ART Stark Naked Startup

Stark Naked Startup™ Advance Reader Team — Thank You for Joining!

Stark Naked Startup™: A Novel — Loneliness Epidemic, Solved By An AI Startup. Sexual Intimacy and Desire, Uncontrollably Addictive. Unintended Consequences, Their Truth Algorithm Weaponized — And Every Government on Earth Their Enemy.™

Book 1 of a planned four-novel series (also Book 5 of the Five Year Life™ Series)

Thank you for being here.

You have just joined the Stark Naked Startup™ Advance Reader Team — ART, short for Advance Reader Team — and that matters more than I can easily put in a welcome page. There is a real reader on the other side of this novel, and your honest engagement is what makes the difference between a story they fall into and a story they don’t.

Stark Naked Startup™ is a work of fiction, but it is not a light read. It is an intense, R-rated romance layered inside a techno-thriller, written for readers who are comfortable with emotional intensity, moral ambiguity, and high-stakes consequences. There are three additional sequels already outlined and ideas for two more beyond those, and the Stark Naked Startup™ ecosphere is built to support all of them — so if this first book lands for you, the plots and subplots that follow are designed to keep going.

This thank-you page is intentionally restrained. Beyond the teaser cover (which may or may not look like the final book cover), I am not revealing major plot points here. If you are reading this page, it means you are being invited into a process that is still underway, not a finished reveal.

First, the Most Important Thing

Everything you receive as part of this Team is absolutely free. The manuscript you will receive is free. There is no upsell, no paid tier, no subscription, no “premium membership,” and no hidden ask of any kind. That structure is permanent.

You are also not required to read the entire novel to be a Team Member. Even reading the first few chapters and telling me what worked, what didn’t, where the story pulled you in and where it pulled you out, is exactly what the Team is here to do.

What Being on the Team Actually Means

I know your time is genuinely valuable, and I truly appreciate you being part of this Team. This isn’t just a list you joined. It is a small, intentional group of people who are helping shape something before it ever reaches the public. You are part of the inner circle on this one. And that matters.

Let me set a clear expectation up front, framed as warmly as I can: there is no requirement to read this novel cover to cover — but there is an expectation that you form an honest opinion on what you do read, and share it with me as part of this Team. That is the whole job. That is what makes a Team Member a Team Member.

I’m not looking for volume. I’m looking for insight. Your takeaways from just a few chapters can be incredibly valuable. In many cases, even one or two chapters is more than enough to form a meaningful impression and a useful note back to me.

What I’m asking from you is simple, but important: bring your perspective to the Team — and, if you feel the novel has earned it, share your honest recommendation on Amazon at launch. The second part is welcomed, never required.

Two Moments Where Your Contribution Has the Greatest Impact

First, any early thoughts, comments, or reactions you share during this pre-launch period help shape how the novel is positioned and presented. That early signal — coming from this Team — is incredibly powerful in building initial momentum.

Second, and most important: your honest recommendation on Amazon right at launch has a direct and measurable effect on how the novel is discovered, ranked, and trusted by future readers. Timing matters here. We will send you a reminder as the launch date approaches so you can share your review when it counts most. If a few honest lines from your draft review — sent to me in advance — are something I could quote (with your permission) in launch-day marketing, that helps even more.

What makes this work is not volume. It is the quality of insight from a small group of people who actually care enough to engage. That’s what you’re part of here.

What This Novel Is (Without Spoilers)

Stark Naked Startup™ explores what happens when human desire, power, trust, and ambition collide with a technological breakthrough that should not exist yet.

While writing this novel, I was forced to go far beyond surface-level research into artificial intelligence. The story required defining a plausible path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), even though AGI does not yet exist. That meant thinking through software architecture, hardware requirements, security constraints, and the real-world implications that such a breakthrough would demand.

As the research deepened, it became clear that this work crossed a line from pure fiction into something more complicated. As a 44X founder with more than four decades of entrepreneurial experience, I recognized that some of the concepts developed during the writing process constituted meaningful intellectual property. That intellectual property is now in the process of being protected through trademarks and patents, with the intention of licensing the underlying technology in the immediate future.

For that reason, I am deliberately careful about what I share publicly at this stage.

You do not need to be a total geek to enjoy the multitude of plots and subplots. You don’t need to be a geek at all. However, the breakthroughs in AI technology that I describe are just beyond the horizon, and I felt compelled to make sure that one of the backbone arcs would pass the plausibility tests of the super geeks who might also enjoy this book. This plausible technology is what allows the startup company in this novel to develop something so intriguing and enticing that every beta reader so far is overwhelmingly wishing the world had this tech available today.

Manuscript Status

This novel is approximately 80% complete. The core narrative, characters, and trajectory are firmly established, but the manuscript is not yet locked. That is intentional.

