Get Sh!t Done

Before a lot of women founders take an investor meeting, we text each other one question: "Have you ever met with him?"That text exists because the institutions around us don't protect us. When the person you'd have to report is the person deciding whether your company gets funded, staying quiet stops being a choice and becomes survival, for you and for everyone who depends on your business.This month, a lawsuit at Cornell alleges that seven fraternity members drugged and gang raped a student and invited the rest of the house to join through a group chat. It raised the same question for anyone building inside an elite institution: who does the system actually protect? So we're re-releasing our conversation on sexual harassment while fundraising. Alex Batdorf, a three-time founder with one exit, sits down with Helena Fogarty and Megan French Dunbar, to share their own accounts of what happened to them while they were raising money for their companies.What We Break Down:The Whisper Network as Due Diligence: Why women founders vet investors through private group chats, and what it costs us to do the institution's job for free.The Math Behind Staying Quiet: Startups founded entirely by women get about 1% of venture dollars. When capital is that scarce, reporting the person who controls it can cost you the company.Who Gets Treated as the Risk: Research puts false reports between 2% and 10%, yet according to RAINN, 975 of every 1,000 perpetrators walk free. Women are still the ones treated as liars.What Happens in Public Tells You About Private: Alex shares how the man who assaulted her did it in front of a group of people, and what that kind of boldness says about the culture that allowed it.Why This Isn't Men vs. Women: Someone in that fraternity captured the Snapchat, and that screenshot is now at the center of the case. Changing this culture takes more people willing to break the silence, and institutions that make it safe to do so.This episode is for you if you've ever weighed whether to take a meeting with an investor you'd heard things about, if you've stayed quiet about something because the person responsible had a say in your funding, or if you lead an accelerator, fund or university and want to understand what your founders may not be telling you.Read the full piece, free on Substack, on how institutions protect predators and what it will take to build a culture of consent instead.If this episode brings anything up for you, RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline is 800-656-HOPE.Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Your business still runs through you, and you're starting to feel it. The instincts that got you off the ground, like control, urgency and owning every detail, are the same ones that can quietly cap how far your business grows.The startup world keeps rewarding those instincts anyway. Investors still picture a certain kind of founder, and some of the most celebrated founders of the last decade, from Theranos to FTX, played that role right up until it all came apart.Susanna Kislenko has spent her career studying why. She founded the Founder Leadership Research Lab at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and has interviewed founders in more than 30 countries. In this episode, Alex and Susanna dig into founder syndrome: what it is, why it happens, and how to catch it before your business can't grow without you.What We Break Down:The Question That Reveals Founder Syndrome: Susanna asks every founder whether they see themselves more as a founder or a leader, and who their hero is. The answers tell her more than most founders realize.When Startup Strengths Become Growth Limits: How the control you needed early turns into a bottleneck later, even at companies with thousands of employees where nobody can move without the founder's approval.What Happens to the People Inside: Susanna's research on star hires who get recruited hard, then diminished once they arrive.How Elizabeth Holmes Became Steve Jobs: Why Holmes pitched Boston first, what happened when the experts said no, and what she changed about herself to get funded in Palo Alto.The Founder Pedestal: How loyal executives, boards, funders and lists like Forbes 30 Under 30 protect founders until they get caught, and why Alex calls that list the next America's Most Wanted.Leading Without the Pedestal: What leader-first founders do differently, including reviews where the team evaluates the founder too.Continue with this week's free Growth Playbook: We take the story one step further by exploring how founder syndrome starts, why the ecosystem keeps rewarding it, and what it costs a business that can't grow past its founder, then give you one concrete move to make in your own business this week.Read the free Growth Playbook on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/Want support putting it into action? Paid GSD members get the accountability, connections and support to keep moving. That includes a monthly Community Traction Lab to work through real business challenges together, a quarterly Growth Planning Party to review progress and plan what's next, feedback and introductions from other founders, and our full library of classes, templates and Playbooks.

