Ryan Cohen pitched Chewy more than 100 times before anyone said yes. “Nobody wanted to give me money,” he later told the Wall Street Journal. The pitch was an online pet store that would out-service Amazon, and Silicon Valley kept passing (nobody wanted to fund the next Pets.com).

Then, in late 2013, a Boston firm called Volition Capital wrote a $15 million check. What convinced them was how often Chewy’s customers came back. Less than 4 years later, PetSmart bought Chewy for $3.35 billion, the largest e-commerce acquisition on record at the time.

That same firm just closed a $950 million fund to do more of exactly that.

Volition Fund VI at a glance

How Volition Capital’s $950 million fund works

On September 14, Volition announced the final close of Fund VI at its hard cap of $950 million. The fund was oversubscribed, it’s the firm’s largest ever, and it pushes Volition past $2.6 billion in assets under management. Since 2010, the firm has backed more than 60 companies, with exits including Chewy, Assent Compliance, Connatix and Rounds.

We're excited to announce the closing of Volition Fund VI with $950 million in limited partner capital commitments, bringing our total assets under management to over $2.6 billion.

With Fund VI, we'll continue to focus on investing in high-growth, founder-owned technology… pic.twitter.com/rshxpu7Pjp

— Volition Capital (@volitioncapital) September 14, 2026

For scale, the previous fund closed at $675 million in early 2023, so Fund VI is roughly 40% bigger.

Co-founder Larry Cheng gave The Information the inside view. Per Dealroom’s summary of that interview, typical checks run $25 to $50 million, Volition takes a board seat, and the sweet spot is companies doing $5 to $50 million in annual revenue that raised little or no institutional money. Cheng said Chewy returned the whole of Fund II, and the sale of Rounds returned about half of Fund IV.

Why Volition is doubling down on bootstrapped founders

The timing is the interesting bit. The Information framed it against a VC rush to back the hottest startups before they’ve made any revenue at all. Meanwhile, limited partners (the pension funds and endowments that invest in VC funds) spent this spring and summer nervous about AI disrupting software. Volition raised a record fund into that anxiety anyway.

Cheng’s read on AI is the part founders should underline. He told The Information that AI is making products cheaper to launch, and that he’s seeing more companies hit roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue in their first year with fewer than 10 employees, a pace he said he’d never seen before. His take in the Fund VI announcement:

“We have backed founders with aspirations for greatness, and we believe truly remarkable businesses are being built today in the new era of AI.”

Larry Cheng, Founding Partner at Volition Capital

So let’s connect those dots. If a tiny team can reach real revenue without a seed round, the pool of “bootstrapped companies with traction” gets much bigger.

That’s Volition’s hunting ground, and it explains why its partners are leaning into AI rather than running from it.

The promise: big outcomes, less founder risk

For all the AI talk, Volition’s promise to founders hasn’t changed since the firm was founded in 2010. Managing partner Roger Hurwitz said it best in the Fund VI announcement:

“Our mission to help founders achieve their dreams without risking them hasn’t changed. That north star has guided us through every market and technology cycle, and we believe it will continue setting us apart.”

Roger Hurwitz, Founding Partner at Volition Capital

“Without risking them” is the part worth underlining. It’s a promise the firm has been testing since it raised its first fund in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and the release spells out what it means in practice:

For a bootstrapped founder, that’s the whole trade: you’ve already taken the early risk with your own time and money, and the right growth partner should help you scale it without giving up the company you built.

How to get on Volition Capital’s radar

Volition publishes its investment criteria openly, which is rarer than it should be. Read them as a checklist for becoming fundable without fundraising first.

A recent example of the model in action: Volition led a $40 million minority investment in Keynes, a connected TV ad company, earlier this year. Minority means Volition doesn’t take the company over.

When Volition isn’t the right fit

Growth equity is a great deal for the right company and a poor fit for others. A $25 to $50 million check comes with a board seat and a partner who expects a large return, often through a sale (Chewy and Rounds were both exits). If you’d rather run a profitable company forever and pay yourself dividends, you may never need this money, and that’s a perfectly good outcome.

