Michael Wang’s piano students have homework they can’t do alone. Every RCM practical piano exam includes ear tests, and practicing for them usually takes 2 people. “Somebody else will have to play it for you,” Michael explained to a room of builders at Shopify, “and you have to identify by ear.”

Most kids practicing at home don’t have a second musician in the house, so those drills wait for the next paid lesson. Michael is the teacher waiting on the other side of it. He’s also a computer science student, and he’s building the app that lets his students drill alone.

Michael pitched on September 13 at Builder Sundays, the free weekly sessions where Shopify opens its offices in Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa to solo builders and small teams working on early ideas.

His product: A piano skill trainer that helps students learn complex musical concepts in an organized, simple way.

The piano homework nobody can do alone

Start with the part of music lessons that parents rarely see.

In Canada, the best-known graded path for piano is the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM). Beyond performing pieces, every practical exam tests the ear: the examiner plays an interval, a chord or a short melody, and the student has to name it, clap it back or play it back. In the RCM piano syllabus, ear tests are worth 10 of the exam’s 100 marks, with sight reading worth another 10. Michael put the “learn it through reps” share of the exam at 10 to 15%, which lines up.

Ear skills improve almost entirely through repetition. The catch is who plays the notes. As PianoTV’s RCM guide points out, practicing ear tests at home usually means you need a teacher or a friend to play the examples for you. Most kids don’t have a musician on call on a weeknight, so the drilling happens during paid lesson time.

Michael sees the cost of that from the teacher’s bench.

“I’m wasting a lot of time with students in class,” he said, on skills “they could be working on at home.”

His fix is surprisingly simple. A student picks a level (or builds a custom set), the app plays a sound, the student names the interval, and a stats screen shows how they did. 2 modules are live. The student can run the whole drill alone, which doubles as a pitch to parents: nobody else has to sit at the piano.

He didn’t find this problem through a market map. He found it at the piano bench, lesson after lesson.

Why teaching gives Michael an unfair head start

Michael’s customer list came straight from his own week: music academies like the one he teaches at, school music teachers who could send drills home as homework, students cramming for exams, and parents, whom he called a “very good paying customer.” He’s watched those parents up close. “I see how parents really care about their children’s musical education,” he said, calling it “a place where people are willing to spend money.”

The exam body itself proves him right. The RCM sells its own Online Ear Training & Sight Reading tool for $9.99 a month, and its product page lists more than 5,000 exercises per tool plus a progress tracker.

Families already pay for this category, which saves Michael the hardest early question: will anyone pay at all?

He named that competition honestly in his pitch: similar tools exist at $9.99, he said, but they’re harder to use, and the older ones don’t work well for younger kids. That’s a real opening, and a narrow one. The RCM tool already tracks progress, so “easier” has to be something a young student and a busy teacher both feel in the first 5 minutes. The strongest version of his edge is the teacher’s workflow: assign the drill, see who did it, and walk into the next lesson knowing where each kid is stuck.

The monetization question: free app or paid subscription?

Michael came with 2 business models and asked the room for feedback, which is the right instinct at week 3.

Option 1 was a free product funded by business deals or by selling user data, which he compared to Duolingo. Option 2 was a proven subscription at around $9.99 a month. He’d already done the tradeoffs himself: free is enticing but earns little until you’re huge, subscriptions work but people cancel when they don’t see value. He also flagged his own gap on the data route: “I don’t have a background in cyber security.” Knowing where you’re weak at week 3 puts you ahead of most founders at year 3.

2 facts make his choice easier.

First, Duolingo makes most of its money from subscriptions. In Q2 2026, Duolingo reported $258 million in subscription revenue out of $298.5 million total, with 12.7 million paid subscribers. The free app brings people in, and the subscription pays the bills. Duolingo also launched a piano-based music course in 2023, focused on reading notes and playing songs, which is worth watching even though it doesn’t target RCM ear tests.

Second, Michael’s users are kids, and children’s data is some of the most tightly regulated data there is. In 2023 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission took action against Edmodo, an education platform, for collecting children’s personal data without parental consent and using it for advertising. The order carried a $6 million penalty (suspended because Edmodo couldn’t pay) and required the company to delete models built on that data. For a solo founder, one mistake there can end the company.

What founders can take from Michael’s first 3 weeks

Michael is early, and he said so. But his pitch still holds 4 lessons any early-stage founder can use.

The next test is whether students who drill with the app walk into their ear tests better prepared. A student who needs the reps, a parent who’s happy to pay and a teacher who wants class time back add up to a real business. Michael is 3 weeks in, and he’s only getting started.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post How Michael Wang Turned His Piano Teaching Into a Startup appeared first on BYVI.

You own the audience every game studio spends millions chasing. So why rent it out for sponsorship reads when you could build something your fans actually play? Joel Diab builds custom games for content creators, funds them himself, and only makes money if you do.

This is how it works, what it costs, and how to tell if it’s right for you.

The $2.50 that started a studio

Joel Diab spent $1,000 advertising his first mobile game, Meme Runner, and made $2.50 from it. All of it came from one player in Australia.

Joel didn’t quit. He’d learned what his real problem was, and it had nothing to do with the game. The struggle was getting anyone to notice it, and that cost more than the game could ever earn back. He’d tried everything to get Meme Runner in front of players, organic posts, user-generated content, even paying the creators who run Subway Surfers footage behind an AI voice reading Reddit threads, asking if they’d swap in his gameplay. Nothing worked at a price that made sense. “Distribution is hard, distribution is expensive,” he told me.

That’s the whole idea behind Lemon Tree Studio: a custom game for content creators, built and funded by Joel, at no cost to the creator.

He sent 100 cold emails to land his first client. One replied, only because they happened to want a mobile game that same week. Pure luck, he admits, but enough to prove the shape of the thing. He’s been sharpening it ever since.

Why should a content creator make a game?

Two facts sit side by side and almost nobody connects them.

1. Mobile games are one of the most profitable formats in software.
2. And content creators, for all their reach, are chronically short on ways to turn attention into recurring revenue.

Put the two together and the opportunity is obvious. The creator already owns the audience a studio would spend millions to acquire. The studio already owns the thing a creator can monetize far past a single sponsorship read.

And it’s a proven, ruthlessly measured industry: every genre has its own demographic, every game lives or dies on the numbers, and you find out fast whether it works.

How do you get your own custom game made?

The process is more manageable than most creators expect, which is the point. After a creator books a call, this is the path from idea to a live app.

The process is more manageable than most creators expect, which is the point. After a creator books a call, this is the path from idea to a live app.

1. The concept comes from Joel, not you.

Some creators arrive with a game in mind. Most have no idea, and Joel prefers that. His background is studying what works in mobile and what doesn’t, so he pitches a concept built to fit the audience rather than the creator’s fantasy. Joel says:

“I’m not here to make your dream game. I’m here to make you money”

When a creator pushes for something the numbers won’t support, he talks them out of it before anything gets built.

2. A one-page outline, then a signed contract.

He sends a short one or two page document laying out the concept. Terms get negotiated and signed before real work starts, which is the guardrail that keeps a project from sliding into endless free revisions. Joel learned that the hard way with an early creator who kept requesting changes the contract never allowed.

3. A 30-page game design document.

Once signed, Joel writes a full spec, sometimes 30 pages, breaking down every mechanic and screen. This is the real blueprint and where the creator’s input gets locked in.

4. An AI engine builds the first version in about a day.

Over the past few months Joel has tuned his own AI game engine to his style. He feeds it the design document and it produces a working game in roughly a day, then a bit of back and forth after that first version. He quotes clients about a month to be safe, and usually delivers in a week or so.

5. Publishing, with a warning about Apple.

Google Play is quick: approved in about 24 hours, updates live in 30 minutes. Apple is stricter. His latest app was rejected 4 times, once for no stated reason beyond a demand for a video of him using it on an iPhone. .

What kind of game should a creator make, and which to avoid?

There’s no single winning genre, but there’s a clear favorite and a clear trap.

The favorite is puzzle. Joel leans toward puzzle games because they’re fast to build, easy to wrap in a brand, and they reach enormous casual audiences.

Think Candy Crush, Royal Match, and Block Blast, the kind of titles already paying creators to promote them because the install economics work.

When big studios are already sponsoring small creators with a genre, they’ve done your market research for you. Bigger creators sometimes fit tower defense, but puzzle is the workhorse.

How much does a custom game cost, and who owns it?

This is where creators lean in, because the financial risk sits on Joel’s side of the table. Lemon Tree runs 3 tiers.

1. Free. You pay nothing and Joel funds the build. He keeps 65% of revenue, you keep 35%, and you always own your brand and IP while Lemon Tree owns the game software. You get a year of updates, and once the game grosses $100,000 the split moves to 50/50.
2. $25,000 upfront. You cover some of the risk, so the ownership flips: you keep the majority (around 65%) and Lemon Tree keeps 35%, permanently.
3. Enterprise (hundreds of thousands). You own 100% of the game and IP, with full creative freedom to monetize however you want.

How many followers do you need to make your own game?

The question Joel gets most is how many followers you need. His answer surprises people. “The following doesn’t matter. It’s about audience loyalty.”

He’s seen it fail the expensive way. One of the largest creators he worked with, a channel with shorts pulling hundreds of millions of views, produced a game that flopped. The reach was there and the relationship wasn’t. They scrolled, they didn’t commit. A creator averaging 5 million views on a base of 10,000 genuinely devoted fans will out-earn a creator with reach but no bond.

That’s why he’s drawn to tight communities, pet influencers among them. His first organic inbound was a pet creator, and he’s building a concept with one now.

Where are custom games for creators headed?

Joel has effectively invented a category. The standard playbook pays creators to promote someone else’s game and eats a high cost per install. His model inverts it: the creator’s own audience installs the game for free, and both sides share the upside.