Advance Readers are being invited in while there is still room to refine pacing, tone, character dynamics, and narrative clarity before the final stretch is completed.

Who I Am Hoping to Hear From

I am especially interested in Team Members who are comfortable with intense romantic content, psychological tension, and speculative technology. Readers who enjoy thrillers, techno-fiction, and emotionally charged relationships are likely to be a good fit.

I also welcome feedback from people with experience in startups, technology, security, or high-pressure environments — your instincts about plausibility, behavior under stress, and unintended consequences are valuable.

You do not need to be a technologist, writer, or critic to be helpful. If you can tell me what feels believable, what feels emotionally true, what feels confusing, or what pulls you out of the story, that feedback matters.

If you are an editor, grammarian, or English professor, your input is also welcome. Precision in language and clarity of intent matter deeply in a novel like this.

If you do not fit neatly into any of these categories but feel strongly drawn to participate, you are still welcome. Insight does not require credentials.

What Participation Looks Like (And How You Help Most)

This Team is a partnership, not a preview dump. The goal is to make the novel stronger, sharper, and more disciplined before completion.

The most helpful feedback includes:

(1) Pacing and momentum: where the story pulled you forward versus where it slowed or drifted.

(2) Emotional truth: whether the relationships, power dynamics, and choices feel earned and believable.

(3) Tone balance: whether the romance and the technological tension feel integrated rather than competing.

(4) Heat: whether the explicit scenes serve the story or feel grafted on.

(5) Restraint: whether the suspense tightens without being telegraphed.

(6) Clarity and confusion: any moments where you felt lost, overwhelmed, or unsure what mattered.

(7) Plausibility signals: anything that strains credibility or needs grounding.

(8) Typos and polish: awkward phrasing, repeated words, or clarity improvements.

(9) “Oh by the way” insights: short observations that do not fit a category but still matter.

(10) A few honest lines of the review you might consider posting at launch — even in draft form — that I could potentially quote (with your permission) in launch-day marketing.

Even a single thoughtful email with a few notes is meaningful. There is no minimum participation requirement.

The Fastest Way to Give Feedback

Screenshots are often the fastest and most effective way to give feedback. If a line, paragraph, or scene feels off, confusing, or especially strong, take a quick screenshot (or phone photo) and email it with a short note such as “confusing,” “too fast,” “needs setup,” “felt real,” or “pulled me out.” You can also reference chapter numbers or general locations if that is easier. I will locate the exact spot.

A Special Ask: Quotes, Social Sharing, and Early Reviews

In addition to what needs improvement, I am listening for what resonates. If there are moments that made you pause, reread, feel tension, or feel something unexpected, please flag them. Short soundbite-style comments can be extremely helpful for pre-launch announcements and marketing — and they often become the most useful pieces of launch-day marketing.

I will also ask Team Members to consider leaving an honest review on Amazon on the day of launch, if you feel the novel earned it. Early reviews have an outsized impact on visibility and discovery. These actions are appreciated but never required.

Recognition and the Team Member “Superheroes”

I plan to recognize and celebrate the people who actually show up for this Team. In a real sense, you help ensure this novel earns the intensity and trust it asks of readers. Recognition happens in two places, both inside the published novel itself:

(1) Any Team Member who meaningfully participates — even with a single thoughtful feedback email — is invited to be acknowledged by name in the novel’s Acknowledgements. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that is completely fine.

(2) A smaller group of Team Member Superheroes, whose feedback is especially substantive and influential, are recognized separately within the Acknowledgements — and given first consideration for every future Advance Reader Team across the Stark Naked Startup™ series (Books 2, 3, and 4) and the broader Five Year Life™ Series.

Recognition is tied to participation and feedback only — never to whether you posted a review. Team Members who sign up and then disappear still keep the manuscript they were sent and owe nothing — they simply will not appear in the Acknowledgements or on the Superhero list.

Acknowledgement (Optional)

If you would like to be acknowledged in the novel’s Acknowledgements section, please let us know how your name should appear. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that is completely fine.

I expect to include both a general “Advance Reader Team Contributors” section and a separate “Team Member Superheroes” section recognizing especially impactful contributions.

Confidentiality

All Advance Reader Team materials are provided for your eyes only. Please do not distribute, forward, upload, or share any files, excerpts, screenshots, plot details, character details, technology concepts, or summaries in any form. Files are watermarked and traceable to the recipient. Confidentiality carries additional weight here because the technology concepts developed for this novel are currently being protected as intellectual property — patents and trademarks are in active filing. This protects the manuscript, the launch, the intellectual property, and the integrity of the entire process.

About Timing and Version Status

This Advance Reader version is close to the final manuscript but not yet locked. Think of this as a true beta reader phase. Your feedback now directly influences refinement before publication.

