18 June 2025

August 2026. After over a year building Spectrm with Manojj, I made the decision to leave the company and start a new chapter.
The last 18 months have been nothing short of incredible for me. I have learned so much, ventured far out of my comfort zone, and have overcome some of the hardest mental challenges I've faced.
I've learned a lot about people. I began to understand how precious time really is. I began to unfold myself and figure out what makes me go. I obsereved my own thoughts, my reactions, my mood. I analysed my diet, my sleep, my digitial exposure.
I learned how to believe. I learned how much you can achieve if you just try and keep going. I learned how important mindset is.
I learned how important communication is in a team. I learned how to compromise, how to be more empathetic, and how to deal with conflict.
I began to appreciate the little moments much more. I learned
In this post, I will (hopefully) regularly update my thoughts and confusions on starting a startup. After about 4 weeks working full time with my co-founder Manojj, I learned a lot, in a fairly linear fashion. Everything was going good, I was watching YC startup school, Manojj was teaching me loads, but now that I’ve reached a sufficient level of deepness within this world, I have finally hit the inevitable stage of complete confusion and the point where you question yourself daily. Our minds are changing every few days, we are moving quickly, but we wonder - are we moving forward, or in circles? Speed means nothing without direction, right? Anyway, here I will post whenever we get to a new idea state, and I will write my thoughts.
I predict that in a few months, maybe years, and possibly decades, I will come back and think “what on earth was he thinking”, but I find that kinda fun and I look forward to it!
I spent my morning consuming Paul Graham - reading “Why smart people have bad ideas” & watching “Before the Startup”. I found them extremely interesting, and I was like damn, this guy is smart and I should definitely listen to him. He spoke & wrote about his experiences as an early founder with Viaweb and gave 6 points on why startups are counterintuitive. Early founders tend not to listen to YC partners, you need to be an expert in your users, not in startups, you cant game the system, startups are all consuming, they will change you a lot, and the way to get startup ideas is trying not to think of startup ideas. He also mentions the best startup ideas come from side-projects. Anyway, my thoughts:
It's interesting, you almost have to figure out your customer first, so that you know who you can deeply understand and learn about. But then, they say the best startups are side projects - now I wonder, how do we define a side projects For me, a side project is something that I work on to improve my life, or for those closely to me. Now, does that mean you should start looking at the world’s pain points and then treat them as side projects? Wait, but surely this line of thought is completely debunked with the fact that side projects should NOT be treated as startups in itself, so you should only develop it as if you are trying to make it for yourself, or a select few people close to you - right? If I took this advice I could start a 'side project' with the subconscious expectation that this would and could turn into a startup - but if i even have a trace of this thought, then doesn't it render itself as a 'startup idea', and no longer count as a side project? This must therefore mean that a side project, is one where you have some deep desire within yourself to solve this problem, no matter how niche, or useless it is to every other human on the earth. If it solves your problem, that's all you care about and you have the passion that pursue it with no expectation.
So let's say that you then have this side project, where you are truly, only focused on getting the solution working for yourself. How do you make that transition from a side project, to a startup?
I think the reason this ‘side-project’ advice is kicking up such a fuss, is because we are working full time on finding a startup idea. So the fact that, on the side of this, we should be working on projects that we shouldn’t treat like a startup, sounds quite counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t we be better off spending all of our time talking to potential customers, like the founders of Brex did? Who knows.
This is what I’ve decided: We aren’t going to know what advice is worth listening to until we try ourselves. Let me try doing a few stress-free side projects during the week, alongside actively looking for ideas (even if Paul says “if you make a conscious effort to try to think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible sounding. Meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them. You'll waste a lot of time before realising they're no good.”)
Next topic: The whole thing about travelling to Thailand and going backpacking - this is something I absolutely must do, and I am not sure if I can NOT do it in my twenties, so it seems here that I have conflicting goals - seeing the world, and making my mark on it. We can all agree that if I spent 6 months of a year travelling, and the other half grinding, I would more likely to be successful if I was grinding the full 12 months. But, what is missing from this, is the quality of life between those two years - which one will I be a happier human for, and which one, in 10 years time will I be more grateful of? If I grind for a year, I am setting up (in theory) a great future for myself in terms of career and financial stability, but am I setting up deep, fulfilling happiness for my future self? Conversely, if all I did was travel, and have fun, I am sure I will learn a lot about myself, but will my future self be happy that I spent all of our money on experiences, so that in the future my family, wife, and kids suffer? There has to be a middle ground.