It’s also a small club. Volition calls itself “extremely selective,” and a fund this size still backs a limited number of companies.

The good news: the work that makes you fundable is the same work that keeps you independent. Paying customers, strong retention and healthy margins give you options, whether you take a $25 million check or never raise a dollar.

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Volition Raises $950 Million for Bootstrapped Founders Who Skipped VC appeared first on BYVI.

Count the terminal tabs open on your Mac right now. If you’ve gone full tokenmaxxer, running one agent per feature, spinning up subagents, keeping a Codex task alive next to 2 Claude Code sessions and a Gemini CLI job, the number is embarrassing. Every one of those windows is a separate place a request can appear.

A plan wants approval. A command wants a yes. A question is sitting there, blocking everything downstream, and you won’t know until you alt-tab into it. The agents are fast. The bottleneck is the human doing traffic control.

That’s the quiet cost of running agents in bulk, and almost nobody prices it in. You optimized the model and you optimized the prompt. But you never optimized the 40 times an hour you go hunting for which session stopped and why.

The tokenmaxxer’s real problem isn’t tokens

Running a crew is now a documented workflow, not a hack. Claude Code alone ships 5 different ways to work on several tasks at once: subagents, agent view, agent teams, dynamic workflows, and projects. The point of all of them is to stop working one task at a time. The catch is written into Anthropic’s own docs: running several sessions or subagents at once multiplies token usage. 3 agents burn roughly 3 times the fuel of one.

So the tokenmaxxer lives with 2 problems at once, and they pull against each other.

The first is attention.

The more agents you run, the more moments there are where one of them stops and waits for you, and the harder it is to see which one.

The second is fuel.

Anthropic meters Claude Code on both a 5-hour rolling window and a weekly cap, and Codex runs its own limits. Push a fleet hard and you can wall yourself off mid-sprint, with no warning until the session refuses to move.

Tools like lazycodex, an agent harness built for aggressive parallel execution and pushing 3,400 GitHub stars, exist precisely because people want to run more agents harder.

The harness makes the crew bigger. It does nothing for the coder who now has to steer it.

CrewTower is the part that steers.

What the CrewTower notch actually does for your AI agents

CrewTower keeps Claude Code, Codex, and your other agents in view at the top of the screen, and lets you answer them without opening a single app.

1. Approve or deny without leaving what you’re doing.

When an agent needs a yes, the request appears in the notch and your answer goes straight back to the session, while your current window stays in focus. Destructive commands get a visible warning first, so a rm -rf build/ shows you what it deletes before you wave it through.

You choose how long the approval lasts: once, for this session, or always where the agent supports it.

2. Read the plan, then have your say.

When an agent hands you a plan, you open the full thing in the notch, approve it, or send feedback for a revision before any code gets written. Same for open questions: the agent asks which queue the worker should use, you pick an option and the work keeps moving.

Plan review is where tokens get saved or wasted at scale, because a bad plan approved on autopilot is a whole session burned.

3. Jump straight to the session that needs you.

When you do need to be inside the work, Jump takes you to the exact place: the right terminal tab or tmux pane for a CLI session, or the Claude Code task in the Claude app and the Codex task in the ChatGPT app.

So no more reading 4 identically named claude tabs to find the live one. It works across iTerm2, Ghostty, Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, Warp, and plain Terminal.

4. Watch context and usage before either runs out.

A small ring on each session shows how full its context is, with warnings as it fills. Underneath, CrewTower shows your Claude and Codex usage windows, so the weekly cap stops being a surprise and starts being a gauge.

For a tokenmaxxer, this is the fuel light. You can see the wall coming and downshift, instead of finding it at 2pm on a Thursday with half a feature done.

5. Swap companions, and keep it quiet when you have to.

You can put a small pixel companion in the bar that reacts as your crew works, waits, and finishes. Yes, it’s adorable. And yes, you can turn it off and run character-free if that’s not your thing

Privacy mode holds the panel closed and silences alerts for a screen share, while your agents keep working in their own apps.

