You can't lose if you never quit

You can tell a lot about how someone approaches life by watching them play pickup basketball.

Playing with Declan is like having a golden retriever on your team. He jumps for every rebound. Sprints to save the ball any time it's going out of bounds. Shoots the ugliest jump shot and having faith it'll go in. Always asking for tips to improve. Always smiling. He's given me a black eye and sprained ankle during our runs, but it's impossible to get mad at him because he's always so positive.

Declan's a quiet force of nature. He owns an antique Porsche but daily drives his Tesla. He lives in a 2b2b apartment with no roommates that I could only describe as a real estate agent's wet dream. He's run multi-million dollar businesses with no outside investment, and currently runs his own company called SLAM. He's also only 23.

You'll never hear him brag about any of it, nor is he a niche internet micro-celebrity, because he's too busy making what he wishes existed in the world: a studio that churns out awesome physical products made by people doing what they love.

Declan spent the last two years training for a hundred mile ultramarathon. So far he's run every day this year, and runs at least a marathon every weekend. He's targeting a race in November so, to get in his headspace, I joined him on a three mile run at 8 am.

I hate running. I've never even finished a 5K without stopping or walking. For 70% of our run, it felt like someone had shot me in my right abdomen. During the last mile, I pointed at every bench and told Declan I was going to sit down once we got there. Every time, he'd respond with:

"You could do that. Or you could finish."

I ended up finishing. It was a suggestion, not a command, that I could do it rather than I had to. I'd failed each time before, so I'd never considered that I could finish, but Declan was certain.

"It's always fun running with people who don't run. Some of them are silent and you can see them suffering. Some of them talk a lot to distract themselves… like you."

*Declan laughs*

"But all of them can always run more than they think they can."

We got coffee and what felt like the best croissant of my life as a reward. I had a good time, but I'm still far from becoming a runner, or wanting to run ever again. I asked Declan how he got into it.

"I was in first year and read the David Goggins book. The next morning I went to the track and just started running."

"Why'd you keep going? Like, I know you read Goggins and were inspired, but most people who know him don't keep up with it for this long."

Declan shrugged. "After running for a while, you just start feeling really bad if you don't." He paused, then added:

"I think running every day is showing up for yourself."

"Like, after running for a while, all of a sudden I started doing all the other things I wanted to do. I had all these ideas, but only started working on them after I started running."

Take an unreasonable amount of shots

The first idea was a social alarm clock app where your friends could record a video of themselves yelling to wake you up. With his cofounder Derrick^[1], they got up to 10,000 users by using guerilla marketing tactics at UC Berkeley like throwing a massive St. Paddy's party and having people download the app to enter, but no one really used it after a while.

They kept working on startup ideas, partially because they had a little chip on their shoulders after not getting summer internships^[2], so they felt like they had to make something work.

After trying to find a problem and validate the market niche like conventional startup advice suggests, they committed to growing one of their side projects. JotBot was an AI writing app they made for themselves to help with assignments. They put it out and forgot about it for a while, then came back to see they'd made $200 and actually had other students actively using it.

As coders who didn't know anything about marketing, Declan had a simple plan.

"I knew that I could make 3 videos a day, and so could Derrick. Then we got 1 more guy to do the same, and posted them to Tiktok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube shorts. 3 of us making 3 videos on 3 platforms, that's 27 shots a day. And if that didn't work after 3 months, we'd figure something else out."

After two months, Declan was sitting on the toilet and had an idea for a video. The opening hook was. "I made a website called i have an essay due at midnight that i really dont want to do . com." Derrick made and posted the TikTok by the time Declan got out of the bathroom, and it blew up^[3]. That gave them enough cash and conviction to keep going, and eventually scale JotBot to over a million users, all out of Declan's studio apartment.

Part of the JotBot saga was hiring Phillip. Declan joined Minolee's creator Discord and posted about hiring someone to help scale their content. Phillip responded, they chatted, and he flew out the next morning to meet up with them in SF.

When they first started working together, Phillip blew $70k of their marketing budget on basically nothing. He kept looking for silver bullets like ads or billboards instead of just scaling content they knew worked. I asked Declan why they didn't fire him.

"He just had a really good energy. Like yeah, he was bouncing around the room and breaking lots of stuff, but eventually you bounce off something and go VCHOOOM!" *Declan motions like a rocket taking off *

In time, Phillip did end up scaling their creator program. After JotBot went triple-platinum, they travelled the world for a bit, spent their adult money, and eventually ended up back in San Francisco looking for their next thing.

"We still wanted to make a real lasting business. JotBot had a lot of churn since most of our customers were college students. Like everyone, at one point we got obsessed with building software for creators since we knew that was becoming a big thing. But after talking to lots of creators, we realized the best opportunity was taking people who had no existing following, training them to make good videos, and then getting them to market products."

"So you invented UGC from scratch in 2024?"

"Yeah I guess so. But we didn't really want them to market other people's products because we could make our own. One really high converting feature from JotBot was AI lecture notes. This was before AI notetakers were really a thing, so we spun it out into its own product. "

That became Minutes AI, another independent profitable business they worked on for a while. Declan and Derrick moved on to start SLAM, and Phillip still runs that company today.