Also, I want to be the guy that can still travel a lot during the year, but grind hard on a startup, but I imagine that if we were to blow up like Cursor, I don't think I'd be willing to just stop for 3 months to go travel - right? They say a startup is like your child - would you leave your child for a 3 month break, and let it die? That's why it's hard to do this kind of thing whilst you are creating a successful startup. I guess, I am grateful I am aware of this as I write my thoughts out, because nothings done yet - I don't have a successful startup, so maybe I should go out and travel again? But times running out - don't I need to start my startup now - whilst I'm young, with no responsibilities? ARGGGGG
Oh and also Mark Reuben said something awesome the other day on my instagram reels -
"If the AI has reason, it wont do what the human can do, because we aren't reasonable. The breakthroughs come from what is not reasonable - what cannot be done, what's not supposed to be done. The AI cannot invent flight before the Wright Brothers, it can only regurgitate what the Wright brother did. And we do that, not by knowing more, but by believing in something that can't be. It’s something that can be imagined that allows forward motion. Always."
Manojj and I were discussing more common YC advice that you hear. We are told that we need to find a ‘hair on fire’ pain point - one that users are desperately trying to solve and are highly motivated to find a solution. I’ll let Micheal Seibel tell you about it in his words: “As a founder, I never took the time to really understand what that meant and I thought it was just an investor marketing saying. Now, when I talk to founders I extend the metaphor to illustrate it more clearly. If your friend was standing next to you and their hair was on fire, that fire would be the only thing they really cared about in this world. It wouldn’t matter if they were hungry, just suffered a bad breakup, or were running late to a meeting—they’d prioritize putting the fire out. If you handed them a hose—the perfect product/solution—they would put the fire out immediately and go on their way. If you handed them a brick they would still grab it and try to hit themselves on the head to put out the fire. You need to find problems so dire that users are willing try half-baked, v1, imperfect solutions.”
I do think this analogy is great, and it makes perfect sense. Ultimately, that would be the ideal position to be in as a founder, but does this mean we should evaluate our ideas based on if it is a ‘hair on fire’ problem? If it’s not, should we disregard it completely?
We took Cursor, as an example. In its early stages, I think it’s fair to say that it started as a hair-on-fire type of problem for their ideal customer. I pay for Cursor, and use it daily. If you asked me 1 year ago, if I needed Cursor, I would say no. I have a chatGPT subscription so I didn’t need to pay for another LLM - I can just split screen GPT and VSCode and I was good to go. But if you asked me now, after using Cursor, I would say coding without AI embedded into my IDE was defiantly a pain point, and I would definitely pay for software to solve that. So what changed? Well, I saw the light, I experienced a better workflow and now in HINDSIGHT, I can identify that live without cursor would create quite a decently sized pain point. Isn’t that interesting. I only found a pain point in hindsight. This makes me think, does that mean we can build a product that we personally think is good and use, and then I guess hope that when other people USE it, they are like - wait, I love this, here’s my money? Essentially, playing on the fact that sometimes, customers don’t even know it’s a pain point until you show them? Is this realistic, or is this just luck? And it’s this “what if?” that makes me reluctant to disregard a product because people’s hair aren’t on fire. I guess time will tell!
So I talked to a successful (YC W24) startup founder today about the topic I discussed above - I was pretty much asking myself, how valid is the “hair on fire” advice? Surely I can think of examples of non hair on fire problems that people solved and that customers pay for. He explained that firstly, the ideal customer profile (ICP) for cursor wasn’t me. It was *real *software engineers whose hair actually was on fire. I just didn’t know it, because I’m not from that background. Ultimately, Cursor did solve a hair on fire problem for their ICP but happened to also solve a mild pain point for millions of other users like myself. In that way, he describe them as a bit of an anomaly, also taking into account how quickly they grew. I guess this has left me thinking, it definitely is a good idea to look at the best and quickest startups, but it’s not *all *I should be doing. The biggest startup names of AirBnb, Google, Apple, Cursor etc, are all great to learn from, but theres a reason they’re separate from the pack, and just because it worked for them, doesn’t mean it will work for us. Instead, we should take a holistic approach and look at what all successful startup’s have in common - solving a ‘hair on fire’ problem for *their *customers.