Alex Schinasi built Hulken into an eight-figure business with two employees, and she didn't spend a dollar on ads for the first two years. She grew it niche by niche: one DM from a thrifter turned into a partnership offer from Poshmark. She did the same thing with makeup artists, then professional organizers. This momentum later turned into major brand deals with brands like Supreme.In this episode, Alex walks through how that thrifter DM turned into Poshmark reaching out to her, why she waited until Hulken was mid eight figures to spend a dollar on branding, the exact return she required before she'd let a channel that was already converting organically become a paid one, and how shes's scalin to $100M with > 10 employees.What We Break Down:The Niche Before The Budget: why Alex built her acquisition engine on niches small enough to win one person at a time, not audiences big enough to need an ad budget.The Free Ask That Wasn't a Favor: what she offered thrifters and makeup artists, and why it solved a real problem instead of asking for content in return.The 5-to-1 Rule: the exact return she required before turning on paid ads for a channel already converting for free.Profit First, Every Time: why she never raised outside funding for Hulken, and what her family's manufacturing relationship made possible instead.Eight Figures, Eight People: how she's staying intentionally small, using agencies instead of headcount, and why she thinks she can hit nine figures under ten employees.Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where Alex's story becomes a repeatable system for finding the customer group already pulling your product forward, before you spend a dollar promoting it. Paid subscribers also get The Collective, our private founder community, where you can bring your niche list and get real feedback before you make the ask.Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Burnt out, overwhelmed, optimistic but feeling meeehhh? That's what founders in the Get Sh!t Done community have been telling Alex the last few weeks.Deals may be taking longer to close right now, no matter your stage, no matter how long you've been doing this. And the instinct when things get harder is to grip tighter and try to do more of it alone. Alex's answer is the opposite: stop trying to do this by yourself, and start building channel partners, the strategic partnerships where you're usually not even exchanging money, just access.In this episode, Alex walks through her full 7-step Channel Partner Framework, goal, offer, who, partner types, short list, ask, and activation, and tells the real stories behind how she's developed channel partnerships and how brands you know of have.What We Break Down:The Goal Before the Ask: why the founders who actually land partners get quantified before they ever reach out, not after.The Offer That Isn't Tit for Tat: how to build something a partner says yes to that isn't a mirror trade.The Who and the Seven Partner Types: the categories of channel partners most founders never think to pitch, including two that are probably already inside your target company right now.The Ask, In Alex's Actual Words: the exact phrasing she uses to open a partnership conversation.The Follow-Up Gap: the one habit almost every founder skips, and the number that proves it.SipFit x Google: how one free office fitting through a single contact became a nationwide channel, then a client relationship.Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where Alex breaks down all 7 steps of the Get Sh!t Done Channel Partner Framework with a real action for each one, plus copy-and-send outreach templates so you can build your own partner list this week. Paid subscribers also get The Collective, our private founder community, where three members are already building their own partner lists together after this week's coaching call.Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/

Dolly Parton passed away on August 25th. By the time she did, this woman who started out as the fourth of twelve kids in rural Tennessee had built an estimated net worth of $450 million.So how did she get there? Beyond having an incredible, game-changing career, she stopped trying to do everything herself, and she built the capacity to prosper, and to circulate that prosperity back out to the people around her.This week, Alex walks through Dolly Parton's entire business journey using the Get Sh!t Done Prosperity Ecosystem, the five-pillar framework this whole show is built on: vision, oxygen, capacity, prosperity, and stewardship. From the radio show her Uncle Bill got her onto at 10 years old, to the song credited to him instead of her because she was too young to sign her own publishing contract, to the night she said no to Elvis Presley's team and reportedly cried through it, to an estimated $165 million theme park stake she never had to run herself.What We Break Down:The ownership lesson she learned at 13: Why "Puppy Love," the first song Dolly ever wrote, was legally credited to her Uncle Bill instead of her, and why that shaped how she handled every deal after it.The night she said no to Elvis: The real story behind refusing to hand over half the publishing rights to "I Will Always Love You," and the $3 million lawsuit from Porter Wagoner that came before it.How she built capacity beyond herself: Sandollar Productions, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Dollywood partnership with the Herschend family that turned into an estimated $165 million stake she never had to run day to day.What $450 million actually bought her: How a $120 million song catalog and a theme park she didn't personally operate turned into freedom, not just money.What she did with all of it: The Buddy Program, the Imagination Library, and why Dolly's giving looked structurally different from most celebrity philanthropy.Paid Subscribers Get Access To: this week's Growth Playbook, where we break down How to Build Capacity by Developing the Right Partnerships, a specific way to identify the one asset only you bring and find the right partner to build the rest with you, plus access to The Collective to workshop your own capacity gap with other founders doing the same work.Learn More + Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://shegetsshitdone.substack.com/