Sprint like a marathon

"So out of everything, what'd you like working on most?"

"Probably this. SLAM."

Declan's had a life of making stuff. His dad's a tinkerer, so when little Declan said he wanted to fly, his dad built him a ramp for his bike and strapped model airplane wings and fireworks on him. One of them hit him in the head.

As a kid, he made his own dremel with a motor and saw blade, a swamp AC, and welded plastic sculptures in his room with a blowtorch.

"How did your parents react to all this? Like they didn't stop you?"

"I think they told me to open a window. My mom was definitely worried, but I think they realized that once they stopped watching, I was going to keep doing what I wanted."

I don't think it's ever occurred to Declan that he can't build something he wants to. He led a sneaker botting group^[4] in high school on Discord and charged a membership fee of $25/month. It got so big that someone from GQ joined and wrote an article about it. He used that money to pay for college and fund all his projects.

There were times where he'd make an insane bet like spending his whole business bank account on a marketing deal that didn't drive any sales, or go into way too much credit card debt, but he made it through. Again, it didn't occur to him that he might not. In his mind, everything always works out, because it has to.

SLAM is the culmination of everything Declan's passionate about. It's about spreading the same confidence he has in himself to everyone else.

"I just have this way of living I think is better. And I want everyone else to experience it too."

It's just better to believe you can do it if you try hard enough. That's what SLAM espouses. SLAM stands for "Sprint Like A Marathon". They run an eight week sprint for ten people working on making a business out of something they're passionate about.

They have a massive studio space where each of the three floors is designed like a space you might work for yourself in. A poster that says "What if it all works out?" greets you every time you enter. There's a library, cafe, and dorm room littered with plants and the favourite albums of past sprinters; other people who gave their dreams a shot. The entire space seems to say, "If they did it, so can you."

But they're not anyone's boss or mentor, at least not directly. They work on their own ideas in the trenches of the idea maze alongside everyone else. It's monkey-see monkey-do but for working on your dreams.

"So what's your dream? What do you really want to work on?"

"I want to make awesome physical products. I really like Craighill if you've seen them. Like that but for special stuff I'd use. The only blog post I've ever written is about that."

I tried out Declan's Craighill scissors, and ended up ordering my own pair. I then checked out his blog.

— —

The number one question everyone asks them is:

"How do you make money?"

The business model they've landed on is making great physical products that someone taking the alternative life path would want. Declan's day to day involves brainstorming, building, and making videos about these products. If someone in the studio's making something they like, they'll offer to add it to the SLAM store as well, though that's not a factor in adding someone to the sprint^[5].

So far, they've burned through a quarter million dollars.

"Bro. How are you so happy all the time?"

"Why wouldn't I be? The sun's shining. Great day to work on stuff. Aren't you?"

Around Declan, it's impossible not to be. As an outsider, it's easy to say a company in massive debt with little revenue is going to fail. After all, if you predict a startup's going to fail, 99% of the time you'll be right. But spend a week inside SLAM, and it's obvious that something special is going on. There's a big ball of energy bouncing around the room, waiting to hit something then take off.

There's always a gap between the time something is good and the time it makes money and is recognized by the masses. Facebook famously delayed monetization while trying to preserve what was cool about the site. The Homebrew Computer Club was probably an electric group to be in and considered delusional outside its walls. Name one visionary appreciated in their time. I can't.

A mentor once told me that people think companies die when they run out of money, but they actually die 6-12 months earlier when the founder gives up. Declan has the same mentor^[6].

Declan attempted an ultramarathon last year without finishing it. This year he's back at it. I bet he's already made enough money to retire early, but has too much he wants to give the world to ever retire.

"I really believe in long periods of rest between big projects, and just letting yourself gravitate naturally towards something."

Sprint, then rest, then sprint again. Declan never looks tired. Not just because he loves what he does, but because he's not looking to arrive anywhere. Just like Goggins, he's still at it, because he's never finished. He's already come so far, and still has a long way to go.

For Declan, life is a marathon, and a sprint. Pace yourself accordingly.

You can find Declan here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

Notes

1. [1]

   Derrick and Declan met through YC co-founder matching. He had no criteria other than someone who wanted to work on that idea. They're my poster kids for that app now, like certain couples for Hinge.

2. [2]

   Declan insists they could have gotten them if they tried. I believe him, but also joked that he's snorting that copium.

3. [3]

   It was so quick and scrappy that they didn't even own the domain before posting. They bought it after seeing the video get traction and linked it to their app.

4. [4]

   He found out about sneaker botting through Twitter, which his mom told him to download to "keep up with the news".

5. [5]

   I asked Declan: "How do you pick people for SLAM? Like how do you spot the potential for greatness at such an early stage?"
   
   "I dunno, I think anyone can do it. It's not something you're born with or anything. It's like making soup. If you're good at making soup, you can make anything work even if you don't have the best ingredients. A good soup maker thinks about how ingredients work together, what flavours they bring out of each other."

6. [6]

   A guy named Farzain, who ran a company called Buildspace. Long story short, they were the original people who taught tens of thousands to believe in their dreams, helping college kids go from their dorms to Y Combinator to millions in revenue. It played a big part in inspiring Declan and Derrick to start SLAM.