He’s found only one other operator doing anything similar, and that person has already drifted toward consumer apps, which leaves Joel more or less alone in the space.

He knows it won’t last.

“As soon as they see a lot of these creators are making a lot of money from this, it’s going to be a race.”

Once the big studios notice the free distribution, they’ll pile in. The advantage belongs to whoever builds a roster and locks in relationships first, which is why being early here beats being big.

For a creator, the takeaway is simpler. You already own the expensive part, the audience. The game is now a one-week build and, on the free tier, someone else’s financial risk.

If your community is loyal enough to show up, a custom game becomes something rare: a piece of your brand that keeps playing, keeps earning, and keeps bringing people back long after the video content ends.

Audience plus loyalty is the whole asset. A game is just the part that finally lets you monetize it.

If that sounds like your audience, Joel’s door is open. You can book a call at Lemon Tree Studio, bring what you know about your community, and let him handle the game. “You don’t have to find a game idea,” he says. “I’ll take care of you.”

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post How Joel Diab Builds Custom Games for Creators, Free appeared first on BYVI.

Fares has spent 20 years at a big tech company, and he’s still there full-time today. He’s a technologist by training and an engineer at heart, but he never wrote a line of code in all that time; building was somebody else’s job. So when he opened ChatGPT on a flight to Mexico and typed a question he’d never thought to ask, he wasn’t planning to become a founder in his spare time.

He just wanted to know one thing:

The answer came back yes, with a catch. People were already doing it, but the patterns were full of errors. That gap was the whole opportunity.

5 months later, the CrochetAI app was live in the App Store, built almost entirely by a man who directs AI the way he used to direct engineering teams. He built it for one person he loves, which is a big part of why it works.

The person he built it for

Raluca, Fares’s wife, picked up crochet during COVID. What started as a lockdown hobby turned into a craft she got serious about. She found patterns online, bought some, joined the Facebook and Instagram groups, and eventually became a pattern tester, which is a real job inside a real economy. Pattern designers build custom patterns and need people to test them before release.

For years Fares watched Raluca from across the room without acting on it: a lot of those patterns were broken.

• The stitch math didn’t add up.
• Instructions went missing.
• Materials lists were incomplete.

Raluca would sit down with a hook and yarn, follow the steps, and end up with something that wasn’t what the pattern promised. It frustrated her for years, and Fares stayed out of it.

That changed in 2024, when the wave of people building with AI got too big to ignore. Everyone around him was building, and vibe coding became the thing everyone was suddenly trying. Fares wasn’t in it at all.

Then came the flight to Mexico, and the answer to his one question pointed straight at the problem he’d watched at home for years.

How CrochetAI makes AI crochet patterns that actually work

Fares did what 20 years in tech had taught him to do before building anything: he researched. He used AI to pressure-test the idea itself.

The answer that came back set the whole product direction.

From a prompt to a verified pattern

If you let AI just generate the pattern, you’ve built a user interface on top of ChatGPT, and you’ve inherited all its errors.

So Fares used AI only where it earned its place. A crocheter types what they want, “a chunky beanie with a pompom,” or a small bunny, or the little chicken Raluca wanted to make.

From there, the system runs a relay:

The AI reads the request and infers intent, then converts it into a body plan. A dog becomes a head, two arms, two legs, a tail. A deterministic crochet math engine, not the language model, handles the actual stitch counts, so the numbers don’t hallucinate. When it says a row takes 36 stitches, it’s 36 stitches of a named type.

Then two critic agents check the work before anyone sees it.

The first is technical: does the math add up, do the stitch counts and materials hold, does it clear the guardrails Fares built in.

The second is artistic, an agent whose whole role is “I am a crochet artist.” Can a human actually crochet this, and will the finished object be what the user asked for? Only after both pass does the pattern render in the app.

Why a chatbot alone won’t cut it

That verification step is the whole difference. Ask ChatGPT or Claude directly and you’ll get a pattern, but it’s unverified. You won’t know if it works until you’ve spent hours and yarn finding out it doesn’t.

CrochetAI’s promise, in the App Store listing, is simple:

“Crochet Patterns that actually work, no more guessing stitch counts or fixing broken patterns mid-project.”

Every pattern passes an automated quality gate before it reaches you.

Built for real crocheters, in two languages

Fares made a few deliberate calls that tell you he was thinking like an operator. He adopted North American crochet terminology (single crochet, double crochet, half double), the language his users actually speak, which is also why the app isn’t in Europe yet: the terminology there is different, and shipping it wrong is worse than not shipping it.

And because Crocheh Solutions Inc. is a Canadian company, everything available to an English user is available in French too, patterns and terminology included.

Fares puts the US crochet market at around $40 million a year. It’s a focused wedge, and he’s building it well before he widens it.

How Fares built the CrochetAI app by managing AI agents

Fares started the work around January 15 and went live on the App Store in May, roughly 5 months, on iPhone first, with the iPad app following and Android in progress.

He wasn’t writing production code by hand. He used tools like Claude and Cursor to build, and by his own estimate the app runs to nearly half a million lines of code. 5 years ago, he says, that’s 5 full-time engineers working for a year. He did it for a fraction of the cost.

The mental model he used is the one worth stealing. He didn’t think of AI as a coding assistant. He thought of it as a team, and himself as the boss.

He has agents that act as project managers, agents that advise, agents that write code, agents that do nothing but test, and a chief marketing officer agent that tells him how to take this to market.

Each one has a defined role. They talk to each other and collaborate. What his career actually gave him wasn’t syntax, it was the ability to manage a product, run the research, size the market, and direct a team toward a shippable thing. The team just happens to be made of agents now.

This is the reframe that matters for anyone reading from inside a corporate job. The blocker was never the idea. Fares had ideas for years. The blocker was that every idea died at the same sentence: I’d need to hire engineers, I’d need to hire people, and the cost made it a non-starter. That doesn’t apply anymore.

Fares’s playbook for building your first app with AI

Fares’s advice for other corporate people, everyone sitting on an idea and convinced they can’t start, is specific enough to act on this week.

1. Start with the idea, not the feasibility.

The thing that kept him stuck was getting hung up on doability, on cost, on who he’d have to hire. Find the idea first and refuse to kill it at the feasibility step, because the feasibility math has changed underneath you.

2. Use AI only where it earns its place.

The reason CrochetAI works is that Fares didn’t hand the whole job to a language model. He let AI infer intent and critique output, and he built a deterministic engine for the part that has to be exactly right. Decide which parts of your product can be “close enough” and which parts have to be verified, and architect for that difference.

3. Treat the agents as employees, and act like the boss.

Give each agent a real role, project manager, engineer, tester, marketer, and let them collaborate. Your job is direction and judgment, the same job good operators have always had. The years of experience you think are irrelevant because you can’t code are exactly what makes you a good boss of this team.

4. Prototype in a day, then put it in front of real people.

Fares built a working prototype in hours and showed it to users, including an early version of his website. He changed direction in a single day based on the feedback he got. Research that used to take weeks can be fast-tracked. Building that used to be 90% of the work is now the last and fastest step, so spend your time on design, on non-functional requirements, and on any regulations your idea has to clear.

5. Build it for someone you actually care about.

Fares had a real problem, felt by a real person he loves, and 20 years of domain-adjacent experience to apply to it. That combination is what turned a plane-ride question into a company. If you solve a problem you’ve watched someone struggle with, you’ll know when the output is wrong even when the metrics say it’s fine.

A birthday gift that turned into a company

Fares timed the first App Store release to land before Raluca’s birthday on May 23. He shipped on the 20th. First the gift, then the company.

Ask him whether working together changed their relationship and he’ll tell you it’s as good as it’s ever been. He got pulled into her world, learned enough of the craft to look at a work in progress and tell that it’s not going to end up a proper sphere.

He still can’t crochet a stitch himself. She now knows a little more about the technical side than she used to, whether or not all of it sticks. They can meet each other in the middle, which is more than most couples building a business together manage.

The wall is gone. What will you build?

If you look past the crochet, this is a story about a barrier that just fell for everyone. For most of Fares’s career, execution was the wall. You had the idea, and then you needed money and engineers and a year, and the wall won. That wall is gone. What’s left is the part that was always the hard, human part: finding a problem worth solving, and caring enough to solve it well.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post Her Crochet Passion, His AI Agents, One Real Business appeared first on BYVI.

A midwife unzips a canvas bag on a dirt road, 2 hours from the nearest clinic. Inside is everything she needs to catch a pregnancy that’s about to turn dangerous: a blood pressure cuff, a urine dipstick, a glucose reader, a hemoglobin card, a thermometer. No lab. No power outlet. No signal. The whole thing costs $5.

That kit is DayOne, a maternal-health startup that came out of Montréal’s Coopérathon. Except the kit isn’t really the company. It’s the part you can see. The company is the part you can’t. What DayOne is really building is the system that carries that kit down every road a hospital never reached.

The scale of the problem DayOne is aiming at is staggering. In 2023, an estimated 260,000 women died from pregnancy or childbirth, one every 2 minutes, and nearly 70% of those deaths were in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not only a Global South story either: more than 1 in 3 U.S. counties is now a maternity care desert. Most of these deaths are preventable with screening that already exists.

As DayOne’s own executive summary puts it:

“Innovation is not invention. It is the integration of what is already proven.”

The tools work. Getting them to the women who need them is the hard part.

So DayOne built a kit. And then it did something most first-time founders forget to do: it figured out that the kit was bait, and the business was everything the kit couldn’t show.

Entry point, product, network effect

Once the anchor lands, the real question is what you’re actually building underneath it. DayOne answers this in one line in its executive summary, and it’s the most quietly sophisticated sentence in the whole document:

1. The entry point is the thing people can hold.

This could be the kit, the dongle or a free tool. Its only job is to make an abstract promise concrete and get you through the door. It doesn’t have to be where the money is, and it usually isn’t.

When Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey started Square, the wedge was a little white card reader he gave away so anyone could take a credit card on a phone. The dongle was the entry point.

Nobody built a $100 billion company selling dongles.

2. The product is the infrastructure that does the real work.

For DayOne, the kit is the hook, but the product is the implementation system: the training, the standardized workflows, the referral logic, the interoperability that makes a Ministry of Health actually able to run the thing at scale.

Look at Toast. It got into restaurants on hardware, the tablets and terminals you see on the counter. But in the third quarter of 2024, hardware was just $49 million of its $1.3 billion in revenue. Financial technology, mostly payments, was $1.07 billion, about 82%. The terminal got Toast onto the counter. The software and payments underneath are the company.

3. The network effect is the part that compounds.

This is the layer nobody can copy once you have it, and the one you have to design from the start even though it pays off last.

DayOne calls it the data infrastructure: every screening generates clinical data in places that never had any, and that anonymized, aggregated dataset gets more valuable with every kit deployed.

When the technology is ready but the system isn’t

In most hard markets, the technology was never the bottleneck. DayOne says this in its executive summary. Countless maternal-health pilots never scale, the team writes, because “implementation, not technology, remains the limiting factor.” The tools already work. Getting them to function inside a real health system is the part nobody designs for.

One Laptop Per Child is the cautionary version. The project shipped millions of rugged $100 laptops to schools across the developing world, a genuine hardware breakthrough.

Then a large evaluation of the program in Peru found no measurable gain in math or language test scores, because the laptops barely changed how teachers taught. The device worked. The implementation around it never existed, so the impact didn’t either.

The lesson did get learned. When Uruguay put the same XO laptops into the hands of every child in its public schools, it treated the rollout as an implementation problem first.

Así comenzamos la implementación de la mano de @fztorg, quienes no solo han capacitado a los docentes, sino que ahora inician la etapa de acompañamiento para asegurar el mejor aprovechamiento de la tecnología.

¿Quieres conocer más sobre las computadoras y sus… pic.twitter.com/qvytGgenig

— OLPC (@OLPC) March 14, 2025

Plan Ceibal, launched in 2007, wrapped the devices in dedicated support teachers, free internet in every school, and a digital library of curriculum, and it reached every primary student in the country. Same laptop, and this time a program that stuck, because someone finally built the system around it.

Don’t fall in love with the wedge

The failure mode is falling in love with your own entry point. It’s the most lovable layer, it’s tangible, it demos beautifully, it’s the thing people compliment. And it’s usually a commodity. Anyone can source a blood pressure cuff and a glucose reader. If DayOne were only a kit company, it would be in a price war within 18 months, competing on the cost of components it doesn’t manufacture.

The kit’s value isn’t the hardware. It’s that the kit is the only part of an implementation system you can point to.

Toast could have stayed a hardware vendor and been crushed by cheaper tablets. Square could have stayed a dongle maker and been copied by every payments processor with a plastic-molding budget. Both survived because they treated the tangible thing as a doorway they walked through, on the way to something bigger.

For founders, the discipline is to keep asking which layer a given decision serves. Are you improving the entry point because it moves the business, or because it’s the fun part to polish?

DayOne’s founders clearly know the answer. Their own words demote the kit to “entry point” while calling the invisible system “the product.” That’s an unusually clear-headed and self-aware thing for an early team to write down, and it’s the tell that they understand what they’re actually building.

Figuring out the layers this early is ordinary, essential founder work, and most teams do it a year too late.

The Takeaway: Find your $5 kit

If you’re building something abstract, and most interesting companies are, you have two jobs that feel like opposites. Make it tangible enough for a stranger to hold in their head, then remember the tangible thing is only the doorway. The house is everything behind it.

Find your $5 kit: the one concrete object, screen, or 7 lines of code that makes your invisible promise real. Lead with it everywhere. Then build the product behind it that people actually pay for, and design the data or network layer that compounds while you sleep.

DayOne turned a maternal-health infrastructure company into something you can carry in a backpack. Whatever you’re building, there’s a version of that kit waiting to be found, and finding it is the difference between a company people understand and one they merely nod along to.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post DayOne: The $5 Kit That Reaches Mothers No Hospital Can appeared first on BYVI.

A tiny Ottawa startup called Tandem Robotics built a farm robot that farmers are calling every week to get back. The reason it fits their fields so precisely is surprisingly simple: the founders spent two seasons doing the back-breaking work themselves, for free, before they wrote a single line of code. Call it earning the right to build, and it’s the one advantage money can’t buy.

The robot that works lying down

The farmer weeding this row of vegetables outside Ottawa is lying down. Flat on his stomach, inches above the soil, he pulls weeds by hand while a robot slides him along the bed at exactly his pace. Nudge an arm forward and it rolls forward. Ease back and it slows. For 20 summers he did this same job on his knees, bent double, back on fire by noon. Now he jokes he’s comfortable enough to watch YouTube while he works, and for the first time in decades his back is quiet at the end of the day. When the company comes to take the machine away for maintenance, every farmer asks the same thing: can I make it through the week without it?

That machine is the Taro cobot, and the company behind it, Tandem Robotics, is maybe two months old with a garage for a factory. The design is largely the masterpiece of their mechanical engineer, Alvin Htet, refined over years of university space rover competitions he ran alongside Kevin at uOttawa.

What I want to talk about isn’t the hardware, though. It’s the reason the hardware works, because that reason is the most transferable thing an early founder can steal.

Why the field beats the whiteboard

The problem Tandem is chasing is real and expensive. In 2022, 44% of Canadian agriculture employers couldn’t find all the workers they needed, and the sector lost $3.5 billion in sales because of unfilled jobs. The fruit and vegetable industry is the worst off, facing a gap of more than 35,000 peak-season jobs by 2030.

The people still doing the work are wearing out: the average Canadian farm operator is now 56, and 60% are 55 or older. And the work itself breaks bodies. A 2023 meta-analysis of 33 studies found 52% of farmers reported lower-back pain in the previous year, climbing above 60% for men.

You could learn all of that from a report, the way I just did. The team behind Tandem learned it from their own spines.

Ming Chen, the CEO, comes from a computer engineering background and is, by every account of the people around him, obsessed with agriculture. Mumtahin Farabi, who runs the hardware, grew up on a small tea-and-dairy farm in Bangladesh before a detour through decentralized-finance engineering.

Before Tandem, the team ran Apidae Systems, selling soil-data equipment to organic farmers, tracking moisture, pH, temperature, and electrical conductivity for clients that included the University of Ottawa and Canada’s National Research Council.

Then they spent two full seasons with their team volunteering on local organic farms, doing the labor for free, feeling exactly which tasks wreck you and in what order.

That is what “earn the right to build” means. Most hardware startups begin with a solution and go hunting for a problem it might fit. Tandem did the reverse. By the time they built anything, they knew the crops, the farmers by name, and the precise geometry of the back pain.

How to earn the right to build

Here’s how to run the same playbook, whatever you’re building.

Do the work with your own hands, not with a survey

Tandem’s two seasons in the dirt weren’t a box-ticking exercise. They were how the team learned exactly what wears a farmer down: bending, carrying, and repetitive strain, in that order, which is why the Taro cobot is built to take those 3 things off a human body while leaving the judgment alone.

This is the physical version of what Paul Graham calls doing things that don’t scale: Airbnb’s founders going door to door in New York to photograph listings themselves, learning the product by living inside the customer’s problem. You cannot outsource this part.

Sell the boring adjacent thing first

Before robots, Tandem sold soil sensors to these same farms, and when they started the new company, every early customer came with them. Those farms followed because trust compounds. Selling the humble product first bought them access, credibility, and a running start on relationships that a cold-emailing competitor will never have.

Rola Elghonimy, who led sales at Apidae Systems and runs sales here, is the one turning that warm pipeline into signed orders.

Shopify has the same origin story: Tobi Lütke was running an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil and built the store software because the existing tools were terrible, then realized the software was the real business.

The adjacent product is a Trojan horse. Ride it in.

Build for the constraint they actually have, not the one you find interesting

The sharpest lesson is buried in Tandem’s history. Their soil-sensor company worked, technically. The dashboards were good. The farmers paid for them. And then the farmers never looked at them, because after a day of manual labor and running a business, nobody has the energy to study a chart.

The founders had solved for data when the real constraint was exhaustion. So the next company attacked the exhaustion directly, with a machine that removes the physical toll instead of adding one more screen to ignore.

When your customer isn’t using the thing you built, resist the urge to blame them. They’re showing you which problem is actually holding them back.

Keep the human where the judgment lives, and support the product like you’ll see them Saturday

Tandem calls the Taro a cobot, short for collaborative robot, and the distinction matters.

It doesn’t replace the farmer’s judgment on which plant is ready and which is a weed, because current AI can’t reliably tell one seedling from another in a messy, chemical-free field where crops and weeds grow tangled together.

It removes the lifting and the bending and lets the human keep deciding. Their roadmap (“Work With Me,” then “Learn From Me,” then “Work For Me”) earns autonomy one verified step at a time instead of promising a magic box on day one.

And because these founders will literally run into their customers at the farmers market, they’ve designed for easy, swappable, right-to-repair maintenance and they refuse to lock buyers into subscriptions. Contrast that with the right-to-repair war farmers fought against John Deere, which only signed a repair agreement in 2023 after years of blocking growers from fixing their own machines. Tandem is building the opposite reputation from the start, and reputation, in a community this tight, is the whole moat.

Where the humility helps and where it hurts

I’ll be honest about the risk here, because I care about these founders more than about a clean story. The same instinct that makes Tandem trustworthy, the reluctance to charge aggressively, the discomfort with subscriptions, the refusal to beat their chest next to bigger competitors, could also leave money on the table. When I asked Mumtahin how investors get a return, he pointed to the exit most robotics companies take: getting acquired once you own a market a bigger player wants. The pricing and financing to get there are still being worked out, which is ordinary early-stage work, not a knock on the team. A product people love and a finished business model are simply two different jobs.

