You know where you want to go. Yet you are overthinking the thousand steps it takes to get there.
The Founder’s Companion closes that gap. You choose two areas of your life to work on at a time, no more. Benji, your coach, suggests your next action, sized to the energy you have today, and you choose it. Everything you finish goes into your evidence bank, so on the days it feels like nothing is happening you can read back the proof that it is.
Seven days free. No card needed.
A look around the app.
Who this is for
Building a business is not the only thing you are responsible for.
You cut your hours at work to make room for this. People at home are depending on your idea working. You want the flexibility you have always dreamed of, and you know exactly what that dream has already cost you to get here.
The limit of four
Most tools promise you can do more. This one promises you can do less.
In The Founder’s Companion your life is laid out as five areas: CEO, Founder, Faith, Home and Relationships, and Personal Growth. Inside those areas sit 26 focus points, from business strategy and finances to visibility, confidence, prayer and meditation, health and energy. You choose the ones you want to work on at the moment and leave the rest.
You choose up to two areas at a time, and up to two focus points inside each. That limit is enforced, not advised. Four things, maximum, at any one time.
Grow my business is far harder to start than email three people back today. Narrowing the field is not a limitation, it is what makes starting possible.1
What you do next
One action at a time, sized to the energy you have today.
Benji suggests
Three at low impact, three at medium and three at high, so you pick by how much you have in you today. Benji makes those suggestions from your vision board, your future letter, your recent diary and what you have already tried, which keeps every action pointed at the life you said you wanted.
You decide
Take one of Benji’s, or write your own. Before you commit, the app asks why this one matters, and helps you answer if you are stuck. Choosing it yourself is what makes it stick, and naming why keeps it tied to where you are going.
You do one thing
5 to 30 minutes, not a whole life overhaul. This is how the dream gets built without burning you out, sending you back to full time work, and leaving you six months later knowing that was not the answer either.
Picturing the life you want, on its own, has been shown to reduce the effort people put into reaching it. Kept next to one defined action you chose yourself, that same picture is what pulls you forward.2
Choosing one action. Three suggestions at each impact level.
The diary
Write it out. The app does the filing.
Somewhere to write freely, in your own words, with no format to follow. Benji reads what you wrote and pulls out the things that sound like commitments, turning them into tasks with a suggested area and urgency, written in the first person as you would write them yourself.
This is your reflective space to say how you feel, and to record actions in your own words. Benji keeps all of it in mind when you sit down for a coaching session, and it feeds your weekly reflections, so the patterns you are too close to see get named for you, along with what is worth focusing on next.
Putting experience into words is one of the most studied simple interventions in psychology. Writing something into a place you trust is what lets the mind stop rehearsing it.3
A diary entry becoming two tasks you did not have to write out yourself.
Benji
A coach at 2am, who already knows you.
A written coaching session with someone who has read your future letter, your vision board, your reflective reviews, your current focuses and your recent diary entries before you say a word.
Benji takes all of that and reflects it back to you. What you said you wanted, what you committed to, and what you have done since, rather than a list of instructions from someone who has never met you. There is no timer either. Answer him, go and put the dinner on or get the children to bed, come back an hour later or tomorrow, and the conversation is exactly where you left it. When you close it you get a summary, and anything you said you were going to do comes back as actions you can add to your task list.
A human coach costs 50 to 100 pounds an hour, has to fit into a week that is already full, and can only remember the notes they wrote at your last session, which might have been a month ago. If either of you cancels, you wait another fortnight. Benji is there on an ordinary evening, and on the ones where your mind will not stop.
Choose how Benji speaks to you: warm, motivating, inspiring, or direct.
Watch a full session, start to finish. 84 seconds, on YouTube.
Reflective reviews
Someone finally notices the patterns you are too close to see.
Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly, Benji looks back across everything you have done: your actions, your tasks, your diary entries, your coaching sessions, your focuses and what you said you were building towards. Then he writes it up for you.
You always do the low impact actions in one focus and the demanding ones in another. You talk about your family with energy and go flat when the conversation turns to a part of the business you have never enjoyed, which might be the part to hand to someone else. Those are the things you cannot see from the inside while you are getting one foot in front of the other, and they are exactly what a review names for you. Where you have stumbled gets included too, without a telling off, and only so you can decide whether to stay with a focus or put it down for now.
