One Brand

Three Brands

I've been running three brands for years.

SimpleDirect. ANC. Founder Reality.

Three websites. Three social accounts. Three marketing strategies. Three everything.

ROI on that complexity: basically nothing.

I'd post something on the ANC account. Crickets. Post the same thing on my personal account. Engagement.

People weren't following the brands. They were following me.

Eight Minutes

Last month I watched someone spin up a new "brand" in about 8 minutes.

AI logo. AI website. AI copy. Done.

A few years ago, that took weeks. Money. Designers. Copywriters. The brand itself was a moat.

Now it's worthless.

Anyone can have a brand. What they can't have is my 6 years of building. My specific decisions. My accountability when things go wrong.

The Consolidation

So I'm consolidating everything.

SimpleDirect, ANC, Founder Reality—all under one name. Mine.

Not because I'm building an ego project. Because in the AI era, the only defensible thing is the person.

"SimpleDirect fails" means some brand dies. Nobody notices. Nobody cares.

"George Pu fails" means I fail publicly. My reputation takes the hit. My name is on the line.

That's accountability. That's the point.

The New Structure

Here's how it shakes out:

Founder Reality becomes the umbrella. The content. The philosophy. The community. Everything I write, record, or build lives here.

ANC becomes the guidance arm. Still the same work—helping founders with real constraints build businesses they own forever. But it's "Guidance by George Pu" now, not a standalone consulting brand pretending to be a company.

SimpleDirect becomes my lab.

This is the part I'm most excited about.

SimpleDirect was supposed to be a SaaS. Pricing tiers, MRR goals, the whole playbook. I killed that. Made the tools free.

But the infrastructure is still there. The dev team. The ability to ship things fast.

Now SimpleDirect is where I run experiments. Large platform bets. Things I'm building for myself that might become useful for others.

The first tools—Changelog, the AI chat—are already live. Free forever.

More coming. Every few weeks, something new drops.

Not products designed to extract maximum revenue. Just tools I actually use, built with my philosophy embedded, shared with anyone who wants them.

The Economics

The economics are simple.

Free tools bring people in. They use something I built. Some of them follow me. Some of those become guidance clients. Some of those become equity relationships.

Tools = distribution. Guidance = revenue. Equity = wealth.

Three brands made this confusing. One brand makes it obvious.

The Fiction

I spent years maintaining the fiction that these were separate companies.

ANC has its own LinkedIn. SimpleDirect has its own Twitter. Founder Reality has its own newsletter.

All me. All the same voice. All competing for attention with each other.

Stupid.

Now there's one account. One voice. One place people go to find what I'm building.

Everything else is legal entities and invoices.

What's Next

What I'm still figuring out:

The platform experiments. What SimpleDirect becomes as a lab instead of a product.

I have some big bets I'm not ready to talk about yet. Things that could be interesting or could be complete failures. That's the nature of experiments.

In the coming days and weeks, I'll share more.

For now, just know: if you see SimpleDirect, that's me experimenting. If you see Founder Reality, that's me teaching or building community. If you see ANC, that's me doing guidance work.

All the same person. All under one roof now.

Conclusion

Took me too long to see this.

The personal brand was always the business. The other brands were just... overhead.

Still processing how much simpler everything feels already.

More on the SimpleDirect experiments soon. The first one drops in a few days.