The good news is that the first job is far harder to fake, and Tandem already has it. They have $225,000 in letters of intent, robots that transplant 2.5 times faster and weed 4 times faster, a hardware platform that can haul 300 pounds, and a waitlist of farmers who treat the machine like a member of the family. That is the rare asset. Pricing and financing are solvable once you own something real, and they own something real because they earned it in the field.

Winning the farms giants ignore

It also helps that they went after a market everyone else skipped. The big, well-funded robotics companies chase enormous factory-scale operations, the kind of farms that are really just outdoor assembly lines, because that’s where the volume is. Tandem aimed at the small organic farms everyone else finds too fragmented and too cash-poor to bother with, and those are exactly the growers drowning in the labor shortage with no help coming.

Serving the segment your competitors dismiss is a classic wedge, and it’s wide open here. The team is going from 2 robots this season to a planned 20 next year across more than 15 farms, converting pilots into sales as they go, with their own factory (currently a garage) meant to scale toward mass production by 2028. Every one of those farms is a relationship they earned before they needed it.

Do this before you write code

If you’re building for a hard, physical, judgment-heavy market, the most useful thing you can do this season isn’t a pitch deck or a demo. It’s showing up to do the actual work. Volunteer on the line, sell the humble tool that gets you through the door, and stay long enough to feel the problem in your own body, until you understand it better than the people living inside it. That understanding is the one thing a bigger budget can’t manufacture, and it compounds every season you stay close to the work. Start there, and the product almost designs itself.

Time in the field plus a problem you’ve felt equals the right to build. No amount of funding can shortcut that.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post Earn the Right to Build: How Tandem Robotics Made a Farm Robot Farmers Beg to Keep appeared first on BYVI.

I met Joe (Beiqiao) Hu at Toronto Tech Week. When I asked him what had brought him there, I braced for the usual founder answer, some polished version of “I built an app that.” Instead he said:

It stopped me. Not only the thought, but the word. Serendipity is a word I picked up only after 10 years of living and studying in Canada.

Joe Hu, Beiqiao Hu, still remembers the trick he used in primary school. When the English teacher asked the class to read vocabulary aloud, he did not know how. So he asked the classmate next to him to write the Chinese pronunciation under each English word, and he read the Chinese instead. He calls what he had back then “deaf and mute” English: he could squint at a word on a page, but he could not hear it and he could not say it.

That kid grew up to score 106 out of 150 on China’s national college entrance English exam, 469 on CET-4, and 426 on CET-6, and then quietly decided he was simply not a language person. When he thought about studying abroad as an undergraduate, the moment he pictured his English level, he gave up on the idea. He tried to improve after graduation. He says he failed every single time.

Today he lives in Ottawa, has spoken at more than 20 events around Canada, runs a company called Just Joe Technologies, and ships an AI product that tens of thousands of people use to practice speaking English.

Moving to an English-speaking country did not do that for him, and he is blunt about it. Living abroad, on its own, changed nothing. What changed things was building the tool he wished existed, then aiming it squarely at himself, every day. Serendipity, maybe. But the kind you have to build with your own hands.

Starting over, one word at a time

The restart came in 2020, at home during COVID. Joe went back to the foundations, vocabulary one word at a time, which felt faintly ridiculous for a grown man who read English on Twitter every morning and assumed he was basically fine. Then he sat a reading mock in May 2021 and scored 5.5. It took him 3 hours. Reading and listening came back with effort. Speaking and writing were a different category of difficulty. He had a full-time job, so he hired one-on-one tutors and bought himself some technique. In March 2022 he scored a 6.5 on IELTS, the number he had set as a private border: clear it or stay home. He still calls it one of the best days of his life.

Speaking would not let go of him, though. He got a school offer in 2023 and spent a good while quietly unconvinced he belonged. What finally loosened that doubt was not an exam. It was a trip to New Zealand, where eleven native speakers, one after another, told him his English was good. One American teacher said it was better than that of most Chinese speakers she had met. Something settled in him: his English was already enough for a real conversation. He filed his study permit.

“Living abroad didn’t magically improve my English. Dedicated practice did.”

The idea that arrived in the shower

Joe was already the type who builds his way out of a problem. He had wired up custom GPTs to grade his own IELTS reading and writing. Speaking, the part he actually needed, had nothing good behind it. Then in November 2023 OpenAI gave ChatGPT a voice, and Joe had the idea in the shower that would eat the next two years of his life: simulate the entire speaking exam, examiner and all.

He built the IELTS Speaking Simulator GPT that December and open-sourced it. His read on why it worked is sharper than it first sounds. A speaking exam ships with a rubric, which means the AI’s output has something concrete to be measured against, which makes the whole task an unusually clean fit for the technology.

“Even hallucination is a feature, not a bug,” he says, and in this one corner of the world he is correct: an examiner that improvises fresh questions is simply doing its job. He used it daily, shipped a V3, posted it to RedNote, and watched it go viral. Over time roughly 50,000 learners ran on it.

He also caught the flaw that would quietly become his company’s entire thesis. After each session he copied the feedback into Notion, then never opened it again. Same topics, same mistakes, on a loop.

The problem, he worked out later, was never how much he practiced. It was how well.

Knowing when to quit, and when to wait

In August 2024 Joe landed in Canada for a master’s, and got a small pleasant surprise at the door: a classmate already knew his simulator GPT. Joe wanted to turn it into a real product and did not believe he had it in him, so he set himself a low bar, refresh the question bank each season and call that maintenance.

Then the model moved. OpenAI shipped a real-time voice API late in 2024, and Joe built a demo at an AGI Venture Canada hackathon.

It worked, and it was expensive: a two-minute conversation cost more than $2. Worse, every time he fixed one bug, three new ones appeared, which is the specific suffering of building software while leaning on AI to write the parts you do not fully understand. So he stopped. On purpose. He decided to wait for better models rather than ship something he was afraid to touch.

Most founders would file that under failure. Joe filed it under timing, and timing turned out to be the skill that separated this attempt from the last one.

A trip to the Bay Area in mid-2025 handed him the line he kept repeating to himself: build something that belongs to yourself.

By then he had spent the year crossing from non-technical to genuinely shipping front-end work, first with Cursor, then with Claude Code. He flew home to Ottawa with a plan and a stack of free AI credits.

Mark, and the two-minute report that became a company

The center of this story is not a model release. It is a man named Mark. Non-native English speaker who sounds native, former army officer, economist by trade, onetime United Nations employee, and, in his own words, a full-time grandpa and part-time citizen in action. They met before a networking event in Joe’s first month in Canada. When Mark heard that Joe wanted to get better at English, he started sending him voice messages and handed him a deceptively small assignment: report your day, out loud, in no more than two minutes.

Joe did it inconsistently at first. Last summer he committed, sending Mark a report every day and getting feedback every day in return. Mark even gave the habit a name to make it stick: Reporter Joe Speaking.

Joe often could not feel his own progress, but Mark and a mentor could see it, and more than any band score, he noticed he could now describe his own life without flinching. This, far more than the exam, is why the product exists. He wanted somewhere to keep his daily reports and get them graded. “If I hadn’t met Mark, I might not have built this,” he says. “Thank you, Mark.”

The pressure that turned a habit into a company was bureaucratic. Joe needed a CLB 9 to chase permanent residency after graduation, so he went back to practicing, even treating networking events mainly as speaking reps rather than for the networking. His score would not move off roughly 6.5. He got critical of the AI, went back and read the feedback properly, and conceded it was right.

The weak link was him. He did not have the patience to run the same topic twice, or the stomach to listen back to his own voice. That admission became the product’s spine: feedback and repetition over an endless feed of fresh questions.

80 days to a working product

He folded the whole thing into his master’s research under professor Tony Bailetti at Carleton, and paired it with a scoping review of the actual learning science, mechanisms with names like interleaved practice and elicited feedback.

One project, several problems solved at once. He also made a clear-eyed case for why he was the right person to build it: an AI tinkerer who owned the exact pain and understood it from the inside.

He started building in mid-November 2025 on free Claude Code credits. When Opus 4.5 launched, it moved what he believed was possible, and he could suddenly see the thing shipping. When the free credits ran out he paid for a $200 subscription and has zero regret about it: without it, he says flatly, the product would not exist. The voice integration nearly broke him. He budgeted one week to wire up Gemini and spent five. His first 3 paying customers hit a brutal first impression, the connection dropping after ten minutes, and he made stability the only thing that mattered until it held.

What came out the other side is Joe Speaking: a real-time AI examiner for IELTS and CELPIP that hands you a band estimate, a transcript, a replay, and section-by-section feedback for about a dollar a session, against the $25 to $60 an hour a human tutor charges.

Underneath the exam mode sits the habit Mark taught him, recording your day, reviewing it, running the same topic again, comparing the takes. It was enough of a business to put his name on real paperwork. He registered Just Joe Technologies, tagline included: Building What Was Impossible Yesterday.

The number he had chased for years

In May, after months of rehearsing on software he had written himself, Joe sat the test and scored CLB 9 on his first attempt, the number he had carried around for years. He refuses to treat it as a finish line. The real target, he will tell you, lives outside any rubric: saying what he means, clearly and without fear, so people understand both his point and who he is.

That is the part worth sitting with. He still says his English is far from great and his app is firmly in alpha. He is not selling a tidy before-and-after. He is selling a method, and he happens to be its first and most honest test case.

What builders can learn from Joe

Be the market, not its observer 

Joe never surveyed learners. He was the learner, which is exactly why he could feel it when the product was lying to him. That kind of judgment cannot be outsourced; it comes from needing the thing yourself.

