The AI rules for neurodivergent founders

Read time: 5 minutes

Hi friends, 

This Tuesday, I have a hot take: I think AI is going to quietly build a wave of neurodivergent-run businesses that couldn't have existed ten years ago.

I talked to three neurodivergent founders & business strategists last week to challenge my hypothesis — and packaged the consensus up for you below. Plus, I added tips on how to use AI to improve your executive functioning (setting goals, planning, breaking things down, and organizing tasks) in your business. 

Quick caveat:

Neurodivergence isn't just one type of brain, and doesn’t need to be fixed. But the founders I talked to, despite being wired differently, all described the exact same struggle — an abundance of ideas, and real trouble turning any one of them into a finished thing. Not a motivation or discipline problem, but a brain that generates faster than it executes.

What they built with AI

Annelie Wendeberg, an ex-professor of molecular biology and published author who now runs the Unravelogue Community, had Circle AI build a focus-sprint tool that lives inside a single Circle post, because it "knows the platform inside and out." It doesn’t require re-authentication, and helps her members time their tasks (or leave them) without shame, but with the accountability of sharing with other members.

Jessie Voss is a community and business strategist with dyslexia, and while she’s far from the days that she transcribed medical courses by hand (a nightmare for someone with dyslexia), she now uses AI to turn screenshots of client's tangled backend workflows into real fixes.

Russ Jones, who runs ADHD Big Brother, fed 260 podcast episodes into a tool that matches whatever someone's stuck on to the exact episode that helps. He also pulls a member health report through Circle's MCP so he knows exactly who's gone quiet and can reach out personally. Finally, he had an idea for a productivity card game where every card is a task, and AI worked out the mechanics he never would've bothered to build alone.

What they hand off to AI

• The chopping — Annelie tells Claude whether today's a full-energy day or a one-line-at-a-time day, and it adjusts how much it hands her at once.
• The first pass — Jessie uses it to catch the grammar her dyslexia skips, and turn a voice note into a draft.
• The sorting — Russ uses it to find out who's gone quiet, then reaches out himself.
• The mechanics, once the idea already exists — Russ's game, Annelie's tool. The idea comes first either way.

TL;DR: All the things that could stop you from building your business – big projects that are hard to strategize and know where to start, marketing tasks that need to happen every stinkin’ week, or rules for a game you can already envision — don’t have to stop you anymore.

The line none of them will cross

The outreach. "Automating human outreach is a nail in the coffin of community," Russ says. He doesn’t want to have a relationship with a bot, no matter how ‘trained’ it is.

The first draft of anything that actually matters. Jessie watched AI get about halfway through a batch of thumbnails before stopping and just doing it herself. Her new rule became: "I don't want it to do it for me. I want it to help me do the thing myself."

Blind trust in the output. Annelie has been using ChatGPT since its first version, and is still hesitant: "It's still not a systems thinker, and not very creative." If you use it without pushing back, feeding it context or insight, she says, you will get something mediocre.

Where they diverge (and customize)

Not everyone will use a tool the same way, or build the same kind of business. That's a great thing. Russ built ADHD Big Brother specifically for people with ADHD. Annelie built Unravelogue for artists, scientists, and researchers with neurodivergence — especially in places where support for these kinds of brains is lacking.

They agree on more than you'd expect:

• Both built body-doubling into their communities. Annelie calls hers a "parallel desk," Russ calls his "the doubling room." I call it quiet coworking.
• Both are wary of leaderboards.

Where they diverge: badges and games. Annelie avoids gamification entirely — badge systems, she says, make her members paranoid, not motivated.

Russ made the opposite call on purpose: AI-generated badges tied to winning a challenge, plus a card game where every card is a task, as deliberate accountability tools for a brain where, in his words, "everything that doesn't have an immediate urgent deadline becomes 'not now.'"

Neither of them is wrong. That's the exact caveat I called out playing out in real time — no community or member's needs are the same, and neither are founders' brains. But seeing how and why real community builders make these calls can help you make your own.

A few AI tips worth borrowing 

• Give AI a capacity signal. Tell it whether today's a full-energy day or a one-line-per-message day, and let it adjust how much it hands you at once.
• Encode your decisions while you have the energy to make them. Write your own rules on a good day — a disagreement check, a "does this actually make money" check — so a bad day still gets the same pushback instead of a yes-machine.
• Screenshot the mess instead of describing it. Most people don't think to try this, and it saves hours of typing out a system in words.
• Write the first draft yourself. Bring your own rough version, then use AI to find the gaps and argue with the weak spots.
• Know what's not worth the prompt. If a task is genuinely simple, skip it. It costs more time than it saves.
• Use it to build the thing, not to decide what the thing should be. The idea comes first. AI works out the mechanics.
• Set a deadline it can't talk you out of. AI makes it dangerously easy to spend five hours perfecting a system instead of doing the work the system was for.
• Never let it be the one who reaches out. Fine for sorting, chopping, fixing, building—not for empathy, connection, or engagement.

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From the community: what’s your community love language?

While the OG love languages may have been debunked (womp womp womp), I do love a strong concept that helps folks understand things across different dimensions.

That’s why, when one of our top members, contributors, and overall nice-guy, Jason Hershkowitz, posted the 5 Community Love Languages, my secret love of quizzes (thanks, early 2000s) and psychology nerdiness came out hard. Because why do they all fit so well?!

1. Words of Affirmation = shout-outs and member spotlights.
2. Quality Time = live sessions and co-working.
3. Receiving Gifts = swag and referral rewards.
4. Acts of Service = fast answers and warm intros.
5. Physical Touch = IRL meetups and summits.

The replies were the real gold. Scott's take cuts through the rest: recognition and events are nice, but the communities he values most are the ones that actually move him forward — useful resources, real introductions, answers that unstick a problem. Different audiences, but the same throughline: members getting somewhere faster because they're in the room together.

Which one’s your favorite? I’m holding an informal poll.

Next issue: In the 2010’s, we had “ditch the 9-5” as the calling card to leave corporate for freelancing. The new milestone is the “million-dollar, one-person business” — but what does it actually look like in real life? (And is it a real thing?!) I’ll dive into 2 examples that will have you dreaming up your own playbook.

— Arina Kharlamova
Lead Editor, Circle Newsletter

P.S. My husband has approximately 17 different business ideas at any given moment. If that's you (or someone you love), forward this to them. 🫶🏼

P.P.S. Do you want to test out how you can build your ideas into real-life businesses within hours? Start a trial of Circle today.