Jo Starling, creative.

11/06/2026

POV: The wind changes direction and calms the swell. The forecast is spectacular. Your meetings are schedule is pliable. There’s room in your freezer for snapper… Carpe Diem!

What lifts your eyes from your laptop and inspires you to seize the day?

10/06/2026

There’s a version of you that existed before the strategy docs, the frameworks, the coaches, the courses, the revenue targets, and the right way to show up online.

That version knew things.

Not theoretically. Viscerally. In the gut. Before language caught up.

They knew what actions felt like electricity and what kind felt like slow suffocation. They knew what spaces made them bigger and which ones made them smaller. They knew — if they’re honest — roughly what kind of life they were building toward. Not in KPIs. In feeling.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of founders traded that knowing for a more sophisticated one.

And the sophisticated one has been running the show ever since.

I see it constantly. Founders who have built genuinely impressive things — systems, audiences, revenue — who are quietly, persistently homesick. Not for less success. For the version of success that their burning impulse was originally chasing.

The one that felt like them.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, after years of working with founders and an embarrassing number of hours losing arguments with fish who turned out to be better philosophers than most of the courses I’ve paid for 🤣 :

The s**t you knew before you knew s**t — that’s not noise. That’s not naivety. That IS the s**t.

That instinct wasn’t naive. It was clean. It was the whole point. And it hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s just been waiting for you to stop calling it fanciful and start building something that honours it.

That’s the work I’m most interested in.

If your gut just backflipped — I’d love to know what resonated. Drop it in the comments 💬 👇, or come find me in the Magnetic Founder Circle.

09/06/2026

You’ve seen it — I know you have! You’ve probably been tempted by it.

F4F. Follow for follow 😖

It looks like growth. It feels like momentum.

But here’s what’s actually happening —
You’re stocking your waterway with carp. 🤮💩🤮

Carp aren’t fussy fish. They’ll take almost any bait, crowd out everything worth catching, and slowly churn the water into mud.

On your page, that mud is a soupy algorithm. A big audience of disinterested followers isn’t a community. It’s dead weight — and Meta knows it.

The algorithm won’t feed an unhealthy ecosystem.

Build a fishery worth fishing. 🎣

Read deeper insight in my latest blog in “Jo’s Take“. I’ve popped the link in the first comment below 👇

09/06/2026

You’ve seen it. I know you have!

You’ve probably even been tempted by it...

F4F. Follow for follow 😖

It looks like growth. It feels like momentum.

But here’s what's actually happening —

You’re stocking your waterway with carp. 👎💩👎

Carp aren’t a fussy fish. They’ll take almost any bait, crowd out everything worth catching, and slowly churn the water into mud.

On your page, that mud is a soupy algorithm. A big audience of disinterested followers isn’t a community. It’s dead weight — and the Meta knows it.

The algorithm won’t feed an unhealthy ecosystem.

Build a fishery worth fishing. 🎣

Read my full blog on this for a fun foray into marketing... link in the first comment 👇

23/05/2026

For decades, I’ve been quietly noting a pattern.

The most instinctive, deliberate, relentlessly curious business operators I’ve ever known — the ones who build things that actually last — are disproportionately, and I don’t think coincidentally, serious anglers.

I’ve been too cautious to say it out loud. Until this past little while.

And now, across the next week, I’m going to be writing about it on my fishing page and on LinkedIn — about the psychology of the angler, the discipline of reading conditions before casting, the intelligence that moves through fishing communities like a current beneath the surface.

The patterns are real. The overlap is real. And apparently, a lot of you have felt it too.

There’s a book, fifteen years in the making, if I'm honest about when the observations and jotting actually started. It’s finding its shape now, and I’m finding my nerve to bring it properly into the world.

This page is where that journey lives alongside everything else I do — the branding work, the frameworks, the deep thinking about what it actually takes to build a business that feels like you.

If you’ve crossed over from my fishing page this week: the flow has led you exactly where it was supposed to 🤗

If you’ve been here a while: now you know why the fishing stories keep appearing in my feed. They were always part of the same argument 😎

The conversation continues — and deepens — inside the Magnetic Founder Circle. It’s a private space for founders building resonance-led businesses. Not tips. Not trends. Real thinking, honestly shared.

Link in comments. Come in if it calls you.

15/05/2026

I want to hear your “ugly duckling” story.

The idea everyone thought was weird, wrong, too bold, too niche, too different — that turned out to be the best thing you ever did.

I’ll go first in the comments. Drop yours below. 👇

10/05/2026

I think a lot of founders are waiting for confidence to arrive before they become more visible.

But I’m starting to suspect confidence is just the memory of survived action.

The ground doesn’t appear first.

It forms beneath the step.

10/05/2026

Couldn’t have said this better myself…

Nobody reading this has NO regrets. Everybody has sh*t we wish we would've handled differently. Especially the person writing this.

But— that DOESN'T mean you deserve endless punishment or loneliness for your moments of cringe.

Sh*t happens. You & I are human.

Ease up.

08/05/2026

Certificate Pride is NOT just for kids!

Do you openly celebrate your achievements without fear of being judged?

I have one question if you answered “no”…

Where is the fun in that?!

Celebrate wildly! It not only allows your community to recognise the work and effort you put in, it gives THEM permission to recognise their own successes.

So… here’s snaps to me today!

Share your latest achievement — big or small — with us. Let’s get some YAY happening!