Run on your own software

He practiced on Joe Speaking daily and earned his score with it. Using your product as its harshest user surfaces the truth faster than any round of customer interviews.

Ship the rough version in public

The open-sourced GPT was raw, and it still built him an audience of tens of thousands who were already waiting when the real app arrived. Those RedNote likes were also the fuel that kept him going on the hard nights.

Treat quitting as a tool

He walked away from the 2024 build on purpose, because the models were not ready, then moved the moment they were. Knowing when to wait is not the opposite of ambition.

Aim past the score

The line he borrowed from Mark runs under everything: it is not your band score that matters, it is how clearly you can say what you think and how confident you are while you say it.

Sell the loop, not the feature

His own bad habit, practicing without ever reviewing, told him where the value was hiding. He bet the company on repetition and feedback rather than on streaks and badges.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post Joe Hu Couldn’t Beat the IELTS Test, So He Built His Own Examiner appeared first on BYVI.

When Amjad Masad pitched Replit a decade ago, one VC delivered what would become his favorite rejection. The investor told him the company was “a great thing for the world” — and that it should exist. He added that the same investor told him, “But I’m a capitalist and I don’t think it’ll ever make any money.”

Most founders would file that meeting away as a bad day. Masad filed it away as a recurring pattern. For the next eight years, Replit pursued a vision — that coding should be accessible to anyone with a browser, and that someday a billion people would build software — without a clear business model to defend it. Then, in roughly 12 months, the company went from $2.5M in ARR to $250M.

Speaking recently at Startup Grind, Masad walked through the long, contrarian arc that led there. For founders building anything ambitious right now, the more interesting story isn’t the hockey stick, it’s everything that came before it.

The setup-friction kid from Amman

The vision started, like a lot of good products, with personal annoyance. Growing up in Jordan, Masad’s father bought what he describes as “the first computer I’ve seen in my life”, and the first one in his neighborhood.

As a teenager, he turned it into a small business, building an Internet cafe management system for the local gaming shops. “It took me like two years to build it,” he said.

But every time he wanted to actually program something, the friction nearly killed the urge. “I would have to spend a lot of time downloading gigabytes worth of IDEs and dependencies,” he recalled. The fix was obvious to him, even then:

“You gotta be able to just open a browser window and start coding.”

That instinct stayed with him. By the time Replit was founded in 2016, the goal had grown well beyond convenience. It had become a thesis about scale: make coding easier, get more people building, and eventually you’d produce “a billion software creators.”

The desert years

The problem with a billion-creator vision is that it doesn’t look anything like a business in year three. Or year five. Or year seven.

“The hardest thing about it is having a vision and being in the desert and not really finding a business model for eight years,” Masad said. “It requires a lot of selling internally — not just VCs, not just inside the company.”

What kept the team aligned during those years wasn’t a deck or a forecast. It was user stories. Every month or two, someone would write in about how Replit had changed what they could build, or even what they did for a living. “We always have these individual solutions stories that would come up,” he said. That was the fuel.

The bet that broke the company, and then made it

In 2023, Masad stood on a TED stage and made a prediction that, even by Silicon Valley standards, was bold. AI agents were coming, he said, and they would solve software engineering end-to-end. Not autocomplete. Not snippet generation. The whole stack — write code, debug code, provision databases, deploy.

Internally, he committed to that future hard. “I felt comfortable to do that pivot, shut down all the other distractions that we’ve had,” he said. That meant layoffs. It also meant a confidence crisis: not everyone on the team believed the thesis. “We actually lost the full half of our team,” Masad said.

It is difficult to overstate how risky that period was. Replit had cut staff, alienated part of its team, and reoriented around a bet that the rest of the industry still treated as speculation.

Then Replit Agent shipped in September 2024 — the first coding agent on the market. ARR went from $2.5M to $250M in a year.

Coding agents aren’t really for coders

Once Replit Agent was in users’ hands, Masad noticed something he didn’t expect. The biggest unlocks weren’t happening to engineers. “If you’re not a coder, coding agents have actually more impact on your work than it has on engineers,” he said.

The examples he cited are the kind founders should be paying close attention to. A product manager at Zillow used Replit to build internal tools that, by his account, “increased offline revenue by tens of millions, perhaps $100 million.” A recruiting lead at another company started generating personalized candidate websites in minutes; response rates “double doubled.”

“You can become a 10x marketer, a 10x sales, by using tools,” Masad said. The framing he kept returning to: coding agents are general-purpose work tools that happen to produce code.

This has a direct implication for how founders should think about hiring. Masad’s take is blunt: “I don’t think raw IQ matters.” What matters now is agency — the ability to get things done and be resourceful with the tools available. “We see a power law,” he said. “We don’t see everyone adopting them.” A handful of operators on any team will absorb these tools and become an order of magnitude more productive. The rest won’t. Hire accordingly.

Lessons from being early on agents

Being first means making the mistakes first. Masad said Replit has already lived through the security and isolation problems competitors are only starting to encounter. “We’ve learned everything that people are learning now,” he said. “Like a year ago.”

The clearest rule he offered was unambiguous:

“Never connect a coding agent to a production environment. Never do that.”

There’s a quiet competitive moat in that experience. Replit’s full-stack architecture — agent, runtime, deployment, security — lets the company enforce guardrails users would otherwise have to assemble themselves. As one example, Masad noted, “we don’t allow the code engagement to install packages that are like a week old.” It’s the kind of opinionated default only an integrated platform can make.

He framed this as a new kind of product advantage:

“In a world where anyone can create anything, it’s more important than ever to create something with opinions and taste, and user experience and user safety in mind.”

– Amjad Masad

What founders should actually take from this

Three threads from Masad’s talk are worth holding onto.

1. Vision and speed aren’t opposites.

His phrasing: “be incredibly patient but moving incredibly fast in the near term.” Anchor your roadmap in five- and ten-year bets, but ship to customers weekly. The patient part is about what you’re building toward; the fast part is how you learn whether you’re right.

2. Distinguish the timeless from the trendy.

“Think about the things that are really core to humanity that are not going to change,” Masad said. Build for those. Use AI to get there faster — don’t build only for the AI moment itself.

3. The org chart is changing under everyone’s feet.

About 85% of the Fortune 500 already has Replit users somewhere inside the building. What varies, Masad said, is whether leadership knows or cares. The founders who win the next few years won’t be the ones who hired the most engineers. They’ll be the ones who built teams where every role — recruiting, sales, ops, product — operates with leverage that used to require an engineering ticket.

What the desert was for

Replit spent 8 years in the desert betting on that future. And the desert now is over.

The clearest sign of that came this March, when Masad introduced Replit Agent 4 — the company’s latest bet on where this is all going. His framing:

“Software isn’t merely technical work anymore. It’s creative. Introducing Replit Agent 4. The first AI built for creative collaboration between humans and agents. Design on an infinite canvas, work with your team, run parallel agents, and ship working apps, sites, slides and more.”

Software isn’t merely technical work anymore. It’s creative.

Introducing Replit Agent 4. The first AI built for creative collaboration between humans and agents.

Design on an infinite canvas, work with your team, run parallel agents, and ship working apps, sites, slides & more. pic.twitter.com/VCucf86wX6

— Amjad Masad (@amasad) March 11, 2026

That sentence — “software isn’t merely technical work anymore, it’s creative” — is the natural endpoint of the journey he described from the stage. The same instinct that started in a kid’s room in Amman, the one that said coding should be as simple as opening a browser, has compounded into a tool that lets anyone with an idea ship it.

The desert years were spent making that possible. The next chapter is what people do with it.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post 8 Years in the Desert: How Replit Bet on the Future Before the World Caught Up appeared first on BYVI.

Most days I’m knee-deep in SaaS demos, churn dashboards, and the usual founder routine. Still, the most useful case study I learned this year has no AI prompt, no blockchain ledger, and not a single line of production code. My biggest learning came from Carol Zou and Matthew Wong, founders of Claymoo. A business totally outside of tech, but one that holds huge takeaways for us, the tech founders. And yes, love prevails again once more (I will explain soon).

How Claymoo Started

The idea for Claymoo hit Carol when she discovered air dry foam clay and realized two things: it requires no baking and it’s very soothing. She also spotted a gap in the market – inconsistent materials and almost no how-to guides. So her mission became making clay crafting more accessible and relaxing for everyday people. She created foam clay kits for cozy nights in, giving a creative vent through guided activities. Each Claymoo kit includes all materials, upgraded tools, and easy-to-follow tutorials to make sure customers can create, master techniques, and finish genuinely rewarding projects.

She branded the name “Claymoo” because the word sounded playful. It also stood out in a market dominated by forgettable “Craft Box” clones. At that point she controlled the entire operation from her parents’ basement – packing, labeling, customer service. Nights blurred into mornings, but she felt traction building. She just needed more oxygen.

@claymoo.co Can’t believe it’s been a year!! #clayart #claykit #polymerclay #crafting #DIYProjects #diyideas #craftidea #clayidea #giftidea #diykit #softairdryclay #foamclay #diykit #learntosculpt #claymoo ♬ BIRDS OF A FEATHER – Billie Eilish

Why Matthew Joined Carol

While Carol was building up her clay kit business, Matthew was hitting a wall in his career.

On paper he looked golden: Geotab engineer, then CTO of a fast-scaling SaaS, then a small exit with a note-taking app. But off paper he was back in his parents’ house burning through savings and struggling with the hard truth: as a one-person founder with a single product, he hasn’t learned how to scale a business beyond himself.

His answer was to walk away from code and start shipping foam clay craft kits. The move looks wild until you know the real reasons. That’s why I’m telling this story. I want early-stage founders, especially the ones stuck to their keyboards, to see how growth could hide on the other side of the tech world.