6. Keep the whole thing on your machine.

CrewTower doesn’t upload your prompts, code, or transcripts, and there’s no account and no app analytics.

For founders shipping anything sensitive, that’s what lets you actually use it. Your crew stays local, the control panel just sits at the edge of the screen.

Why turning the Apple notch into mission control is the smartest move

The founder lesson here is worth pulling out, because it’s a positioning move more than a feature. CrewTower claimed a piece of real estate that every MacBook has and nothing else uses.

The notch is dead space most people just work around. Turning it into mission control for your agents is the kind of wedge that looks obvious only after someone builds it, the same way Loom made “the video is the message” and Superhuman made the keyboard-only inbox.

It also runs everywhere, not just on notched machines. On an external display it shows up as a small pill at the top of the screen with the same controls, on macOS 15 or later.

The bet is that a persistent, always-visible strip beats another window you have to dig for, and for a workflow where the whole problem is too many windows, that bet is right.

CrewTower pays for itself the first time it saves you from a bad plan

CrewTower is a one-time $9.99, early-bird down from $14.99, for one Mac. No subscription, updates included.

Set that next to what a tokenmaxxer already spends: a Claude Max plan runs $100 to $200 a month, and most serious fleet-runners are stacking Max with a Codex plan on top.

Against a few hundred dollars a month in agent subscriptions, a $10 control panel that saves you from burning a weekly cap on a plan you would have rejected isn’t a purchase you model in a spreadsheet. It pays for itself the first time it stops you approving one bad plan.

The one honest catch: this Mac app has no free trial. What the site gives you instead is a full live demo that replicates the app right in the browser, so you can click through real approvals, questions, plans, and companions before you spend anything. Run the demo, decide in 3 minutes, and you’ve lost nothing if it isn’t for you.

Why CrewTower is a must-have for tokenmaxxers

The whole tokenmaxxer race has been about throughput. More agents, bigger harnesses, more parallel runs, more tokens burned per hour. And somewhere in there the bottleneck stopped being the machine and became you: the one who still has to approve the plans, answer the questions, and catch it when the tank runs dry. Whoever keeps the crew moving ships fastest now, and honestly that comes down to how much you can see at once.

CrewTower’s whole pitch is that the fix costs $10 and sits in the one strip of your Mac you’d been ignoring anyway. So run your 5 agents from somewhere you can actually see them, or keep alt-tabbing around and calling it productivity.

Running the agents was never the problem. Keeping five of them pointed in the right direction is, and that’s the job CrewTower actually does.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post CrewTower: Tokenmaxxers, Your Agents Now Live in the Notch appeared first on BYVI.

This week, CHFA NOW Toronto opens at Exhibition Place, and for 3 days Canada’s natural and wellness industry will crowd into one building. Last year’s show drew more than 1,200 exhibitors and 3,400 attendees. Somewhere in there, a founder is reprinting her sell sheet for the second time this week, practising a 30-second pitch on her co-founder, and hoping the right buyer stops at her table.

Alongside all the booth conversations, there’s another $1 million opportunity on the table this week. Just ahead of the show, Healthy Planet announced the Homegrown Grant, worth $1 million in promotion across its stores and website. Nobody can pitch for it. The retailer will choose by looking at its own numbers.

The grant with no application form

The Homegrown Grant offers $1 million in Healthy Planet media value, split among a group of selected health and wellness brands.

Then the twist: rather than running an open application process, Healthy Planet will shortlist eligible brands using its own sales data and selection criteria, and contact them directly. Healthy Planet announced it ahead of CHFA NOW Toronto, though the grant itself is separate from the show.

“Today we meet founders with wonderful products who are up against global brands whose marketing budgets they will never match.”

– Muhammad Mohamedy, General Manager at Healthy Planet

A little context on who’s writing the cheque. Healthy Planet has been a Canadian family business since 1995 and started as a small kiosk.

It now calls itself Canada’s largest online health store, and it’s about to open its 46th Ontario location, an 11,200 square-foot store in Scarborough, on October 1.

A fair reading needs 2 honest notes.

