Notes on Shawn Yeager | Go-to-Market, AI, Bitcoin, Frontier Tech

Nothing enforces your agent's rules

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Nothing enforces your agent’s rules at runtime. A skill file carries behavioral constraints, but in a world where agents choose their own tools, those constraints run entirely on model compliance.

I built a skill that generates hero images for this publication (skill file on GitHub). Claude Code reads a post, builds a constrained prompt, and calls FLUX.2 Pro on Replicate. The skill is mostly prohibitions, each one the result of a specific failure. FLUX treats axis labels as part of the spectrogram format, not as text. Bans have to go in the first line of the prompt because placement equals weight in diffusion models. Say “dark background” without banning the word “paper,” and you get a photograph of navy cardstock on a desk. These rules work. But they work because the model is compliant, not because anything enforces them. No runtime rejects an image containing text. No validator checks the palette. When the model doesn’t listen, I regenerate. Five wasted cents.

I know Kung Fu

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

A SKILL.md file is a plain text document. A hundred lines describing how to do something—audit an SEO page, write cold outreach emails, run a security review. The agent reads it and immediately operates at that level. No training run, no fine-tuning. Just a file and a context window.

In The Matrix, Tank loads a combat program, Neo opens his eyes: “I know Kung Fu.” A skill file is that scene. But Neo got one program at a time. Agents stack skills and self-select. An agent writing code can pull in a debugging skill when something breaks, switch to frontend design for the UI, and run a code review before shipping. The skill library is open, and the agent decides what to load.

Nobody knows how to price for agents

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Both paths to AI pricing—proprietary agents and open protocols—break the seat model. Products already lost their edges. The pricing hasn’t caught up.

Most companies frame this as a choice. Build proprietary AI to protect current revenue, or open the platform to external agents and risk becoming commodity infrastructure. The proprietary path is where the money is right now. Atlassian did it with Rovo, Salesforce built Agentforce, and it keeps per-user revenue up while using captive data as a moat.

SOUL.md and MEMORY.md are the new hearts and minds

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Agents don’t have hearts or minds. They have SOUL.md and MEMORY.md.

In traditional marketing, positioning wins hearts and minds—gets people to care, then believe. For agents, the equivalent is two plain text files.

In OpenClaw, SOUL.md gets created through a first-run conversation. The agent interviews you about your values, priorities, and constraints, then writes its own behavioral philosophy based on your answers. MEMORY.md accumulates through use. The agent captures what works, what you’ve decided, and what you prefer. One file defines what the agent values. The other records what it’s learned to trust.

AI changed what a product is

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

AI agents, MCP, and open protocols broke the assumption that products have edges. The entire go-to-market stack—positioning, competitive analysis, pricing, sales enablement—assumes a bounded thing. Something you can draw a box around, position, price, sell.

An agent discovers your API and wires it into workflows you didn’t design for. Your product becomes one node in a chain that didn’t exist yesterday. Surface area is emergent, not shipped. The agent defines it at runtime. Product boundaries are shifting—and so is everything downstream of them.

Be unreasonably good at one job

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The companies that scale start by being unreasonably good at one job. They pick a customer and become irreplaceable to them.

When you nail it, you stop fighting for attention. Customers find you. Word spreads because the experience is undeniable. You earn the right to expand. Then you grow—not before.

Most startups spread effort everywhere. They want better UI. Faster support. More integrations. They chase everything. Nothing compounds because nothing gets the sustained attention it needs.

Engagement is inventory

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:34:00 +0000

Extractive platforms degrade the thing they extract from. X doesn’t neutrally host discourse; its business model selects for conflict because conflict is engagement and engagement is inventory. The platform’s success and the community’s health are at odds.

Freedom tech fixes the incentives, not the features. Nostr and Bitcoin don’t promise better interactions through better moderation or smarter algorithms. They remove the middleman whose profits depend on making discourse worse. Zaps align creator compensation with audience value rather than engagement.

Cloudflare went down again. Reframe resilience.

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 11:25:00 +0000

Cloudflare crashed yesterday. X, ChatGPT, Uber—all down. Even DownDetector went offline because it runs on Cloudflare.

One company, one bug, hundreds of services dark for hours. This happened 30 days after AWS took down half the internet for 15 hours. The infrastructure concentration problem keeps getting worse.

For years the trade-off seemed obvious: Centralized = reliable, proven, professional. Decentralized = slow, clunky, ideological. After two major outages in 30 days, I’m wondering if that still holds.

My hunch: CFOs are looking at these events differently now. Not “could this happen?” but “what did this cost us?”

The dependency is the vulnerability.

Lightning didn’t go down during the AWS outage. It couldn’t—there’s no AWS to fail. No Cloudflare to crash. No central coordinator whose DNS can cascade. Lightning routes through independent nodes. One fails, you route around it. Nostr relay dies? Connect to a different relay. No coordinator means nothing to coordinate, nothing to fail.

That’s how it worked during AWS. That’s how it worked yesterday.

The architecture delivers protocol-level redundancy. No single point of failure. Real resilience during centralized failures. But the pitch typically leads with censorship resistance, sovereignty, freedom from government control.

After yesterday, enterprises are asking “how do we reduce infrastructure dependency risk?” That’s a risk management question. It has budget. It gets put in RFPs.

You translate architectural advantages into enterprise risk management language.

Launched: Nostr UX pattern library

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 18:30:00 +0000

Yesterday I launched nostr-ux.com. It’s opinionated, evidence-based UX research for building Nostr apps that don’t lose users.

Why this exists: Nostr has a retention problem. 30-day retention trends to 0%. We’re at ~10k daily active users. Posts disappear and followers vanish when switching apps. Every app feels like beta software.

These aren’t protocol problems—they’re product problems. Fixable ones.

AWS is the Achilles' heel of surveillance tech

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This became readily apparent today as the infrastructure giant suffered one of its most severe outages in recent history. Everything from social media apps to publishing platforms went down. Many still are, late into the evening.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin and nostr carry on unimpeded. Centralizing forces tend to centralize further. So expect this trend to accelerate. This is the too-big-to-fail pattern repeating in infrastructure. Fast forward: decentralization goes from a novel curiosity to a critical foundation.

Bitcoin sales requires longer education cycles

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Working with Bitcoin companies, I keep seeing the same pattern: sales teams try to apply traditional SaaS playbooks and wonder why their pipeline stalls.

The problem isn’t execution. It’s that Bitcoin sales starts further back in the buyer’s journey than most realize. I wrote about this in depth in Why Bitcoin sales is different from SaaS.

In traditional SaaS, prospects understand the problem you’re solving. They’re comparing your solution to competitors or evaluating whether to build vs. buy. The education is about your product, not the underlying technology.

Trust paradox in decentralized systems

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is designed to minimize trust. That’s the whole point—trustless, permissionless, decentralized.

But selling Bitcoin solutions requires building enormous amounts of trust.

You’re asking companies to reconsider their entire monetary infrastructure. To custody assets in ways that feel uncomfortable. To adopt technology that their compliance team is nervous about. To work with startups instead of established vendors.

This paradox creates interesting challenges for go-to-market strategy. You can’t just run traditional enterprise sales plays. The technology says “don’t trust us” but successful adoption requires deep trust relationships. I explore this tension further in Why Bitcoin sales is different from SaaS.

Why partnership frameworks fail in Bitcoin

hello@shawnyeager.com (Shawn Yeager) — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Most partnership frameworks assume you’re working with established categories and known business models.

Bitcoin breaks these assumptions.