For Matthew, the ceiling wasn’t technical. It was managerial. He could refactor a codebase in his sleep, but hiring, supply chain, cash-flow forecasting – those looked like foreign languages to him. He could either stay where he was, keep writing code, and hope the next project magically solved the gap. Or he could chase the gap head-on.

He chose the second path.

How Claymoo achieved a 10x growth

Carol and Matthew grew Claymoo from “cute Etsy side hustle” to a real company that ships thousands of kits a month. They’ve already sold 100,000 kits directly to consumers, and this is just the start. If you have a company, regardless of industry, you need to know their approach. These tips apply to other ventures too.

Hard-Won Lessons Every Founder Should Steal

Founders love bullet lists – I’m guilty too. So, I’ll convert my key lessons from Carol and Matthew into direct points.

Do a skill audit

Write down the tasks you can finish before coffee gets cold. Those are your comfort skills. Now list the tasks you keep postponing. Those are your growth skills. Matthew’s growth path involved hiring, supply chain issues, and international shipping. Claymoo made him work on them every single day.

Visibility is a skill you build, not a trait you’re born with.

Carol wasn’t a natural content creator, and that’s what makes her transformation so impressive. She pushed past the awkwardness of pointing a camera at herself because she understood something crucial: in a crowded market, the best product loses if nobody sees it. So she showed up on TikTok anyway, posted consistently, and taught herself to connect through short videos. Today she has over 230K followers across TikTok and Instagram, and her content drives most of their sales. That takes guts most founders never find.

@claymoo.co Here’s a little glimpse into what life looks like as a small business owner, two years after opening our shop. I’ve honestly lost count of how many new roles we’ve had to take on, but I still find it really fun and so rewarding. November has been our busiest month yet. It’s been crazy, with fires to put out left and right, but also filled with some of our most exciting moments.  I can’t wait to share more of my journey in the upcoming TikToks! #smallbusinessowner #smallbusiness #clay #clayart #claymoo ♬ Param-Pam-Pam – Carlos Campos

Tools amplify process – so fix the process first

Too many founders rush to automation when they hit capacity, hoping technology will solve their operational mess. It won’t. A broken process under manual labor becomes a broken process times 100 when you automate. Before Claymoo invested in warehouse tools, Matthew and Carol documented every step, run it manually until it was smooth, then introduce equipment.

Your real ceiling is the skills you’re avoiding

Matthew looked successful on paper still felt stuck. Recognizing that feeling – and acting on it – matters more than holding to status. That dissonance between external validation and internal stagnation is one of the hardest things for founders to admit, let alone act on. Most people ignore the feeling, pivot to a shinier idea, and hope it goes away. Matthew did the opposite. He recognized that his ceiling wasn’t market conditions or lack of opportunity. It was the gap between the skills he had and the skills he needed to build something bigger than himself.

Upgrade only when pain forces it

Claymoo did not move into a warehouse because it sounded fun. They moved when the house literally filled to the top. The basement worked until pallets scraped the ceiling. Upgrade only when the metrics prove it’s time.

What I love about these insights is that they have nothing to do with foam clay. They apply to SaaS, AI startups, coaching – any venture where growth asks you to abandon what’s comfortable.

Translating CTO Skills to Clay Kits

Some tech founders ask whether their hard-won coding skills add value in a physical-product world. Matthew proves they do.

1. Systems thinking. Debugging distributed software taught him to see production as flows, not tasks. That mindset streamlined shelf layout, pick-and-pack sequences, and inventory audits.
2. Data discipline. Engineers obsess over metrics. Matthew now tracks clay waste per batch and shipping cost per zone. Each data point guides the next operational tweak.
3. Automation instinct. Where others see a unpredictable machine, he sees an opportunity to add sensors and run A/B tests on temperature settings. The domain changed, but the mental models transferred perfectly.

If you’re itching to pivot, remember the skill set, not the industry, is your true leverage.

When Clay Met Claymoo: A Lesson in Persistent Outreach

Matthew didn’t just bring systems thinking to Claymoo – he brought the founder’s most underrated skill: persistent outreach. He cold-contacted Clay.com – yes, the sales automation platform – pitching a partnership. The brand symmetry was too perfect to ignore: Clay meets Claymoo.

Matthew didn’t get a reply at first, so he followed up. Then he followed up again. Most founders would’ve stopped after the second silence. Matthew didn’t. He kept the “conversation” alive until Clay.com finally responded. And eventually, they said yes. Today they co-create corporate gift bundles together, and that partnership exists because Matthew refused to let “no response” mean “no.”

The Biggest Takeaways

Carol and Matthew each taught me something different, and both lessons apply to your business.

From Matthew: Your Skills Are More Portable Than You Think

Switching from SaaS to clay didn’t erase Matthew’s engineering past. It leveraged it. System thinking, quick iteration, and data obsession transferred perfectly. What changed was the environment.

Most tech founders underestimate how transferable their skills are. They also overestimate how much they’ll enjoy staying inside the same sandbox forever. If you feel stuck, borrow Matthew’s filter. Ask yourself, “Where will my current strengths translate, but my missing skills get exposed?” That sweet spot drives explosive personal growth.

From Carol: Customer Insight Beats Credentials Every Time

While Matthew brought systems and data, Carol brought something even more powerful: the ability to spot what customers actually want before they ask for it. She identified a gap – people craving creative outlets but intimidated by the mess and learning curve of traditional crafts. Then she built an entire experience around solving that friction.

Carol also understood that product quality alone doesn’t win. You need to bring people into your world. Her TikTok presence is community building, not just marketing. She shares mistakes, celebrates customer creations, and makes clay crafting feel accessible rather than exclusive to experienced clay crafters. That authenticity converts, scrollers become buyers, and buyers who experience Claymoo become advocates. Just head over to the testimonial section, and you will be blown away by the customer love.

If Matthew’s lesson is “your skills transfer across industries,” Carol’s lesson is “your customer insight matters more than your credentials.” She didn’t need a design degree or manufacturing background. She needed empathy and the willingness to solve a problem that mattered to her first.

The Real Reason Matthew Quit Tech (Yes, It’s About Love)

Perhaps the most valuable lesson here is this: some of the best business decisions are rooted in love, not just logic. Matthew didn’t quit tech because of a market analysis or pivot strategy. He quit because the person he loved was drowning in cardboard boxes and customer emails, building something real, and he wanted her to succeed. That decision to step in, to lend his systems thinking to her vision, turned a one-person hustle into a thriving company.

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This pattern repeats throughout entrepreneurial history.

• Gordon Roddick funded and scaled The Body Shop because he believed in his wife Anita’s vision of ethical cosmetics.
• Lynda Weinman built Lynda.com into a $1.5B acquisition with her husband Bruce Heavin as co-founder, combining their complementary skills.
• Even the warmest version of eBay’s origin story credits Pierre Omidyar’s desire to help his fiancee Pam Wesley trade Pez dispensers online as part of the inspiration.

The spreadsheet version of career advice says: “Follow the money. Pick the highest-growth sector. Ride the wave” But the human version says something different. Sometimes the smartest move is to help the person you love build something meaningful. When complementary skills meet shared purpose and genuine partnership, you don’t just build a business, you build a life. And that might be the most sustainable competitive advantage of all.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post From Code to Clay: How a CTO Quit Tech to Make Clay Kits with His Life Partner appeared first on BYVI.

You already know that building a high-growth company often feels like riding a roller coaster in the dark. Still, even by startup standards, losing $757 million in a single quarter should have been a death sentence. For Peloton, it almost was. When I first read that figure, my mind flashed to every sleepless founder I’ve coached who panicked over burning “just” a few hundred thousand dollars too quickly. How did Peloton survive a nine-digit hemorrhage? And why should you, a tech founder trying to keep your SaaS churn under 2%, care about a hardware company’s near-death experience?

That matters because the same idea fits your digital tools, AI products, or B2B services. If you ignore the human side of what you’re building, you could end up like Peloton before their big changelosing huge amounts of money and seeing your brand fade away.

The numbers tell a sobering backstory. Peloton reported a net loss of $1.26 billion for fiscal 2023, adding to a string of red ink that spooked analysts. In just the fourth quarter of 2023, the company posted another $241.8 million loss – still jaw-dropping but less catastrophic than the $757 million low point. Meanwhile, total revenue slipped to $674 million in the last quarter of 2024, a year-over-year fall of more than 9%. These declines followed a pandemic-era surge that had once pushed annual revenue past $4 billion. If you have ever watched your own quarterly graph tilt downward, you understand the sense of free-fall Peloton’s leadership faced.

I think that the most instructive part of Peloton’s saga isn’t the scale of the numbers but the speed of the turnaround once the company reframed itself. Within a few quarters of its “community first” epiphany, Peloton’s cash flow turned positive for the first time in years, something I would have argued impossible had I not seen the SEC filings myself. The shift offers a playbook for any founder looking to stabilize or even resurrect a business that appears to be spinning out of control.

The Pandemic Surge: When a Waiting List Disguised as Product-Market Fit

Back in 2020, people found themselves boxed into living rooms that doubled as offices, classrooms, and makeshift gyms. Peloton became the status symbol of quarantine life. Users waited months and paid premium prices for the privilege of sweating next to their couches. Revenue exploded from $915 million in 2019 to roughly $4 billion by 2021. A growth trajectory so steep it almost felt like a punchline, the kind of chart every Series A founder dreams of showcasing.

You might remember that euphoria because your own product saw a pandemic bump or because you personally scrolled through Instagram stories filled with friends boasting about their first “Cody Rigsby ride.” I did both. In my experience, such rocket-ship moments can feel like permanent validation. Yet they often hide fragility beneath the hype. Peloton’s leadership committed to long-term manufacturing capacity and poured money into global logistics, assuming demand would remain sky-high. When gyms reopened, usage dropped, and a warehouse full of unsold bikes shifted from an asset into a liability.

