On the Right Train 🚂
Ciao! 👋
Yesterday I spent the full day with Vincent Mattart 💎 at the Zentroom in Bern, right next to the train station. We do this once every two weeks.
After 10+ years building things together, most of our time now happens on Slack and video calls. But sitting in the same room, even just twice a month, changes everything.
In a world obsessed with speed, digital, and urgency, taking a full day to talk (about the business, the vision, but also life) is the best way to recenter. And honestly? Every time we meet, we pump each other up as much as possible. Not only to realign the vision, but to support each other in this crazy journey of building something from scratch. Again 🙈.
Here is what makes this moment special. Vincent and I both left GOLD AVENUE around the same time, end of 2024. Which means we lived the entire 2025 AI acceleration in first person. We watched the models evolve week by week. We challenged the tools. We jumped between ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and many others. We built websites, videos, images, business models, just to test what was possible.
And the real advantage was not the tools. It was the time. We had the time to actually understand the power of all this.
funere has been, since day one, our palestra digitale (our digital gym). No boss. No one to report to. We can pivot from one idea to another in a snap of the fingers. We sit, we check the numbers, we read the feedback, and two hours later it’s done.
The best part? With AI accelerating right now, we don’t feel like spectators. We feel like we are on the right train, accelerating with it.
📤 The Memo is Out
Quick fundraising update: we finished the investor Memo, and I’m sending it right now to a few potential Business Angels.
You’ve heard this from me before, and I’ll keep repeating it:
Raise before you need the money. The moment to talk to investors is when you don’t desperately need them.
A New Logo in 125 Seconds
Google is showing Funere more and more in the search results. Great news. One small problem: we never actually built a proper logo 🙃.
So yesterday’s debate was simple: should we make one? The answer was yes and no. Yes, we should upgrade our current image. No, we are not going to spend money, or more than 125 seconds, doing it.
So here it is. The new Funere logo, approved by unanimità decisionale:
Some of you will say it looks “too close” to Facebook. I don’t think so. I even suggested to Vincent that we use a “g” instead of an “f”, but we both agreed that would be more confusing than helpful (lol, joking).
Connecting Claude to Everything
I connected Claude to my emails and my Google Drive. Then I added my Stripe exports, bank statements, and Revolut transactions, and asked it to clean everything up to make our accountant’s life easier.
Here is the real story. I had let six months of accounting slide (a classic founder move). I was scared it would take me weeks to connect all the dots.
It took four hours.
I’m also testing something I really like: Drive files that auto-update every day with fresh exports (from Search Console, for example), so we can analyze the data and make decisions almost in real time.
And for anyone doing SEO: this week I also connected Claude to Semrush. Now Claude can pull the data straight from Semrush and give you real recommendations. Bref, very exciting.
The Numbers Are Talking
For the past few weeks, we’ve felt a real acceleration:
Traffic: around 80,000 visits per month, fully organic. That’s 3x since January, and still climbing.
Registrations: another all-time high this week.
Interactions: comments and condolences have grown a lot since April.
The more we grow, the clearer our thesis becomes.
Own the Attention
In the beginning, we kept asking ourselves how to optimize for profit. Today, we optimize for growth.
It made me laugh this week. I spoke with Marc (CMO at GOLD AVENUE), who said: “you never change, you always optimize for growth.”
He’s right. And the logic is simple. When you have no doubt you can monetize the growth, the real challenge becomes owning the market. I fought for years to grow the GOLD AVENUE customer base, because I knew that once you own the market, you can monetize it.
I also co-own a campground business. That one is a service: the size is limited, and you have to monetize from day one. But the internet is different. The internet is about leverage. If you believe you can leverage your growth enough, it makes sense to go all in.
Our thesis in three words: Own the attention.
Do We Still Need Employees?
Here is a question Vincent and I keep coming back to. With AI accelerating like this, do we even need to hire?
Honestly? We go back and forth. On one side, two people with the right tools can now do the work of a much bigger team. On the other side, the cognitive load (the surcharge mentale) is very real. There is only so much two brains can hold at once 🧠🧠My current answer: AI removes a lot of the busywork, but it does not remove the need for A+ humans. The right people don’t just add hours. They add judgment, energy, and ideas you would never have on your own.
I don’t have the full answer yet. But it might be one of the most interesting questions of building a company in 2026.
🔨 Destroy My Newsletter
This week’s question is easy: the logo. Yes or no?
Hit reply and tell me honestly. Too close to Facebook? Clean enough? Should we have gone with the “g”? 🙈
P.S. Last week’s newsletter went through the roof: 129,000 impressions. We are now 3,942 subscribers here on LinkedIn, plus a few hundred on Substack. Thank you for the eyeballs 🍀
Cheers,