In hindsight I admit it does feel quite silly disagreeing and questioning advice from people who have been successful themselves AND been involved in so many startup journeys, regardless of their outcome. I guess that’s just my way of truly understanding a subject - dive in, realise I’m wrong, learn, and come out knowing that I now have a deeper understanding of the topic, rather than just taking it for truth.
So I just returned from holiday and I had some new thoughts. Before the holiday in the last few weeks I was basically pushing as much time as I could towards the startup and that meant sacrificing a lot of things such as reading books, listening to podcasts, and reading blog posts.
I basically felt if the content I was consuming was not directly related to startups, that it did not count as work and therefore I shouldn't be consuming it.
I found myself neglecting reading as a result - something I love and get annoyed about if I don’t get a chance to do during the day. I read non-fiction, usually about topics and ideas I haven’t come across before. Eg. Books about biology & evolution (Selfish Gene, Sapiens). These books give me an ever so slightly better understanding of the world around me, and shift my perspectives which is one the reasons I love reading so much.
None of this is really related to startups, but could you argue that reading makes me a happier, more knowledgeable startup founder, thus positively influencing the startup. Surely a better understanding of the world and yourself would benefit a startup? I think what I am really trying to say is that, my bet is that the things we do outside of startup world has an impact on what happens in startup world, so we shouldn’t demonise and neglect them - instead, do them within reason. The may not look like they’re “pushing the needle” but maybe they are?
Anyway, sounds like I’m overthinking. Let me go read now. Will update you soon to see if I still feel the same way.
We started ideation on Monday. We face the same old problem we are always facing - what do we prioritise and how do we balance speed + depth. If we are ideating a problem space, how long do you spend? Where do you draw the line? 1hr, 5hrs, 1 day, 1 week? 1 week gives you a huge opportunity to dive deep into the space, talk to users, upskill yourself on the nitty gritty, and put you in a better position to offer up a solution. Buttttt, 1 week is way too long. We have 9 spaces we want to look into - does that mean 9 weeks for ideation? Way too slow. Okay, but if we do each for say 5 hours, is that enough time to dig deep enough to even find a problem? I guess it depends on how quickly you can deep. Isn’t it frustrating when every answer is a form of “it depends”!?
Anyway, in just three days by taking action, we are getting much closer to an answer. As we dive in more, we realise where we’re wasting time and where we are finding value. We are aware that you shouldn’t always go off your instincts when doing a startup, but we feel like this is the right time to use them. We don’t know and we won’t. I think that the pure fact we are getting better everyday is enough for me. I mean, no matter the outcome of these next two weeks, we will still question ourselves “could we have dug deeper?”, “maybe we spent too long researching”. Hindsight’s a bitch like that.
Dare I say we’re moving fast. Fast relative to a few weeks ago. Every week we push harder. We estimated that brainstorming would take around 2 weeks, and we’d have an idea 21st. We underestimated ourselves, and found ourselves finished brainstorming by Sunday. Yes you could brainstorm for weeks and weeks, but we went off intuition of balancing speed and depth. Quite impressed with ourselves, but still think we can move much faster.
What a week it has been! We have built our first real MVP, and will be shipping to users as soon as possible - tomorrow latest. We are working on an idea in the people search idea space - something that has been done well by a few companies, but we want to make it great. We also have some ideas of certain niches we can hit.
