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How I picked the 15 founder workflow templates in Projelli

By Jameson Daines · 2026-04-13 · 10 min read

Projelli ships with 15 interview-driven workflow templates. Each one runs you through a structured set of questions about your business and produces a set of real Markdown files in your workspace, the documents you'd have written yourself if you'd had two more hours in the day.

Picking which 15 templates was harder than building any of them. Almost every founder I talked to had a strong opinion about which template should be in the box, and most of those opinions were different. This post is the criteria I used, the 15 that made the cut, the runners-up, and the ones that explicitly didn't make it.

The criteria

I had four hard rules.

Rule 1: It has to be a document a founder ACTUALLY writes, not one they should write. A lot of "founder template" lists include things like "personal mission statement" or "company values document." These are things a consultant invents to charge you for a workshop. Real founders don't write them. Cut.

Rule 2: It has to be something the AI can meaningfully improve over a blank page. If the document is mostly numbers (a financial model with detailed assumptions) or mostly proprietary knowledge (your specific customer's unique pain), the AI's contribution is small. The templates that benefit most from AI help are the ones where the founder has the raw thinking but the structure is missing, the AI is good at structure.

Rule 3: It has to be a document with a clear "done" state. Templates like "ongoing market research" don't have an end. Templates like "Pitch Deck v1" do. The done-state matters because it lets the workflow have a satisfying conclusion: you start the workflow, you answer the questions, you get the document, you're done. No nag, no infinite loop.

Rule 4: It has to be the kind of thing a solo founder does ALONE. Anything that requires coordination with another person (a co-founder, an investor, an employee) is bad fit for an AI workflow because the AI can't model the other person's responses. The 15 templates are all things a founder does sitting at their computer with no one else in the room.

The 15 that made it

Listed in roughly the order a founder encounters them as a business matures, from "I have an idea" to "I have a board meeting next week."

1. New Business Kickoff

What it produces: A Vision document, a one-page PRD, and a Lean Canvas, generated from a single founder interview. Why it's the flagship: This is the template most users run first. It exists to take a fuzzy idea and turn it into three concrete documents in 20 minutes. If you only ever use one Projelli template, this is the one.

2. Customer Persona

What it produces: A persona document with the customer's job, life context, the specific problems they have, the alternatives they currently use, and the language they use to describe their pain. Why it matters: Most "persona" templates are generic demographic sheets. This one is built around the conversational pain language the founder needs for the actual marketing copy. It's the difference between "millennial knowledge worker" and "the Saturday morning founder who's been wrestling with this problem for 6 months."

3. Competitor Analysis

What it produces: A side-by-side matrix of you vs your top 3-5 competitors, with the gaps you can win on, the gaps you can't, and the messaging implications. Why it matters: Founders consistently undervalue this document until they're 5 weeks into building and realize they don't actually know how they're different. Doing it early forces a clarity moment.

4. MVP Scope

What it produces: A scoped MVP plan listing what's in v1, what's cut, what's deferred to v2, and the brutal "if you only had 2 weeks" version. Why it matters: Scope is where solo founders die. Having an AI ask the cutting questions ("if you couldn't ship this feature, would you still launch?") is a useful forcing function.

5. Pricing Strategy

What it produces: A pricing model document with anchor pricing, tier descriptions, the psychology behind each price point, the math at different conversion rates, and the test plan. Why it matters: Pricing is the hardest thing solo founders do. A template that walks you through the question "what's the cheapest version of this that's still valuable enough to sell?" is genuinely useful.

6. Go-to-Market Plan

What it produces: A 90-day GTM document with the channels you'll try, the order, the metrics you'll watch, and the cutoff conditions for moving on from a channel. Why it matters: The thing nobody tells you about GTM is that you have to commit to a sequence. Trying everything at once is the failure mode. The template forces you to pick an order.

7. Pitch Deck

What it produces: An outline document for a 10-slide pitch deck with the narrative for each slide and the 1-2 sentences that go on it. Not the visual deck, the words. Why it matters: Most founders make a deck before they have the story. This template makes you write the story first. The deck gets built later in Figma or Keynote from the outline.

8. User Interview Plan

What it produces: A discovery interview script, a screener for finding people, and a tracker for the responses. Why it matters: Most founders skip interviews because they don't know how to start. Having a script ready in 10 minutes removes the friction of starting.