The surge was more mirage than miracle. A spike in unit sales is gratifying, but if you treat it as proof of product-market fit without stress-testing long-term engagement, you build a skyscraper on sand.

Peloton’s Crash Landing

As lockdowns ended, casual riders folded up their yoga mats and canceled subscriptions. Secondary markets were soon flooded with $2,000 bikes listed for a few hundred dollars. Peloton’s share price nosedived nearly 90%, wiping out billions in market capitalization. Final-quarter revenue for 2023 came in at $642.1 million, a staggering drop from pandemic highs. Debt mounted, layoffs cut the workforce from more than 6,700 employees to under 3,000, and each earnings call sounded more like a distress signal than a victory lap.

You know that feeling when your unit economics no longer add up and your burn rate surpasses any reasonable fundraising prospects. Now multiply those numbers by a thousand, and you have Peloton’s 2022–2023 nightmare. The company’s churn was modest at 1.4%, but hardware sales collapsed so sharply that even strong subscription retention couldn’t offset the gap. Investors worried about bankruptcy protection. Founders in my network started citing Peloton as a cautionary tale for overproduction and under-validation.

The Outsider Edge: Barry McCarthy and the Streaming-Mindset Audit

In February 2022, Peloton replaced its charismatic founder, John Foley, with Barry McCarthy – a CFO best known for shaping subscription economics at Netflix and Spotify. The move puzzled some industry watchers: what could a finance executive from entertainment companies possibly know about cardio equipment? Yet if you have led multiple startups, you appreciate how fresh eyes can surface blind spots insiders miss.

McCarthy walked in and ran an audit not of factory utilization or supply-chain contracts but of user behavior within Peloton’s digital ecosystem. When he examined engagement metrics, a pattern emerged: members who gravitated toward a specific instructor – often visible through hashtags like #PowerZonePack – logged into the platform twice as frequently and churned less than those who skimmed randomly across classes. The bike, it turned out, was merely a conduit to ride alongside beloved personalities.

McCarthy’s outsider perspective allowed him to reframe Peloton not as a hardware manufacturer but as a creator-driven subscription network.

The Single Insight: You Don’t Sell Products – You Sell Belonging

The crystallizing epiphany was simple: “community equals value”. Members did not wake up at dawn to climb a digital hill because the bike’s carbon-steel frame was impeccable. They did it to hear Ally Love’s motivational pep talk or Robin Arzón’s “no excuses” mantra. When McCarthy grasped that truth, every subsequent decision pointed toward amplifying the instructor-member bond.

I know that insight sounds obvious in hindsight, but look around your own product dashboards. You probably still track monthly active users, daily active users, and gross churn. Do you measure how many customers have formed an emotional anchor – perhaps a favorite customer-success manager, a peer-to-peer Slack channel, or a recurring webinar series that feels like a social club? If not, you could be missing the very data that predicts long-term retention.

Peloton started monitoring Instructor-Specific Engagement (ISE). The metric revealed that people who followed at least one instructor on social media and attended that instructor’s live classes each week had the lowest churn, highest referral index, and largest appetite for premium merch. That discovery redefined the company’s north-star metric and changed budget allocations overnight.

Peloton Execution: Turning a Hardware Giant into a Relationship Company

Transforming an insight into a scalable strategy required several moves.

1. Strategic Instructor Empowerment

McCarthy elevated instructors from on-screen trainers to full-on micro-CEOs. They received greater autonomy to brand their classes, choose playlists, and cultivate personal communities off-platform. Contracts began to incorporate incentives tied to subscriber retention rather than simply class views, aligning everyone’s interests around the health of the community rather than the sale of more bikes.

2. Personality-Driven App Experience

The Peloton app went through a redesign that pushed instructor stories front and center. When you opened the app, you no longer saw an inventory of classes classified by duration or intensity. Instead, you saw personality-driven experiences: a themed hip-hop ride with Alex Toussaint or a mindfulness-infused climb with Emma Lovewell. This subtle shift reframed each workout as a social event rather than a practical task.

3. Subscription Model Expansion

Peloton decoupled its digital subscription from bike ownership. For $12.99 a month, you could stream classes on any stationary bike or even just on the floor with a set of dumbbells. Subscription revenue already accounted for 55% of total revenue in fiscal 2023, and McCarthy doubled down on that trend, emphasizing the high-margin nature of digital subscriptions versus the razor-thin or negative margin on hardware.

4. Cultural Partnerships and Integration

Peloton experimented with cultural partnerships. A Taylor Swift album launch would trigger a themed ride. A Marvel movie premier could inspire a superhero bootcamp. Each collaboration acted as social fuel, inviting fans who might have ignored a generic “30-minute cardio session” to join a communal celebration of their favorite pop culture moment.

What Startups Can Learn From Peloton’s Playbook

You may be thinking, “Great for them, but I don’t have charismatic fitness celebrities on payroll.” You also might not have venture debt large enough to fill a football stadium, which is a blessing. In my experience, the underlying principle still maps neatly onto smaller SaaS and AI startups.

Finding Your Brand Ambassadors

Step one is to identify your equivalent of Peloton’s instructors. Maybe it’s a customer-success manager who gets rave reviews in every feedback survey. Maybe it’s a developer advocate whose GitHub tutorials light up Hacker News. Whoever it is, you can spotlight their voice in webinars, email updates, or in-app onboarding videos.

At DeckLinks, for instance, we saw a notable jump in attachment rate once we embedded video narrations from the founders next to proposal slides. Customers felt they were interacting with us directly, not a PDF. That single tweak increased average viewing time by more than 400% and, crucially, unlocked upsell conversations because buyers remembered the presenter’s name and personality.

Measuring Emotional Investment

Second, you need a metric that captures human connection. Traditional product analytics can’t tell you whether your users feel emotionally invested. For BYVI, we rolled out what we call Author Resonance Score. It measures time spent per article, return readers for a specific author, and social shares. High resonance signals we should commission a follow-up piece from that founder and perhaps invite them to a live AMA session.

Unbundling Your Value Proposition

Third, consider decoupling your core value from your flagship product if usage data suggests the experience itself – not the object – is the sticky part. Peloton’s cheaper digital-only tier proved that fans were willing to pay purely for access to instructors and community. In SaaS, you might offer low-friction API access that doesn’t require onboarding to your full-stack platform. Or you might repackage internal knowledge – think design systems or playbooks – into a separate monetized asset with higher margins and wider appeal.

The Startup Playbook: Building Your Own Community Flywheel

Consider the following path as a narrative rather than a checklist.

Discover Your Relationship Anchors

Begin by talking directly to your most engaged users. Ask them what energizes them about your product. If their answers revolve around an individual – “I always tune into Linda’s weekly tips” or “I love how Raj explains bug fixes on Slack” – you’ve found your relationship anchor.

Elevate Your Human Touchpoints

Next, elevate that anchor. Allocate part of your marketing budget not to paid ads but to nurturing personal brands inside your team. Send your star engineer to speak at niche conferences. Encourage your customer-success lead to host a live “office hours” stream on LinkedIn each Friday. These events shouldn’t feel like product demos. Instead, they should feel like gatherings of like-minded people.

Design Meaningful Community Rituals

Then design rituals that reinforce belonging. Peloton riders know that Tuesdays often mean PowerZone classes, Saturdays host live climbs, and special holidays bring themed rides. You can mirror that cadence: a Monday bug-bash stream, a Wednesday secondary-feature spotlight, a first-Thursday-of-the-month founders’ AMA. Rituals convert passive users into anticipating members.

Align Pricing With Participation

Finally, charge in a way that rewards participation. Usage-based pricing – or eliminating rigid tiers altogether – lets your most engaged users feel seen and appreciated. When your pricing reflects actual usage or community involvement, it encourages customers to explore more features, contribute ideas, and deepen their relationship with your product, all while knowing they’re paying for genuine value rather than arbitrary limits. This alignment turns pricing into another touchpoint for trust, not friction.

Beyond Peloton: The Macro Trend Every Founder Should Track

If Netflix transformed DVD rentals into community binging and Spotify turned MP3 ownership into shared playlists, Peloton is simply the fitness chapter in a larger shift from products to relationships. In fact, I’d argue that every venture capital deck boasting a “network effect” but ignoring human stories is missing the real driver of stickiness. Community is not an add-on. It is the moat.

I see the same pattern in design tools like Figma, whose user conferences feel like rock concerts, and in AI research hubs that publish open-source models sparking fan-driven enhancements. The companies winning mindshare convert their teams into relatable faces and their user base into collaborative co-builders.

The Key Takeaway

If you take away one lesson, let it be this: belonging is a monetizable asset. That means you should obsess over the emotional journey your users experience. Care deeply about how your users feel, not just the steps they take in your product. Your next pricing pivot, marketing campaign, or product iteration should answer one question: “How does this deepen the relationship?”

If you focus your top goals on community engagementlike tracking how much people connect with your team or contentyoure building a brand that can handle market changes and hard times. Thats what saved Peloton, and it can protect your startup too.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post Peloton Lost $757M per Quarter. ONE Insight Changed Everything appeared first on BYVI.

I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of bootstrapped startups that manage to carve out their own path to success. Today, I’m excited to share with you the remarkable journey of LavaReach, a bootstrapped AI sales startup that not only achieved impressive growth but also recently completed a successful exit in just 4 days.

LavaReach: How It Started

In July 2023, Daniel and YiMing crossed paths at a VC event in Toronto.  At the time, both were working on their own startups. Daniel was busy building Sellwisely, a tool that helps automate LinkedIn tasks, with two other co-founders. Meanwhile, YiMing was working hard on a developer tool with his team of two co-founders in Australia. They had no idea that their chance meeting would lead to them working together.

