highest achieving professionals wake up every day asking themselves where their career is going, what is the next challenge, and if their current leader is the one to take them to the top. A performance culture built on reverse communication answers all three questions even before they are asked.

When your staff feels heard and seen, the environment shifts. Structure appears as safety, and safety boosts motivation. The performance follows.

Conclusion

The mirror method isn’t a soft leadership tactic. It is the ultimate respect that you can give staff (and even customers), and as a by-product, improve performance from staff (and even customer conversions).

See your people clearly. Reflect them accurately. Then lead them somewhere worth going.

The best businesses are never the ones with the best individuals. The best businesses are the ones with leaders who can see the individuals clearly to make the systems work for them.

The right message and the wrong method lead nowhere: The problem isn’t what you said. The problem begins before you even open your mouth.

When you discuss things with your staff or with your customers, do you listen to what they say? Do you pay attention, or do you just wait for your turn to present your ideas?

Are you a leader who just waits for your turn to speak and puts all your effort into getting your employees to like you? But the most important question to ask yourself is: Do you want your employees to like what you say or what you execute?

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The trendiest new AI chatbot is just 10,000 human volunteers manually answering your questions. 

Former Google project manager Tucker Bryant recently created an AI chatbot called ChatTJB that doesn’t use AI at all. Instead, the AI stands for “Average Individual.” 

The project started in April with him on the other side of the screen, manually answering questions. ChatTJB looked uncannily like the AI assistants Silicon Valley has poured trillions of dollars into building. A user typed a question into a plain chat box, waited a moment and got a response.

The project exploded after Bryant spent $6,000 on a San Francisco billboard promoting ChatTJB in late July. Since it went up, the site has received more than 100,000 prompts, he told Fortune, while the volunteer list has been growing by about 1,000 names a day. At the time of writing, Bryant has paused ChatTJB in response to the surge in traffic. 

The project is notable because instead of machines replacing people, people are lining up to act like machines.

From satire to sincerity

One message in particular changed how Bryant viewed the project. On the first night of their honeymoon, a user wrote in to say they couldn’t fully relax and asked whether that was normal. 

Bryant said it was the moment ChatTJB began to feel less like surreal satire and more like a place where people genuinely wanted to talk to “a well-meaning, if undeniably average, human being.”

ChatTJB was never meant to be a business. But its sudden popularity has created opportunities Bryant didn’t necessarily expect.

“I’ve had a couple of conversations with people interested in working on the project in different ways,” he said. Even so, he still sees ChatTJB as a temporary art project, one of several ideas he wants to explore. 

That said, he isn’t ruling anything out. “If the right partner wanted to help turn this into a sustainable project, I’d love to talk with them,” Bryant said.

The risk of outsourcing thought

The idea for ChatTJB grew out of Bryant’s unease with how easily people can hand everyday decisions over to AI without pausing to question its answer.

He told Wired that he caught himself asking an AI chatbot if he should wear short sleeves or long sleeves on a 65-degree day in a city where he had lived for seven years. His partner had a name for that habit: “cognitive surrender.”

The term comes from research by Wharton professors Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave, who studied what happens when people lean too heavily on AI guidance.

“When people hear the term, they immediately recognize the phenomenon, both in others and often in themselves,” Shaw told Fortune. “Academic work can define and measure a phenomenon, but art can communicate its emotional stakes in a way that a research paper rarely can.”

The trendiest new AI chatbot is just 10,000 human volunteers manually answering your questions. 

Former Google project manager Tucker Bryant recently created an AI chatbot called ChatTJB that doesn’t use AI at all. Instead, the AI stands for “Average Individual.” 

The project started in April with him on the other side of the screen, manually answering questions. ChatTJB looked uncannily like the AI assistants Silicon Valley has poured trillions of dollars into building. A user typed a question into a plain chat box, waited a moment and got a response.

Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.

I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.

The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.

But subtraction has a ceiling, and you hit it faster than you expect. Once the obvious tasks are automated, savings flatten and you are left with a business that is cheaper to run and no more valuable than it was before. Worse, you have trained yourself to see your company as a pile of tasks to be eliminated rather than a set of judgments only you can make.

The founders pulling ahead are running a different play. Microsoft studied AI users this year and found that the most effective ones were not the people completing more tasks faster. They were the people who stopped asking what tasks define their job and started asking what outcomes they were now positioned to drive. The agents handle the mechanics. The human moves up the stack to intent, taste, and judgment.

That is not a soft distinction. It is the entire game.

Automation raises the stakes on judgment; it does not remove them.

