founder log_
A record of things I've founded and my learnings from them.
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Engine
An old friend from Toucan convinced me to join him on Engine. We are building a fintech crypto platform where users can create their own ETFs or structured products.
I have learned a lot about financial engineering products, and I think they are amazing and beautiful. This is the first company I have done with more than two founders. There are four of us, each with a specialization. The output is much bigger, and the work and burden do not sit on one person. It is still ongoing, so there is no full conclusion yet.
So far, I think I want to do more of these. A few people who are very good at their thing can move much faster than one or two founders trying to do everything.
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Tech recruiting
After helping build half the dev shop team, I thought the right business might be recruitment or staffing. I could meet solid developers, filter them well because I am a developer, and had already placed five people within a few months for our dev shop.
It was very hard to find employers who wanted to work with a recruiter and pay a fair finder fee. The companies that did often wanted brand names or a long interview process. I could tell quickly whether someone was good enough for a startup with 5-20 engineers. Many of my clients could not.
A profitable recruitment shop is a marketplace. You need a big bag of candidates and a big bag of employers, then a small percentage match. I have not fully given up on this one. I may come back in an AI-augmented way.
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Dev shop
I tried to build my own dev shop. I made a website, spoke to four or five developers about freelancing as subcontractors, and started reaching out to sell the work.
It did not work out. Finding clients was much harder than I understood then, especially at prices where I could make money and still pay developers enough to keep them happy. Turns out to have a healthy agency business you have to markup your workforce by ~70%-100%. I later joined a dev shop as a partner and spent a year helping build its team.
The hard part (for me) is not finding developers. The hard part is finding clients at a price that makes the business work.
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Minerva
A friend and I saw the RAG and connector wave coming. Companies wanted to connect Google Drive, Notion, and other internal information to an LLM, but many did not want to give that data to a connector vendor. We made Minerva, an open-source, self-hosted API that turns S3 documents into a searchable knowledge base.
We built the MVP and had a few calls. There was some interest, but we could not sell it for real. In hindsight, the business would have been killed anyway. Claude now has connectors and MCPs.
It was an interesting experiment and my first real foray into AI, and into more aggressive agentic coding.
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Expensio
Expensio started as a quieter way for me to track my own expenses, income, and budget. I made it self-hosted because I had a bet that self-hosting and one-time purchases would become a big thing.
This was where I experimented with SEO and free tools, which taught me useful things. The product itself did not get traction, so I shut it down.
People do not want to self-host. They want a done-for solution. The people who are going to pay want to give you money and have the problem go away. Also free public tools with input params in the URL are great for SEO.
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Nymnio
Nymnio was accounting software for crypto companies. It tracked transactions across addresses, cash flow, income, expenses, and capital gains. With some labelling help from the user, it could export the statements that made bookkeeping much easier.
I spoke to a few accounting shops. They liked the idea and were probably willing to spend a few thousand dollars a month on it. It did not die because the idea was bad. I just did not have the time to take it to the end, so it slowly died off.
When you see a B2B opening and a few people are actually interested, that is a very good sign. Move much faster. Give them what they want ASAP!
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Pickle Farm
While I was at Toucan Protocol, I built an MVP for a casual idle play-to-earn game. You would come in a few times a day, plan things, set things to pickle, then sell the mature pickles on the open market for pickle coin.
I got the architecture working, made visual assets in Aseprite, and talked to some people. By the time I had something to show, though, the NFT craze had already passed. I saw that it was not going to get major traction and stopped.
If you are going to ride a trend, you have to ride it hard and early. If I could go back, I would launch an NFT with Pickles first, then build the game on top of the created community.
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Crypto-only course checkout
I built a Gumroad or e-junkie-like product that let course creators take payment directly in crypto. I had spent a lot of time as a freelancer building websites and membership sites for creators, and many of them had started investing in crypto.
The product worked, but I could not market it or sell it well enough. I raised $30k from an angel for 40% of the company, then shut it down and refunded more than half the money.
It is not actually that crazy or hard to get an angel investor. Getting good terms is another matter. Giving up 40% for $30k was awful.
There's probably at least a few others I'm forgetting tbh.