Trusting Your Gut Beats Following Playbooks - year-end reflections of Melanie and Christian

Dec 24, 2025

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What do you keep when a year of founder advice contradicts itself? What actually sticks once the playbooks cancel each other out and you are left with your own judgment?

Follow the Gradient closes out the year with a reflective episode from hosts Melanie Gabriel and Christian Woese, drawing on dozens of conversations with founders, operators, and investors across Europe . Instead of a guest interview, this episode turns the lens inward, unpacking what truly held up across a full year of building, scaling, and questioning received wisdom.

The conversation surfaces how founders actually form convictions when advice is biased, context is messy, and no clean answers exist. It is less about what to do next and more about how to think when certainty is unavailable.

We talk about:

Why most founder advice is shaped by survival bias and how to tell when it does not apply to your company
Thinking internationally from day one without losing focus on a home market that still needs to work
Saying no as a growth skill and why focus becomes harder as opportunities increase
Introspection as an underrated founder capability that quietly compounds over time
Why venture capital is often treated as default advice despite fitting only narrow business models
How founders actually protect sanity through routines, relationships, and deliberate reflection

This episode resists formulas. It treats building a company as a sequence of judgment calls rather than a checklist, shaped by context, timing, and personal limits more than by frameworks.

Our biggest takeaways, including Melanie and Christian’s view on where founders most often mistake confidence for clarity:

https://followthegradient.io/p/what-we-learned-from-interviewing-50-plus-guests

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🎙 Follow the Gradient: conversations about building a business from Europe while staying sane.

Follow us:

Melanie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melaniexgabriel/

Christian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-woese/

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/followthegradient/

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