I am moving carefully but deliberately. The goal is release when the novel is genuinely ready — not before.

Download Link Coming When Manuscript Is Ready

The Stark Naked Startup™ manuscript is not yet available for immediate download. It is approximately 80% complete and should be ready for Advance Readers within the next few weeks. Once it is ready, you will receive an email with the direct download link.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing what you think of it.

How to Send Feedback

Email:

ARC@FiveYearLife.com

Subject line (auto-filled when you click the email link above):

ART Feedback – Stark Naked Startup

You may send feedback in any format that is easiest for you: short notes, screenshots, bullet points, or marked-up documents.

One Last Thing — Why This Matters

A novel either earns its intensity or it doesn’t. Pacing, restraint, escalation, emotional truth, technological plausibility — these properties cannot be calculated in advance. They have to be tested against real readers who can tell me what felt earned and what felt forced. That is why this Team exists.

The reader on the other side of this novel is someone who wants a story they can actually fall into — romance with real stakes, suspense with real heat, characters whose choices have weight, and technology that feels close enough to be unsettling. They are tired of fiction that telegraphs every turn. Your honest reaction — where the story pulled you forward, where it drifted, where the heat felt earned and where it felt grafted on, where the technology grounded the plot and where it strained credibility — is how I make this novel meet them there with the precision they deserve. That is the most meaningful kind of help you could give to a lot of readers you will never meet.

Thank you again for being on the Team. This novel is being shaped with care, discretion, and rigor, and your insight helps ensure the final version earns the intensity and trust it asks of readers.

Thanks,

Robert

Robert Lee Goodman, MBA
CEO and Publisher, Good-Man LLC
Founder and Author, Five Year Life™ Series
44X Founder · Rocket Scientist ·
33K Compound Knowledgist™ ·
Chief Dragonslayer™ – Business & Love ·
Novelist Who Successfully Found His Heroine™

PS: If you are a corporate buyer, HR leader, coach, or program director interested in bulk purchase or organizational use, contact: SpecialSales@FiveYearLife.com

Job loss is never just a financial event. It’s an identity shock, a loss of stability, and a rupture in how you understand your own value. And in today’s economy, finding stable work often takes far longer than people expect — especially as AI continues to reshape entire professions.

Your Last Paycheck™ was written to prevent panic-driven decisions during one of the most vulnerable periods of a person’s life.

The first half of the book provides a calm, step-by-step stabilization plan for the critical early weeks: what to secure, what to protect, how to preserve both finances and emotional footing.

The second half offers a realistic blueprint for navigating the AI-driven job market — including how to assess which roles are expanding, which are quietly disappearing, and how to reposition yourself without chasing false promises.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/YourLastPaycheck

There comes a point in nearly every life when the internal alignment that once held everything together begins to fracture. You feel it before you can explain it — a heaviness, a resistance, a sense that you are living slightly out of phase with yourself.

Reset Protocol™ exists for that moment. It guides you through 108 carefully sequenced questions designed to reveal patterns you’ve lived with for years, surface truths you may have been avoiding, and help you see your life with clarity rather than judgment.

You’ll also learn the Five-Year Lens™ — a future-focused way to evaluate decisions based on who you are becoming, not just what you’re trying to escape. Not the familiar path, but the one most aligned with what you actually want.

Reset Protocol™ is not about blowing up your life; it’s about realignment — done deliberately, honestly, and with realistic compassion. It’s how you move beyond the road less traveled and step onto the road most desired.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocol

Some people prefer to read and reflect. Others need to engage, write, and move. This Workbook is built for action.

The Reset Protocol Workbook™ transforms insight into execution. It follows the same 108 carefully sequenced questions, but provides structured space to capture your answers, clarify your thinking, and turn reflection into forward momentum.

This is where your Reset Protocol becomes your own — not just something you understand, but something you actively work through, decision by decision.

Whether you use it alongside the main book or on its own, the purpose is the same: to move you from awareness into alignment, and from alignment into action.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocolWorkbook

“I had 1,200 first dates” sounds like a gimmick. It wasn’t. It was the byproduct of an accidental experiment that started with a simple website: NovelistSeeksHeroine.com.

That page described the 28 traits I believed mattered most for long-term compatibility. More than 15,000 women responded, convinced they matched. What followed was a decade-long journey — roughly 1,200 first dates, over 300 second dates, and a hard-earned education in the difference between attraction, projection, and true alignment.

Out of those 15,000, out of those 1,200 first dates, there was one — and only one — woman I asked to marry me. She said yes. That was more than two decades ago… and we’re still happily together and counting.

But this book isn’t about my story. It’s about yours.

Efficient Love™ shows you how to avoid years of unnecessary detours, identify real compatibility earlier, and find the person who is right for you — where you also happen to be right for them.