Building this week was a lot of fun. It was challenging, interesting, and most importantly, it taught us a lot. We realised how fast we could actually move when you really put your mind to it. I do think however, from Tuesday to Sunday, my mindset has ever so slightly shifted towards solution thinking - Since I took charge of the frontend, I have had to really step into the role of how the user would use the application, and what kind of prompt they may input. This keeps your mind narrowly focused on predicting what people may use it for, without actually thinking problem first. Manojj, thankfully, is the opposite, where he is very much focused on really defining the problem, and this means he is pushing as hard as possible to get it into peoples hands. I’m grateful for this grounding, as I do agree, we need to stop building now, and really focus on what exactly are we going to solve. On one hand it’s great that we are in a fertile idea space, with loads of scope to play with, but also, that means if we choose the wrong niche, we won’t be successful. Within this space, the most important thing right now is finding the pain point that users will pay to solve. We have had one person tell us with confidence if we did X, Y, and Z properly, they would pay for it. But that’s not enough. The next week is crunch time and customer discovery with our MVP.
Oh and before I forget to mention - I am a big advocate for work-life balance, and I try to strive for balance every single day no matter what. This week, Manojj stayed up all night till 7am to get some shit done that he said he would. That day I woke up at 6am, did some hand over, and I worked till 2am the following morning. This was my first huge day - the day’s all founders love posting about on LinkedIn (“Omg all those late nights were worth it…”), and as someone who likes balance, I was surprised how much I was happy to sacrifice my sleep for this. I was just so determined to hit our deadline and get this shit done. This isn’t impressive, but for people that know me, I almost never sacrifice my sleep for much lol. So for me, this tells me a lot about the feelings I have towards this startup. Although, I need to be a little slow on the gas - getting sucked into the idea too quickly is bad, and maybe its just been a big drought of ideas for months on months, that now that the half baked idea has arrived, I think its the end. That’s not the case - this idea could be dead tomorrow. You never know, so I am telling myself to stay level headed.
Having an ‘idea’ is worse than I expected. It’s such a broad space, we’re struggling to find the exact use case
These last week has been tough. The YC deadline is coming up and we are keen to smash it out the park, but with that comes huge pressure on our application. We’re pushing hard but I have been struggling to turn off, and as a result my sleep has been considerably worse this week. I’ve been more tired, my productivity has dropped, and I have slipped on keeping up with balance - reading & journaling, and exercise etc. Now I’m sleeping later to get work done, but then sleeping an hour through my alarm like today (I don’t even remember turning it off lol). I also don’t want to become reliant on caffeine, so I’m forcing myself to not drink it daily.
Today I’m going to try and that 30 mins of wind down before bed. Even though I know balance is important, I’m always fighting.
Also our first launch today, and first potential customer!
From Mech Eng. grad to startup founder…all within a year.
It been a wild journey, but @Manojj and I are committed to our building Spectre. A natural language search tool that you can use to find the exact person you’re looking for. Our vision is to make finding the right people easy and accurate - a search based on peoples real experience, not limited to filters and keywords.
If this sounds interesting, our basic MVP is live now and we’d love your feedback. We’re just getting started - looking forward to the journey ahead! 🚀
Who have you struggled to find in the past?
https://spectre-search.vercel.app (best on desktop)
This is hard. Very hard. Getting customers
It feels like a scramble to get customers before the YC deadline. I think I want YC so badly that I just want customers NOW NOW NOW. Thats not how it works. The timing sucks because we haven’t had enough time to get our customers. On the other hand it’s really good that this deadline is imminent because it’s forced us to get our product out there, launch & just make everyone aware.
Submitted our YC application and feeling awesome. It was a big struggle this week, but this application in itself has made us really really think about what our vision is and what our mission is. The MVP we released to the public did not solve our problem at the core. We released it as a way to see what people would want to search. We tried this out, but I don’t think this method was as effective as it could be. First we need to actually built the product that we want to solve our pain point - after all, the problem came from us from the beginning.
Thats why this week we’ve decided to build an MVP to solve OUR problem. Ultimately that’s where I think it should start - if we’re building a product that we’re not even going to use, what’s the point?
Okay, so we are almost 10 days post-YC application and my mindset has shifted yet again. Before the YC application, we were acting almost ‘desperately’. I actually think that was good, but now that things have cooled down, we’ve rebased and realised that YC is helpful, but we should forget about it for now, and smash continue building our product. I watched Garry Tan’s really insightful video about not being ‘thirsty’ and I also read Sam Altman’s blog post of “….”
