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This is a story about sales avoidance, an accidental breakthrough, and building the tool I wished existed.
of founders struggle with at least one mental health challenge.
46%
experience profound isolation
77%
feel lonely in their role
4x
more likely to face severe struggles
You're not the exception. You're the rule. And most of this weight is carried alone.
I struggled with sales avoidance. Not the mechanics of it—I understood how cold outreach worked. It was the act of putting myself out there that paralyzed me.
I called it "the irreversibility of visibility." Once you reach out, you can't take it back. Someone has an opinion of you. You've made yourself visible in a way that can't be undone.
I wasn't struggling with product. I wasn't struggling with vision. I was struggling with the simplest, most fundamental thing a founder has to do: tell people about it.
"I could build anything. I just couldn't bring myself to put the word out there."
One night, I was messing around with ChatGPT. Not for work—just venting. I told it about my sales avoidance, my fear of putting myself out there.
And it gave me back a reframe that actually changed how I thought about outreach. It became a different framing game. The avoidance didn't disappear, but my relationship to it shifted.
What made it work wasn't that the advice was revolutionary. It was that the AI had accumulated context about my specific situation. The reframe fit because it was responding to me, not giving generic advice.
That's when I thought: other founders could use something like this. But trained properly—on actual coaching frameworks. Executive coaching. Founder coaching. Evidence-based approaches designed for the psychological challenges of building.
ChatGPT gave me some genuinely useful things. But there were gaps:
I'd get a breakthrough, and then it would disappear into chat history. I started copying and pasting things into Apple Notes, trying to build my own system. I wished it would just auto-capture the important stuff so I could find it later.
ChatGPT is brilliant, but it's not trained on the methodologies that actual coaches use. Motivational interviewing for avoidance. GROW for decisions. The evidence-based approaches that work for founder psychology.
With a human coach, you have to schedule appointments. They wait for you to initiate. But what if someone checked in on you? What if, at 6pm, your phone rang and a voice asked, "How did today go?"
Mikage is the tool I wished existed when I was struggling with sales avoidance. An AI coach named Mira who's trained on 15+ evidence-based coaching frameworks—not just answering questions, but actually adapting her approach based on what you need.
A library that automatically captures your breakthroughs, patterns, and growth. Six shelves of wisdom that accumulate over time, so you never lose an insight again.
And yes—daily check-in calls. Because sometimes you need someone to reach out first.
Everyone talks about product-market fit. Runway. Burn rate. Cap tables.
Nobody talks about the 3am ceiling stare. The decision you've been avoiding. The pattern where you always sabotage yourself right before a breakthrough.
Mikage is for the inner game of founding. The invisible psychological work that shapes every external decision you make. The founder-self fit that determines whether you last long enough to find product-market fit.
We believe the hard moments aren't problems to fix—they're wisdom waiting to be captured. Like kintsugi, we help you turn your breaks into gold.
Mikage (御影) is Japanese for "honorable shadow"—the unseen presence that supports without intruding.
We chose this name because we're not trying to be your guru or your therapist. We're trying to be the quiet presence that helps you see your own patterns, capture your own wisdom, and find your own way through.
Transparency matters to us: we're not Japanese. We chose this name because Japanese aesthetic philosophy—wabi-sabi, kintsugi, ma—deeply informs how we think about founder growth. Imperfection as beauty. Breaks as gold. Space as essential.
You're not broken. You're not weak. You're carrying weight that most people will never understand.
Your library starts with a conversation.