Here is the part the cost-cutting crowd misses. The more work your agents execute, the more expensive your mistakes in judgment become. A bad decision used to ship at human speed, caught by the three people it passed through on the way out. A bad decision handed to an agent ships at machine speed, across every channel, before anyone blinks.

You do not get to delegate the judgment. You get to delegate the labor — and then you are more accountable for the judgment than before, because there is no longer a layer of humans between your intent and the market.

This is why founders who treat agents as a license to disengage are setting a trap for themselves. They are scaling their own blind spots. An agent will execute a flawed strategy with perfect efficiency and total confidence. It will never walk into your office and say this feels wrong.

What to automate, and what to guard.

The discipline is not complicated, but it requires resisting the pressure to automate by default.

Automate the mechanics. Research, transcription, data retrieval, first drafts, lead enrichment, scheduling — the repeatable workflows that drain hours and require no taste. Start with one workflow, give it narrow permissions, keep a human approval checkpoint, and measure what actually changes over thirty days. The teams that win here keep the stack small and the workflow documented before adding complexity. Stable systems beat sleek demos.

Guard the judgment. The decisions about what your company stands for, which customers you will not serve, when the data is telling you something the model cannot see, what tradeoff is worth making and what line you will not cross. These are not inefficiencies to be optimized away. They are the reason your business exists rather than a competitor’s. Microsoft’s own data names the limit clearly: agents still fall short on tasks requiring deep empathy, emotional intelligence, and nuanced social understanding. That is not a temporary gap. That is your job description.

The strategic move in 2026 is to use agents to buy back the hours you were spending on mechanics, and then to spend those hours on the judgment work you were too busy to do well. Most founders will do the first half and pocket the time as savings. The ones who compound will reinvest it.

Automation is becoming a baseline, not an advantage. When every business in your category can deploy the same agents at the same cost, the agents stop being a differentiator. What remains scarce is exactly what cannot be automated: the quality of your judgment, the clarity of your intent, the taste with which you decide what is worth doing at all.

So by all means, deploy the agents. Cut the busywork. Reclaim the hours. But do not mistake a cheaper company for a stronger one. The founders who win the next few years will not be the ones who automated the most. They will be the ones who automated everything except the thinking — and then got dramatically better at the thinking.

That is the asset no agent can run while you sleep. Make sure you are still the one holding it.

Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.

I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.

The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Portland, Oregon-based entrepreneur Lauren McDuffie, 42. McDuffie and her cousin Rachel Albers, 49, co-founded Dressy, a line of superfood-forward salad dressing mixes that can be prepared quickly and easily at home, this past June. Following a $12,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign, Dressy launched as a side hustle and made $2,500 within its first few weeks. Now the business is projected to see about $30,000 in revenue by the end of the year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
Before launching Dressy, I spent more than a decade building a career as a food writer, recipe developer, cookbook author and photographer. Through my recipe website, My Kitchen Little, and my cookbooks, I worked to help people make home cooking feel more approachable and interesting. 

Running a recipe website gave me firsthand experience at building an online brand, creating content and understanding how busy people actually use their kitchens. Dressy grew very naturally out of that work; it felt less like swapping careers and more like solving a problem that had been bugging me for years. 

Rachel, who is an attorney by education, had ended a long career working as a political consultant and was preparing to send one of her sons off to college. She shared with me over coffee one morning that she was ready for something new, and I realized that working with her — combining our different skill sets, experience, interests and aptitudes — would make for a great partnership. 

Starting a superfood-packed side hustle

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
We officially launched Dressy on June 1, 2026, but I first had the idea in the fall of 2024. Again and again, I noticed the same disconnect: People were willing to make homemade pasta sauces and fresh breads from scratch, but when it came to salad dressing, even enthusiastic home cooks almost always reached for a store-bought bottle. 

I realized it wasn’t because people preferred bottled dressing. It was because homemade dressings, while mostly simple, still require keeping a long list of fresh ingredients on hand, unless you just use oil and vinegar all the time — which is great but somewhat boring after a while. So I started asking myself what homemade dressing might look like if it were designed (or re-designed, really) for modern life.

The answer eventually became Dressy: clean, flavor-forward, superfood-boosted dressing mixes that let people make fresh dressing in less than a minute with just one staple ingredient they likely already have. Each Dressy pouch contains everything you need to create a fresh, flavorful dressing at home. Our flavors – Hello, Ranch, Green Goodness, and Sundress – are made with thoughtfully chosen ingredients and designed to deliver the flavor of homemade.