A note on work-life balance. The past week, we set very hard and strict deadlines for work - Meeren to stop working 10:30pm NO MATTER WHAT, and Manojj 2:00am. This comes from the fact that pre-YC application, we were burning the midnight oil to get shit done - this was great, we got shit done. But the startup race is a long one, and doing this on a weekly basis is not sustainable. I always ‘knew this’ but I really felt it a few days rest following our big week. I remember waking up feeling unbelievably energetic. I thought - imagine if I was like this every day - the shit that we could achieve in the long run would be amazing. So let’s do it - let’s focus on health and sleep even more than we already do because this surely moves the needle further than working 16hr days straight for weeks on weeks. Maybe I’m wrong because so many successful founders talk about working 80+ hours a week and sleeping 4 hrs a day and having 4892 cups of coffee. I wonder if they’d be able to achieve the same sleeping 8hrs a day. I think getting 8hrs of high quality sleep is really really hard when you’re doing a startup - the hardest part being the disconnecting. If you can truly disconnect from your work in the evening, you have a huge chance of high quality sleep. Our startup is the last thing we think about before bed, and the first thing we think about in the morning. Ideally, we should probably think about it 14 hours a day, and then the hour before bed, and the hour as we wake should be disconnect, and connecting time. This is the ideal solution and I am determined to get there.
Manojj has been on holiday for the last 9 days, meaning I’ve had to spend this time building the product as quickly as possible. The timelines don’t really change or make way for your team even if you’re on holiday. It’s been noticeably more difficult pushing through without your teammate. It really demonstrates how important having someone else is, and really tests your own discipline and drive. I enjoyed the challenge.
The last week, I’ve been borderline addicted to the Micheal & Dalton series. Today I watched one of my favourite ones - When Should You Trust Your Gut? LINK: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ViqdR5E2wU]. They speak about two main situations; 1) you are an expert in your niche field 2) you aren’t an expert but have some interest in doing a startup in this field. If you are part of group 1, you can maybe lean on your gut a little bit more, because your judgement comes from a place of expertise, and that is more valuable than the average joe (given that they’re not experts). How do you know if you’re an expert? Well, if you find that you have strong opinions and unique perspectives on a certain niche, maybe you are indeed an ‘expert’ in this field, compared to the rest of the world. Experts are in a good position to understand deep problems in their niche, often giving them a good starting point for a startup. If you fall more into the not-expert category, you should first admit this as quickly as possible and plan to build your expertise. Hopefully you want to learn more about this field, and more importantly, enjoy learning in this field. That’s going to be the best way to build expertise.
No path is better than the other - they’re just telling us to be self-conscious of if you’re bringing expertise, or building expertise.
Where things go wrong: “when the founder with expertise is fearful and acts like the founder without, and the founder without expertise is too confident and acts like the founder with”. Brilliant advice from Micheal.
If you are an expert, and you’ve built something that truly impresses yourself, you are probably in a good spot. With non-expert, it’s a little more complex - are you proud of what you’ve built? Would you buy it? Has it actually solved the problem for you, or someone you know? Are you impressed by it?
Bringing this back to Spectre - we are somewhere in the middle. We definitely have a few opinions on people search, however we are not experts on the subject. Instead, we’ve been trying to build that expertise by speaking to 100+ people from varying industries. The thing is, most people have told us that we should probably go down the sales leads/recruiting side of things where people search is a fundamental component. That makes sense, but our gut pulls us back on this, because the reason we started this was to help the average professional find people they actually wanted in the first place. We’re in a spot where the ‘building expertise’ part is telling us to go one way, however our own use-case, and the reason we had this idea in the first place, is telling us to go another.
For now, Manojj and I are in agreement that we can’t predict where it will go, but one thing is for sure - we are trusting our gut on building our MVP. Our MVP will first impress and solve our problem, and then we will go out and find others like us who may find value. With our scrappy V0 launch, we didn’t actually make something that truly impressed ourselves, or that truly solved our problem, so we’re rectifying that now.