9. Landing Page Copy

What it produces: A landing page outline with hero variants, sub-headline options, feature callouts, social proof slots, FAQ, and CTA copy. Why it matters: Founders who can build the product often can't write the copy. The AI is good at first drafts of marketing copy when given a clear input about the audience and the differentiator.

10. Content Strategy

What it produces: A 90-day content plan with topics, channels, cadence, and a backlog of post titles. Why it matters: "I should blog more" is one of the most common founder regrets. A template that produces a 12-post backlog with titles is the difference between "I should" and "I have a list."

11. Financial Model

What it produces: A simple cost-and-runway model document with assumptions, scenarios, and the breakeven math. Why it matters: Most "financial model" templates are 80-line spreadsheets that nobody uses. This template produces a written narrative document with the numbers in context, "if I sell 50 units in month 1, here's the math, here's what I cut." Useful even without a spreadsheet alongside it.

12. Weekly Review

What it produces: A short Friday-afternoon ritual document: what got done, what didn't, what to focus on next week, what's decaying. Why it matters: The weekly review is the highest-leverage 15 minutes a founder spends. The template makes it as cheap as possible to do, so you actually do it.

13. Investor Update

What it produces: A monthly or quarterly update document with metrics, wins, losses, asks, and a brief narrative section. Why it matters: Even pre-funded founders should write these as a discipline. Once you're funded, they're table stakes. The template makes the structure consistent so investors get a predictable rhythm and you don't reinvent the format every month.

14. Board Meeting Prep

What it produces: A pre-read document, an agenda, a metrics section, a decisions queue, and the asks. Why it matters: Most founders show up to board meetings underprepared and the meetings drift. A template that produces a structured agenda with a decisions queue makes the meeting tighter and the decisions cleaner.

15. First Hire Playbook

What it produces: A job description, an interview rubric, a scorecard, and a 30/60/90 onboarding plan. Why it matters: Hiring your first employee is one of the riskiest things a solo founder does. Having all four documents in one workflow run, with the interview rubric and the scorecard tied to the JD, prevents the most common failure mode (hiring on vibes and being surprised).

The runners-up

These are the templates that almost made the cut. Most will end up in v1.1 or v1.2 if they keep coming up in user requests.

The templates that explicitly aren't here

These are the templates I deliberately did NOT build, because they're a bad fit for the AI workflow model.

How the workflows actually work in the app

Each template is a TypeScript file in src/modules/workflow/templates/ that defines:

  1. The interview questions. 5-15 questions the workflow asks the founder before generating anything.
  2. The system prompts. The AI prompts that take the interview answers and produce the documents.
  3. The output schema. A list of files the workflow produces, with the path and the content type for each.
  4. The follow-up actions. What the founder can do after the workflow finishes, link to other templates, refine specific sections, regenerate with different inputs.

The runtime takes the answers, calls your AI provider (Claude / GPT / Gemini), parses the streaming response, and writes the resulting files to your workspace folder. Every action is logged in the audit log so you can trace exactly which interview answer produced which paragraph in the output.

The templates are intentionally simple, most are 100-200 lines of TypeScript. Adding a new one is a few hours of work. If you have a workflow you wish was in there, email me and tell me what it should look like. Real user requests are how the template list will grow.

What I learned about templates

Three things, in case you're building anything similar:

  1. The interview questions matter more than the prompts. A great prompt with bad input produces generic output. A bad prompt with great input still produces something useful. Most of my time on each template was spent on the questions, not the prompts.
  2. Templates compete with blank pages, not other templates. The benchmark isn't "is this better than the equivalent template in Notion." The benchmark is "is this better than the founder writing this from scratch in a blank text file." That's a much lower bar and a much more useful framing.
  3. Don't build a template until you've been asked for it 3 times. Every template I built after thinking "this would be cool" got cut in user testing. Every template I built after the third user said "I wish this was in here" survived.

That's how I picked the 15. If you've made it this far, you probably want to see them in action, there's a free tier and the Founder's Launch $29 lifetime is live until I sell 100.

See the templates in Projelli

If you're a solo founder and there's a template you wish was in Projelli, email me at [email protected]. The list at the top of this post will grow over time. I'd rather build the templates real founders ask for than the ones I think they should want.