Investing $30,000 to launch the side hustle

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money/investment did it take to launch?
The first step was trademarking our name. Not to be all, “it came to me in a dream,” but it actually did. So, I scooped it up. The next step was validating that the problem was real. Before we worried about packaging or branding, we spent time asking if we were solving something people actually struggled with. I’d spent a long time watching others embrace homemade versions of almost everything — except salad dressing. That observation gave me enough confidence to believe there was a real opportunity to rethink the category.

From there, we focused on building the brand very thoughtfully, keeping operations as lean as possible and investing in things that we truly saw as mission critical. We invested in recipe development with food scientists that involved a lot of testing and iterating, as getting our flavors just right was a non-negotiable.

Every decision has to earn its place

It was also extremely important to me to invest in custom packaging and branding right out of the gate, and we did so by working with a fantastic Portland-based graphic design firm (Perspektiiv). We began sourcing high-quality ingredients and focused on obtaining them from local companies to keep shipping costs as low as possible. Because Dressy is a food product, there was also a significant amount of (less exciting) operational and structural work behind the scenes, from regulatory requirements, labeling and researching commercial production options to finding the right suppliers and manufacturing partners. 

By the time Dressy launched, we’d invested approximately $30,000 into the business. The majority has been self-funded, with about $10,000 coming from a small friends-and-family fundraising round. When you’re spending your own money, every decision has to earn its place, so we fully gamed things out all along the way. I’d like to think this approach shaped the bones of the company in ways that will pay off down the line.

Scaling a CPG business with intenti0n

Are there any free or paid resources that have been especially helpful for you in starting and running this business? 
One of the most valuable resources early on was simply talking to people who have done it before. We sought advice from experienced CPG founders and fractional consultants who were generous enough to share what they’d learned, and those conversations helped us avoid some costly mistakes. 

We also chose to work with the Food Innovation Center at Oregon State University, which was an incredible resource throughout our product development process. Many land-grant universities and schools with strong agricultural or food science programs offer benchtop product development services, food safety expertise, and both technical and business support for entrepreneurs, often at a much lower cost than private consulting firms. For anyone thinking about starting a food business, I would absolutely encourage them to see what resources their state’s universities have available.

We also partnered with the consulting firm, FoodWit, whose guidance gave us confidence that our packaging and labels met FDA requirements before launch. Having knowledgeable experts in areas where we aren’t specialists allows us to move much more confidently.

More than anything, though, and at the risk of sounding platitudinal, I think curiosity has been our greatest resource. We’re deeply aware of how much we don’t know when it comes to running and scaling a CPG business. So, we ask a bunch of questions and try to talk to as many people as we can all of the time. We read a lot, scan the forums over on StartupCPG (also a great resource) and try not to assume we have to figure everything out on our own. Every conversation with someone a few steps ahead of us shortens our learning curve.

Don’t rush to a quick fix when things go wrong

Can you recall a specific instance when something went very wrong — how did you fix it?
One of our biggest early setbacks came before launch when the commercial kitchen we’d planned to use for first run production unexpectedly became unavailable. Overnight, we lost the manufacturing plan we’d spent months preparing around and had to find an entirely new path forward.

It was tempting to look for a quick fix, but we’d been very intentional about staying lean in the early stages of the business. Rather than rushing into a co-manufacturer before we felt we’d truly established product-market fit, we doubled down on our original philosophy of protecting our capital and proving the concept first. We found another commercial kitchen, adapted our process and kept production in-house.

Raising $12k on Kickstarter, making over $2k in weeks

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the side hustle earn?
We’re still in the early stages of building the business — it’s only month two — so for us success right now isn’t only, or even primarily, measured in revenue. We’re focused on repeat customers, word-of-mouth sales, retailer conversations and proving people genuinely come back once they’ve tried the product.

The month prior to launching, we successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign, raising $12,000 while also being selected as a coveted “Project We Love” by the editors. This was a fantastic early signal that people would respond positively to our brand and products. 

We launched in June very softly, with lowkey announcements, but still made a quick $2,500 within the first few weeks, selling out of our limited-edition summer flavor, Sundress. We are preparing to roll out a local retail launch next month, will be selling at the Portland Night Market this fall and are kicking off a sustained, focused advertising push as well. As such, our projected 2026 revenue (first six months post launch) is somewhere around $30,000.

Steady and controlled growth and revenue

What does growth and revenue look like now? 
The words that come to mind are steady and controlled. We’ve been very careful not to overstretch our skis when it comes to our operational and production capacities, so that’s what I mean when I say we launched quietly. But transparently, this decision was largely due to the fact that we’re both moms and have very busy schedules in the summer that involve a lot of travel. That’s just the truth of it, and we mutually agreed to avoid hitting the gas until the busy season had passed. 