It distills everything learned from that journey — including the Three Lists — into a practical, repeatable approach you can apply immediately to your own search.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/EfficientLove

Stark Naked Startup™: A Novel – Book 1 — Loneliness Epidemic, Solved By An AI Startup. Sexual Intimacy and Desire, Uncontrollably Addictive. Unintended Consequences, Their Truth Algorithm Weaponized — And Every Government on Earth Their Enemy.™

It begins with a problem that has quietly grown into a worldwide epidemic, spreading across cultures, countries, and generations, affecting not just millions, but likely hundreds of millions and even billions of souls on this planet, often without being openly acknowledged because it hides so easily behind lives that appear complete from the outside.

Call it loneliness, if you want, though that word barely captures the full weight of it, because what is actually being felt is not simply the absence of company, but the absence of being truly known, truly understood, and truly connected in ways that feel real, dependable, and impossible to fake, whether in romantic love, friendship, family, or the quieter forms of human connection that give life its meaning.

Four founders come together around that recognition, not because they believe they have all the answers, but because they share the conviction that this epidemic is neither small nor inevitable, and that if something could be understood at a deeper level, perhaps it could be changed, not merely for a few fortunate people, but in a way that might genuinely make the world a better place.

What draws them forward is , and at the beginning it still looks, at least from a distance, like a startup story, a few brilliant, driven people building something ambitious and hopeful in the face of a problem that seems too large for any small company to solve.

Then something begins to shift, though not in any clean or predictable way, and not in any form the founders would have recognized at first for what it really was, because whatever they had touched was no longer simply shaping what people said to one another, but the space beneath what they said, where hesitation, desire, restraint, and truth normally remain guarded, filtered, and quietly distorted.

Because when two people connect through , the distance between what is felt and what is revealed does not gradually close the way it usually does, but instead begins to collapse, giving way to a form of shared awareness that feels at once intoxicating, disorienting, and impossible to resist.

It does not feel reckless. It does not feel confused. It feels certain in a way that is almost unnerving, because the usual space people rely on to stay in control seems to dissolve almost immediately, leaving behind the unmistakable sense that something deeper has already recognized what neither of them has yet spoken aloud.

Time does not disappear. It accelerates until hesitation has no place to live, until desire and certainty arrive together, and what would have taken months becomes something neither of them can delay, and neither of them would ever choose to.

This is not the familiar courtship minuet people have come to expect, not the cautious circling, not the incremental testing of boundaries. It is something else entirely, a different kind of dance, where recognition arrives first, where alignment follows immediately, and where passion does not wander aimlessly but locks into place with a precision that feels both overwhelming and inevitable.

Desire is unmistakably part of it, but it does not stand alone, because what rises with it is something far more disarming, a sense of alignment so complete that the usual friction is simply not there, no second-guessing, no misread signals, no quiet holding back that people are used to carrying even in their most intimate moments.

Here, there is to reinterpret, to correct, and almost no place left for the subtle evasions that normally prevent passion from becoming what it was always capable of becoming.

What unfolds in that space is not merely erotic, though it is undeniably that, and not merely romantic, though it is deeply that as well. It is the experience of two people entering a form of connection where closeness is no longer negotiated, but revealed, where desire and certainty rise together, and where intimacy carries a depth that feels both intensely physical and profoundly understood at the same time.

Within that convergence, moments begin to emerge in which , where sensation deepens into meaning, and where the line between emotional connection and physical experience becomes impossible to separate.

And yet what begins here is not confined to romance, because the same underlying shift begins to extend into , , and , suggesting that what is being touched is not merely a better way for people to fall in love, but a deeper way for human beings to recognize, understand, and relate to one another across nearly every meaningful dimension of life.

What began as an attempt to address a global epidemic affecting hundreds of millions, and likely billions, starts to reveal implications far beyond anything the founders imagined, becoming less a product and more the early edge of a black swan event, one capable of producing outcomes no one can fully model and no existing system of control can comfortably absorb.

And that is when the attention shifts, because something like this will never be left alone once outside forces begin to grasp even fragments of what may be possible.

What follows is no longer simply a question of whether the founders can protect what they have built, but whether what they have touched can remain what it was meant to be once others begin trying to control, redirect, weaponize, or own it.

Especially once it becomes clear that beneath the emotional, romantic, and philosophical implications there may also be elements of that extend beyond fiction.

That realization was never part of the original plan, and yet somewhere in the process of developing this story, it became impossible to ignore the possibility that what was being described might represent something more tangible, something that could, under the right conditions, constitute , with the specific details intentionally withheld for reasons that should be self-evident.

This is not just a story. It is a partially redacted case file. And whatever is happening inside it has already begun.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/SNSPreview