Balancing Speed and Quality. We want to get our actual version 1 of our product out as fast as possible, but we are always wrestling with - “how good should we make this? Would we rather launch today with 7/10 quality, or spend an extra day doing 9/10? Maybe even another for 9.8/10? It’s tempting, and we know one thing for sure - we should bias speed over quality but it’s still not as simple as that. How much should we bias? I want to say we’re doing a decent job - I push for quality, while Manojj pushes for speed, and we meet nicely (or so I thinks in the middle. He keeps me in check - especially since I come from a product design background, and since high school, I’ve been wired to pay attention to every detail - “tenacity” as Mr Brown once drilled into me…and sometimes that can get out of hand.
I have been on holiday since Sunday with family, and I think I was due a break. On Sunday, I was so eager to just get my head out of Cursor. I just wanted this shit to be done, and get the product launched, but I also knew we couldn’t rush it. Getting away from the scene for a bit definitely helped but third day in, I am lowkey itching to get back. I’ve been checking my messages from Manojj every so often to see how it’s going, if it’s any closer to launch. I’m excited to get back home and get working - I WANT TO LAUNCH.
On the train back from a tech-founder meet + greet, and Manojj and I had a good conversation about who we would be our first hire? Manojj and I have quite high ambitions, and although we may have different metrics and meanings of success, at a very high level, we both agree that success comes from creating value. Creating *real *value is rare and difficult. You need to have gone through certain life experiences to get there, and usually this ‘value’ you are creating, is somewhat an expression of yourself. Manojj and I always relate this to music artists, since we’re both huge music fans.
I’m going through another ‘doubt’ phase.
The thing is, I use YC’s videos to almost realign myself. The videos, whether they explicitly say it or not, remind me that these things take time, and its hard, and as long as everyday you push to learn something new about the business, you are moving. I even remind myself of things I preach to others. I say to Manojj we need to extract as much data from a situation as we can because every part is useful. And so I remind myself, that by just simply acting, and doing the thing, you are gathering data. If you’re going down the wrong path, once you realise, you can go back and figure out how you got here - with all that ‘action’ data. If you never try, you get no data, you stay safe, but you stay the same. Matthew McConaughey says “Dive in. Go find out. Don’t half ass it”.
To build a product 100 people love, you need to almost go above their expectations. 7 star experiences. 5 star is almost what they expect. You can get 100 people to like your product on 5 star experiences, but to love - that must reach a new level.
Had my first call with a first potential user who has a real pain point of people search. We haven’t closed him yet - and it’s going to be so hard to do so, but I finally have spoken, face to face, with someone who a) experiences the pain point. b) actively pays $50 a month for another service aside from LinkedIn, that doesn’t even work as well as it should for that price tag. Didn’t even know this product existed either - they just raised $85 million in series B. Game on.
Honestly I am quite excited about this. I really believe we can solve this - a long, long, complicated road, but this is a step in the right direction I think. Every day is a new day to learn, and I definitely learned something today.
For 5 mins it seemed all rosy last week didn’t it. Today marks the absolute bottom of our startup journey, but surprisingly, I’m not as upset as you’d think. In fact, yes although we are at the bottom, there seems to be so much comfort in the clarity in understanding exactly where it went wrong, as well as basic YC advice finally clicking.Long story short, we have a shitty product (thats kinda impressive for us) that no one uses. We are finding it very hard to get early users, and as the weeks move on, our competitors take up more and more space - Juicebox came out of hibernation, and Happenstance just gets that much better each update. Our initial motivation was ‘let’s solve this problem for ourselves, because no one else does it the way we want to’. As the weeks have gone on, that has become less and less true. If we really try hard, using a combination of OpenFunnel, Juicebox, and Happenstance, we can actually probably do most of the queries we set out to answer in the first place. These weren’t possible before, when we started, but since it’s been quite a while, the updates have now made these possible. The question is - do we fight, or do we not bother? I think we’re both game for a fight - we back ourselves, but the thing is, we will only go into the fight if we have conviction that we can do one (significant) thing, better than our competitors. Right now, it’s hard to see where that is - and if we do have an idea, by the time we build it, we are predicting that those competitors will get it implemented anyhow. It’s an assumption but we must consider it. So yea - in a place of ‘wtf do we do’. This is getting familiar lol.