At this point, though, we’ve had two months to understand how consumers respond when they discover our dressing mixes organically — and the response has been incredible. I’m excited to see what the fall season brings now that we can take our feet off the brakes and let it rip. 

No two days look alike while running a side hustle

What does a typical week working on this side hustle look like?
Right now, Dressy is still in its early stages, so no two days look alike. Some weeks I spend time in our commercial kitchen making product, while others I focus on recipe development, photography, social media marketing, customer service or meeting with partners. Since it’s just the two of us running the show right now, we wear a lot of hats.

That said, I’ve learned that being productive isn’t the same thing as being busy. At this stage, I’m constantly asking myself what will actually move the business forward the most. Sometimes that’s developing a new recipe and sometimes it’s simply having a conversation that influences how I think about the business. I’ve become much more intentional about protecting my energy and focusing on the work that creates the greatest momentum.

The opposite of a grind — and the value in better questions

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
I’ve wanted to create a brand and business like this for the majority of my life. So witnessing this thing bloom that’s mostly lived inside my head is honestly thrilling. I still kind of can’t believe it. That is easily the thing I enjoy the most. That and running it alongside Rachel. We’ve lived on opposite coasts for our entire lives, but my family moved to the Portland area three years ago, and running this business with her has been so much fun. It’s taken a process that is often described as a grind and made it the exact opposite of that.

What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
The advice I have is a product of having started multiple food businesses, from my career publishing books to my work as a food blogger to now building a CPG company.

Don’t wait until you think you’re ready to ask better questions. Just start talking and don’t stop; make yourself a student of whatever it is you’re trying to achieve or become, and don’t turn that setting off. Find people who are five steps ahead of you, not 50, and ask them anything and everything you want to know. They’re usually the ones who remember exactly what you’re struggling with and what you’re feeling, and they’re often incredibly generous with what they’ve learned. 

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Portland, Oregon-based entrepreneur Lauren McDuffie, 42. McDuffie and her cousin Rachel Albers, 49, co-founded Dressy, a line of superfood-forward salad dressing mixes that can be prepared quickly and easily at home, this past June. Following a $12,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign, Dressy launched as a side hustle and made $2,500 within its first few weeks. Now the business is projected to see about $30,000 in revenue by the end of the year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
Before launching Dressy, I spent more than a decade building a career as a food writer, recipe developer, cookbook author and photographer. Through my recipe website, My Kitchen Little, and my cookbooks, I worked to help people make home cooking feel more approachable and interesting. 

Running a recipe website gave me firsthand experience at building an online brand, creating content and understanding how busy people actually use their kitchens. Dressy grew very naturally out of that work; it felt less like swapping careers and more like solving a problem that had been bugging me for years. 

In science class, you probably learned that rust forms when iron reacts with water and air. Now a tech startup is turning that same reaction into a battery. Form Energy calls the clean-energy process “reversible rusting.” The battery takes in oxygen and turns iron into rust to discharge power, then reverses the process to recharge. The company just raised $750 million, pushing its total funding past $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The batteries last longer than the Energizer Bunny. While standard lithium-ion batteries run for a few hours at a time, Form’s can keep going for 100 hours straight, long enough to get a utility through a multi-day grid emergency like a winter storm.

The money is going toward ramping up manufacturing at Form Energy’s Weirton, West Virginia plant and its first wave of commercial projects, including a 300-megawatt installation with utility Xcel Energy tied to a Google data center in Minnesota. Form’s list of projects lined up to build has quadrupled this year, from 20 to 80 gigawatt-hours, driven largely by the AI data center boom straining the power grid.

In science class, you probably learned that rust forms when iron reacts with water and air. Now a tech startup is turning that same reaction into a battery. Form Energy calls the clean-energy process “reversible rusting.” The battery takes in oxygen and turns iron into rust to discharge power, then reverses the process to recharge. The company just raised $750 million, pushing its total funding past $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The batteries last longer than the Energizer Bunny. While standard lithium-ion batteries run for a few hours at a time, Form’s can keep going for 100 hours straight, long enough to get a utility through a multi-day grid emergency like a winter storm.

The money is going toward ramping up manufacturing at Form Energy’s Weirton, West Virginia plant and its first wave of commercial projects, including a 300-megawatt installation with utility Xcel Energy tied to a Google data center in Minnesota. Form’s list of projects lined up to build has quadrupled this year, from 20 to 80 gigawatt-hours, driven largely by the AI data center boom straining the power grid.