As a founder, you know that timing is everything in the startup world. About a month after they met, Daniel hit a roadblock. His technical co-founder couldn’t work full-time on their startup anymore – a common problem that many new businesses face. This put Daniel’s project in a tough spot, and he needed to make some important decisions about what to do next.

Coincidentally, YiMing was also going through changes in his own startup. He was finding it hard to work with his team in Australia due to the big time difference. There were also some disagreements within the team that weren’t getting better. These problems led YiMing to decide it was time to leave his project. It’s a scenario many of you can relate to – sometimes, despite your best efforts, the team dynamics just don’t click.

This serendipitous timing led to the creation of LavaReach in mid-August 2023. The team came together perfectly: Daniel brought his skills in running business operations, YiMing had strong technical knowledge, and they were joined by Max, who was excellent at sales. It was a trio that seemed almost too perfect on paper. Each co-founder had different strengths that worked well together – Daniel handled the day-to-day operations, Max took care of sales, and YiMing managed all the technical work.

The Early Days 

Now, let’s talk about the early days of product development – a phase that every founder knows all too well. It’s an intense mix of excitement, sleepless nights, and countless iterations.

For the LavaReach team, these early days were packed. By the end of August, barely two weeks after joining forces, they had already developed a scrappy hiring trigger. This tool could automatically fetch decision-makers and generate personalized emails. For those of you who’ve been through early product development, you know how exciting it is to see your idea take shape, even in its most rudimentary form.

Over the next month and a half, the team expanded their product capabilities at breakneck speed. They built out multiple triggers, implemented contact fetching based on Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and refined their personalized email generation. Was it perfect? Far from it. But as you well know, perfection is the enemy of progress in the startup world.

This early prototype, with all its flaws and limitations, laid the foundation for what would become LavaReach’s core offering. It was a functional solution to a real-world problem – a crucial milestone for any startup. For those of you just starting your own companies, remember this: your first product doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to work well enough to solve your customers’ problems.

The Pivot: When Plan A Becomes Plan B

As you’ve likely experienced in your own entrepreneurial journey, the path from idea to successful product is rarely a straight line. LavaReach’s story is no exception. By the end of 2023, despite having a substantial sales pipeline, the team found themselves facing a familiar startup challenge – difficulty in converting potential customers.

This struggle stemmed from a realization that many of you have probably faced: our product’s quality wasn’t quite up to par, and we were attempting to solve a vague pain point – research and personalization – without a concrete plan to tackle it effectively. It’s a common pitfall in the startup world, trying to be all things to all people instead of focusing on a specific ICP with an acute problem.

But here’s where the LavaReach team demonstrated their resilience. Instead of stubbornly sticking to their original plan, they made a bold decision to pivot. They introduced a “managed-product” or “full-service” option. This new offering promised customers meetings and a proven approach using LavaReach’s software, which included list building through triggers and signals, research through AI and data sources, and support with email automations using the customer’s existing tools.

For those of you who’ve ever had to make a significant pivot in your business model, you know it’s not an easy decision. It requires admitting that your initial approach isn’t working, and having the courage to change course. But as the LavaReach team discovered, being willing to change direction turned out to be exactly what they needed.

By shifting their focus to performance guarantees and promising meetings, LavaReach began to convert customers on $2,000 MRR deals. This new approach catalyzed rapid growth, with the company adding an impressive $80,000 in ARR month-over-month for several months.

When Growth Leads to Change

If you’ve ever experienced a period of hypergrowth in your startup, you know it’s both exciting and terrifying. When the new business model started working well, LavaReach grew faster than they ever expected. But with quick growth came new problems they needed to solve.

By mid-June 2024, the team realized they needed to reassess their strategies and focus on sustainable growth. It’s a common inflection point for startups – that moment when you realize that the practices that got you to this point might not be the ones that will take you to the next level.

In August 2024, the team underwent a significant change when they parted ways with their sales co-founder. For those of you who’ve gone through co-founder separations, you know it’s never an easy process. It’s emotionally taxing and can create uncertainty about the future.

This transition period prompted Daniel and YiMing to go back to the drawing board. They began talking to users, focusing on the individual contributors they initially set out to help, rather than just the sales leaders attracted by the promise of higher sales targets through AI and automated outreach. It’s a reminder of an essential startup lesson – never lose sight of your core users and their needs, even when your company is growing quickly.

The Human Cost of Rapid Growth: Burnout

Now, let’s talk about something that doesn’t get discussed enough in startup circles – burnout. As founders, you’re often so focused on your company’s growth that you neglect your own well-being. YiMing’s experience with burnout is a stark reminder of the toll that the entrepreneurial journey can take.

Around October 2024, just a month after their sales co-founder left, YiMing hit a wall. In his own words: “I had a massive panic attack, I felt like I was dying, my chest was tight, and I could have a heart attack at any moment. I could barely work for weeks. Every time I opened my laptop, I would have this haunting chest pain, I would be out of breath.”

For those of you who’ve experienced founder burnout, YiMing’s description probably resonates deeply. For those who haven’t, it’s a powerful warning. The pressure of running a startup, especially one that’s growing rapidly, can have serious physical and mental health consequences.

YiMing’s burnout was a wake-up call for the team. It highlighted the importance of work-life balance (which rarely exists among startup founders) and the need for sustainable growth strategies. A trip to Japan helped YiMing disconnect and recover, but the experience left a lasting impact on his approach to entrepreneurship.

If you’re reading this and recognizing similar signs in yourself or your co-founders, take it as a sign. Your health – both mental and physical – is your most valuable asset. No amount of startup success is worth sacrificing it.

4-Day Bootstrapped Startup Acquisition

As LavaReach continued to evolve and grow, Daniel and YiMing found themselves at another crossroads. In January 2025, they began reaching out to similar companies for potential collaborations or outcomes. What happened next was unexpected and moved at a pace that would surprise even the most experienced serial entrepreneurs with multiple exits. 

The exit process, from start to finish, took a mere four days – a testament to the agility and decisiveness often required in the startup world. It began with an initial call between Daniel and Daniel Saks, CEO at Landbase on a Friday. What was supposed to be a 30-minute quick call to exchange ideas turned into a series of texts, calls, and even a dinner with the company’s chief of staff, who happened to be in Toronto that same night.

For those of you who’ve never been through an acquisition process, let me tell you – this is not the norm. Usually, these processes can take months of negotiations, due diligence, and paperwork. But sometimes, when there’s a perfect fit, things can move at lightning speed.

The momentum continued into the following week. On Monday, Daniel and YiMing met with the entire executive team of Landbase. By Tuesday, just four working days after the initial contact, the deal was finalized.

Want to learn more about Landbase? Check out their recent video series that breaks down common sales and marketing challenges, and shows how their solutions are helping companies transform their go-to-market strategy.

Lessons for Founders

Now, let’s talk about what you, as a founder or aspiring entrepreneur, can learn from LavaReach’s journey. Their story offers several valuable lessons that you can apply to your own venture.

1. Embrace Serendipity

The chance meeting between Daniel and YiMing at a VC event led to the formation of LavaReach. This underscores the importance of networking and being open to unexpected opportunities. As a founder, you never know when a casual conversation might lead to your next big break. So, get out there, attend events, and engage with your peers. Your next co-founder or game-changing idea might be just a handshake away.

2. Be Willing to Pivot

When their initial product wasn’t gaining traction, the LavaReach team didn’t hesitate to pivot to a “managed-product” model. This flexibility was key to their subsequent growth. In your own startup journey, don’t be afraid to change course if something isn’t working. Your ability to adapt quickly could be the difference between success and failure.

3. Listen to Your Users

After parting ways with their sales co-founder, Daniel and YiMing went back to talking to their users, focusing on the individual contributors they initially set out to help. This user-centric approach is crucial for product development and market fit. Remember, your users are your best source of feedback and inspiration. Make it a habit to engage with them regularly and really listen to their needs and pain points.

4. Recognize and Address Burnout

YiMing’s experience with burnout highlights the importance of mental health and work-life balance in the startup world. As a founder, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and forget to take care of yourself. But remember, you are your company’s most valuable asset. Taking time to disconnect and recharge isn’t just good for you – it’s crucial for the long-term success of your venture.

5. Be Prepared for Rapid Changes

The speed at which LavaReach’s acquisition unfolded demonstrates how quickly things can change in the startup world. While not every opportunity will move this fast, being prepared for and open to such rapid changes can lead to unexpected opportunities. Stay agile, keep your documentation in order, and always be ready to seize an opportunity when it presents itself.

6. Value the Human Element

Throughout their journey, the LavaReach team emphasized the importance of the human element in their work. This aligns with my own belief in the power of personal qualities such as kindness, empathy, and the willingness to understand others. In your own startup, remember that behind every user, every team member, and every investor is a human being. Cultivating strong relationships and showing empathy can set you apart in the often impersonal world of tech.

Looking to the Future

While the LavaReach chapter has come to a close for Daniel and YiMing, their entrepreneurial journey is far from over. As YiMing said:

“I’m certainly not done with startups. Hopefully I’ll see you coming back in a few years, for some even wilder stories.”

This sentiment encapsulates the spirit of true entrepreneurs – always looking forward, always ready for the next challenge. It’s this spirit that drives innovation, creates jobs, and pushes our society forward.

As for the acquiring company, while details of their plans for LavaReach’s technology and team are not public, it’s clear that they saw significant value in what Daniel and YiMing had built. This acquisition not only validates the work of the LavaReach team but also opens up new possibilities for the technology they developed to reach a wider audience and make a bigger impact.

For those of you working on your own startups, let the LavaReach story serve as both inspiration and a reality check. Success in the startup world can come in many forms and often when you least expect it. Stay focused on creating value, be open to opportunities, and don’t be afraid to pivot when necessary.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post From Bootstrap to Buyout in 4 Days: The LavaReach Story appeared first on BYVI.