Anyway heres what we did wrong, and what we learned:
Fuck, the days keep flying. Manojj and I were ill, with suspected COVID the last 7 days. I couldn’t work for almost three days, slowing down ALREADY slow progress. We’re stuck in a state of slow and dithering. We have no idea what to do, we keep doing ‘brainstorms’ that go in circle, and for the first time in a while, we don’t actually feel like we’re moving anywhere. At least before we were moving - even if it was in the wrong direction. The point is we learned.
Anyway, it’s funny how much less you give a fuck about being successful when you’re ill. As Confucius says, “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one”. I also got SOOO incredibly bored whilst I was ill, so I’m glad to keep busy again.
The illness has slowed us down even more, and thats seeped into our mindsets - we now need to re-train and pick up momentum, so today we just fired off loads of things to do, to get back into that feeling of speed. Easier said than done.
Conflicting mindsets - we want to stick with this problem space because we believe there is something here. We just need to find it - dig deep, and speak to enough people. But the thing is, we’ve been here for a while, and nothings come up thats especially stood out to us. Does this mean we stop, and move on? Or do we just need to carry on? I think we know that we are the only people on this planet who can possibly make the right call, but with the stakes so high, it’s hard. But there’s no point faffing around, so we just chose to stick with it a little longer, and see what falls from the tree. We need to actually do it justice - can we have 100 REALLY good, in depth conversations with people firs; if nothing comes from those, then maybe there’s nothing there.
Back and forth. So in the last few days, Manojj has convinced me to stay on the people search space, but rather follow a lead in Private Equity - we have reason to believe that they aren’t finding and assessing companies all that efficiently and these processes take a while. We have never worked in this sector so we have no clue if that’s actually true, so today we reached out to around 150 PE professionals in London, and seeing if there’s actually a pain point.
One thing we were left ironically wondering at the end of the day, was that we spent several hours finding these people in PE in the first place…the problem that we set out to solve in the first place. Why don’t we just…idk…solve it - or at least speed it up! Maybe we were thinking too big before. Maybe we assumed we had to just legit SOLVE the entire thing end to end and that would be a waste of time. But, what wouldn’t be a waste of time, is automating the worst parts of it. The copy and paste into excel, and the string matching job titles every time you go to a companies page on LinkedIn. So this evening I tried to use GPT’s Browser Agent to get me leads. In about 5 mins it got all leads on the first two pages of my LinkedIn account no issues. This problem will be solved by browser agents soon enough - assumably by ChatGPT, so maybe we should just build a quick version for ourselves (1 day max) and then use that until GPT releases their next batch of agents that completely melt another thousand startups.
Thinking about this, the only thing separating the GPT Agent and our “people search agent” would be the steps of inference and reasoning. We make checkpoints and ask it to review the profiles/page with certain context, to ensure that you can dig u the
How do I create value? Today I’ve been reflecting on the mediums in which I can create value. A startup is an obvious choice, but it’s worth re-evaluating if thats the path I want. If my true goal is to just create unique value in the form of art, it’s not necessarily true that the best option for me is a startup. I could join a startup, be a critical piece to a cause I really care about. I could join a non-profit. I love travelling too, but when I travel and see poorer countries, I wonder if I can help, and even if they need it, or want it. If there was a place that needed and wanted help, I’d love to work with them and solve their problems - real fucking problems. Living in the west, I’m bias to helping people solve their problems PLUS making a shit tonne of money. Anyway, after a long day of thought, I am still keen to keep going down this path, but I do want to keep ‘creating real value’ in the forefront of my brain. I hope I don’t stray from my core goal.
So it’s been a while. After what I’d say was my lowest low a few weeks ago, I’d say we’re at a semi-high moment. We have actually spoken to more than 1 person with a hair on fire pain point! Someone who’s tried multiple tools, paid for them, and even tried writing their own script! We always thought
I’m quickly realising that now that finding the potential customer is one part, but a bigger one might be retention. How do we keep them interested so they don’t get bored?