Building in public month three reflections

A fictional city with mountains depicting the two places I’ve been spending time

I’m excited to share my most recent reflections on building in public and my journey to build a company (or join a very young company). Below are some of the biggest changes in the last month for me.

Summary

• Feeling excited: My excitement continues to grow. I felt a little uncertain about my path as I’ve gone down it and those uncertainties are washing away. Every day I feel more certain this is going to be a really cool story to share as it grows.
• Building less, validating more: I’ve scratched a lot of the personal itches I’ve had. I’m feeling more serious about building things that will be impactful for more of the world and financially successful.
• Living in two places: I have now spent 3 weeks in SF this year, including the most recent two weeks. I have 3 more weeks lined up and am committed to spending as much time in SF as helps me launch the most impactful thing I can.

Beyond the summary, I still am excited to share more details on what I have built in the last month.

Things built

• Circularity of Composting Future Search: I spent a week in Denver and some time leading up to that to help the facilitation team run a process for 150 people in the composting industry. We took them through a Future Search process exploring their shared past, present, and future. It was very inspiring and you can read much more about it here.
• HomeInventoryPro: My biggest project of the month. This tool takes a video and turns it into a full inventory of things you own. I’m wondering if this is helpful enough for moving companies and maybe estate sales or people moving to be a business.
• Content summary tool: The new LLM tools get me excited about news again. I think I should be able to wake up and get all the most relevant things in the world on topics I care about the way I want it. I built a tool that uses LLMs to do that for Warriors news as a prototype (a very important topic)! It worked for a while and I turned it into a Twitter bot too but the LLM model that was cheap also seemed to be inconsistent. I’ve shut down the project but you can see the Twitter bot and code here and here. I will answer no questions about the Twitter bot’s handle.
• Portfolio: This is one of my favorite projects to share about because it could help you! I used Replit’s new AI agent and built this while in an Uber to a potential co-founder meeting. It is super cool you can build apps in your car just by talking to an agent. I am overselling it very slightly, it did hit one issue I had to debug a bit but I do think this wouldn’t always happen. Let me know if you build an app on a car ride!
• Ardent AI extension: Ardent AI is a startup using LLMs to connect with databases and automate data engineering work. The founder and I met at a previous hackathon in month two, but I didn’t work with him. This time I thought I should give it a go as a data person myself. We built a tool that is almost like pull requests for data, where we copy a database, branch it, then have the LLM agent run its code against the copy of the codebase, then show the changes in data as as request to the user so they can’t mess up their database without reviewing it with an LLM. Hopefully you can see our work someday if you use the Ardent AI product.
• Tiny co-working trial making any song (that is kid friendly) for kids who want to hear songs about things they experience (e.g. CyberTruck song). A potential co-founder had a young child who wanted to hear a song about a CyberTruck. She said it wasn’t that easy to do with the AI tools and for parents they’d probably want some safety constraints. We hacked for an hour and built a super basic script. Sharing for fun here!

Lessons learned

• Being SF has felt like a bigger acceleration than I imagined
• You can build and launch an app in an Uber ride!
• Validating ideas is hard. Apollo is good for getting emails, I need to figure out how to do this most effectively. When should I try ads?
• Being around other founders is very inspiring!
• Composters do such interesting work turning waste into rich soil and seem very happy to do that.

Progress (or a feeling of progress):

• Now working out of Founders Inc for a bit, excited to see if I make some great progress here with the network and space.
• 2 serious recruitment experiences from co-founders with money raised for a co-founder role! Very flattered.

Plugs

• Try out my inspiration oasis on the internet (tip, audio on).

Asks

• If you know how to validate ideas effectively, please help.
• If you know movers or people who will pay for a home inventory from a video please connect me.

Offers:

• Time, feedback, connections

Thanks for reading this? Should I turn this into an email enabled newsletter where I get your emails?