AI Builders Co-work + The Stage: Beyond Vanity Metrics

Friday is our open co-working day.
​People come to work on their own projects, take breaks together, and usually stay through the afternoon. It’s quiet, focused, and builder- and founder-led.
​You can arrive anytime from 10AM. Most people show up after lunch and settle in before 1.30pm. Bring your laptop. Grab any open seat. Stay as long as you like.
​At 1.30pm, we pause work briefly for a shared session called The Stage, then everyone goes back to working.
​This is how Fridays here work.

The Stage @ 1.30PM
The Stage is a short, open-format session where builders and founders share something they are actively working on. A workflow, a technical breakdown, a lesson learned, or just a topic keeping him/her up at night.
The goal is to spark ideas you can try immediately after, during the same afternoon. After the session ends, most people simply open their laptops again and continue working.

Michelle Lo Horton
​Founder & Chief Story Teller, StoryARC
​Instagram

This week we switch gears away from our usual technical sharing to something more human. Michelle will be sharing how to tell stories that matter and how to create content that generates business outcomes for real businesses in the AI age.
​Michelle Lo Horton is a brand strategist and thought leader specializing in business storytelling for founders. Michelle works with technical founders and business owners across B2B and B2C sectors, helping them transform product narratives into competitive advantages. Her clients include AI companies, SaaS founders, and D2C brands looking to build defensible market positions through strategic storytelling.

In the age of AI, building products has never been easier, or less differentiated. Everyone's vibe-coding similar solutions, which means technical excellence alone no longer guarantees market success. The new competitive advantage? Being essential to your audience's thinking, not just present in their feed.
​
This session introduces the ARC (Audience Relationship Capital) framework, a proprietary 0-30 quantitative methodology developed by Michelle. It's a framework that measures whether content builds commercial trust or just collects vanity metrics or generating noise.

• ​The problem: Why product differentiation has collapsed and what that means for go-to-market strategy.
• ​The evidence: Data patterns from founders showing the gap between attention metrics and business outcomes.
• ​The framework: How to measure and build the three trust vectors that predict commercial success (Memory, Familiarity, Intent)
• ​Practical application: The R↔C Weave methodology for technical founders—balancing relatability and competence without swinging to extremes

​Designed specifically for builders who prefer technical content, this session makes the commercial case for why storytelling isn't marketing fluff, it's your defensible moat.
​Three tangible takeaways:

• ​A diagnostic tool: The ARC Score framework (0-30 scale) to audit whether your current content strategy is building commercial trust or just collecting vanity metrics
• ​A mental model shift: Understanding that in AI-commoditized markets, distribution beats differentiation, and strategic storytelling is how you win distribution
• ​An action step: A specific 30-day content audit method to identify which trust vector (Memory, Familiarity, or Intent) is your weakest, and therefore where your growth opportunity lives.

​After the session, we go back to work or hang out to network.

RSVP here > https://luma.com/fxklskiu?utm_source=meetup