Reviews are written for you and arrive on their own. You get a message when one is waiting, even if you have been nowhere near the app.
A day counts when you complete something in the app, so it is seven days of doing, not seven days in a row. Take a fortnight off and you come back to a review, not fourteen blank pages.
People who stopped to work out what they had learned from a task went on to do better than those who simply moved on to the next one. Across ten studies with more than 4,000 people.4
The evidence bank
On the day it feels like nothing is happening, there is your list.
Updating your email sequence at 11pm, after everything else the day has already asked of you, is real work. In most apps you tick it off and it vanishes, as though it never happened.
In The Founder’s Companion it goes into your evidence bank and stays there. Every action and every task you have finished, grouped by month, each one keeping the reflection you wrote at the time, so you can read back not just what you did but how it felt. Nothing is ever deleted automatically.
It is there for the one in the morning moments, when you are wondering who told you that you could do this, and the answer is a list of everything you already have.
Believing that you can follow through on something is one of the strongest predictors of whether you actually complete it, and the largest source of that belief is evidence of your own past success.5
You become what you repeatedly do. The Founder’s Companion is where you decide what that is, one action at a time, and where the proof of it is kept, so the life you are building stops being something you hope for and becomes something you can watch happening.
What it costs
Two ways to subscribe.
£14.99
a month
£149
a year
Coaching sessions are separate. Sessions with Benji are five pounds each and are not part of the subscription. Buy one only when you want it. Packs of five or ten cost less per session.
Seven days free. No card needed. Cancel any time.
Questions
Before you start.
Do I have to write every day?
No. A day counts when you complete something in the app, so it is seven days of doing rather than seven days in a row. Take a fortnight off and you come back to a review, not fourteen blank pages.
Is my diary private?
Yes, your entries are yours. Benji reads them so that he can suggest your tasks and your focuses, support your coaching sessions, and write your reflective reviews.
Do I need coaching sessions to get value from it?
No. Your subscription includes the diary, your tasks, your focuses and actions, your evidence bank, your future letter and vision board, your reflective reviews, and the choice of how Benji speaks to you. Coaching sessions sit on top of that, for the nights you want to talk something through.
I already use a planner. Does this replace it?
It depends what you mean. If it is a journal, this can take its place. If it is a full operating system for running your business, this is not that and does not try to be. The Founder’s Companion helps you reflect and then move forward, and your diary and tasks sit happily alongside whatever else you use. If an operating system built around how you work is what you actually need, email Esther at hello@esthersheryl.com and ask.
Can I cancel?
Yes, at any time, from inside the app. No email to send and nobody to ask.
Where the thinking comes from
Built on the research, not claiming to be proof of it.
Every part of the app draws on established work in psychology. Some of that work is settled and some of it is argued over, and the page below says which is which.
1. A defined next step is easier to start than an unbounded one. Related to Iyengar and Lepper, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (6), 2000, pages 995 to 1006, on too much choice putting people off choosing. Later meta-analyses find that effect depends heavily on circumstance rather than holding universally, so the app relies on the part that is not argued over, which is that bounded and defined is easier to begin than vague and endless.
2. Fantasy without obstacles reduces effort. Oettingen and Mayer, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 2002, pages 1198 to 1212. This is the finding the vision board is designed around rather than against. Paired with Deci and Ryan on self-determination, where self-chosen goals are sustained better than imposed ones.
3. Writing about experience helps. Pennebaker, and Frattaroli, Psychological Bulletin, 2006. Meta-analyses disagree, and the effects are modest, but the intervention costs almost nothing. The pull to return to unfinished things, commonly called the Zeigarnik effect, is well supported, though the related claim that you remember unfinished tasks better has not replicated well, including in a 2025 meta-analysis.
4. Reflection improves performance. Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano and Staats, Learning by Thinking, Harvard Business School working paper 14-093, 2014. Ten studies, 4,340 participants. Still a working paper rather than a peer-reviewed publication.
5. Self-efficacy predicts follow-through, and past success is its largest source. Bandura. Widely replicated.
Also drawn on: Neff on self-compassion, where treating yourself kindly after a slip produces more motivation to improve, not less.
Get in touch
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