1. “Media value” means promotional placement priced at what it would normally cost a brand to buy: featured spots in stores, promotions online, that kind of exposure. It won’t pay your co-packer or cover payroll. For an early brand, though, it covers the exact line item that usually gets cut first.
2. A few details aren’t public yet: how many brands will be picked, how the $1 million will be divided, and when the programs run. There’s also an interesting tension in the criteria. Brands must be new to Healthy Planet’s shelves, yet they’re shortlisted from sales data. My read is that the sweet spot is brands recently listed whose early numbers already show traction.

Why visibility is the expensive part

Healthy Planet’s general manager, Muhammad Mohamedy, framed the grant around a problem every CPG founder knows. Small founders, he said, are up against global brands with marketing budgets they’ll never match, and visibility is “the one thing we can give them that they would otherwise have to buy.”

He’s right about the price tag. Getting onto a shelf costs money before a single unit sells. Farm Credit Canada estimates listing fees (what a brand pays a retailer to place a new product) at about $100 per store for each product, while smaller retailers often ask for a free case per product per store instead. It also advises brands to plan on at least 3 to 4 price promotions a year at 15% to 25% off.

And that’s only the cost of being there. Being seen is a separate budget: promos, flyers, end caps, sponsored listings online. That second budget is where small brands lose, because a product nobody notices doesn’t sell, and a product that doesn’t sell gets delisted.

Healthy Planet also has a very practical reason to find these brands early. Its own numbers show that Canadian brands carry the store. In June, Mohamedy said Canadian-owned brands make up only about a quarter of the roughly 2,200 brands it carries but drive about 2/3 of its sales. In some aisles it’s close to total: roughly 98% of its magnesium sales and 97% of its vitamin sales come from Canadian-owned brands. The retailer carries close to 600 Canadian-owned brands, many of them small.

So this grant is generous and good business at the same time. Healthy Planet gets first access to the next brand its shoppers will love, right as the “buy Canadian” habit keeps growing. I don’t count that against it. The partnerships that last are the ones where both sides win, and founders should read the grant as a clear signal of what this retailer wants more of.

How to get picked for Healthy Planet’s Homegrown Grant

Since nobody can apply, the only way in is to already look like a winner. These 6 moves make that happen, whether or not you ever get the call.

1. Treat your sales data as your application.

Healthy Planet picks from its own numbers, and it runs the rest of the business the same way: store openings are chosen using local demographics, existing e-commerce penetration and customer density. If you’re already listed somewhere, know your sales per store per week cold, and send buyers a one-page update when those numbers climb.

2. Aim for the gaps on the shelf.

The same Healthy Planet data shows where Canadian brands are missing: they’re only about 4% of its cosmetics sales and 9% of baby, because credible local options are thin. Mohamedy called that exactly where retailers and Canadian makers can partner. A strong Canadian brand in a thin category stands out.

3. Make your Canadian story findable in 2 seconds.

Healthy Planet already uses maple leaf shelf tags, a Canadian products section online and dedicated shopping filters to help shoppers spot local brands. Meet it halfway. Put “Canadian-owned” or “Made in Canada” on the front of the pack, in your online product titles and in your retailer product data, so every tag and filter actually catches you.

4. Build for the second purchase before the spotlight hits.

Mohamedy’s definition of success is specific: a shopper discovers the brand and comes back for it, and the brand gets to hire someone and add a product. Visibility only compounds if people rebuy.

Before any big promo, make sure you have inventory to cover a spike, a reason to repurchase (a bigger size, a bundle, a subscription online) and a plan for when the promo ends. Loblaw’s Small Supplier Program offers new small suppliers a 6-month on-shelf commitment for the same reason: repeat buying takes time to build.

5. Start with retailers that can actually see you.

A 45-store regional chain notices a small brand. A national grocer with thousands of SKUs per aisle might not, at least not yet. Win the specialist first, then use those numbers to open bigger doors. And stack your options. Loblaw’s program, for example, promises subsidized retail fees and 7-day payment terms for small suppliers. Different doors reward the same thing: proof that shoppers want you.

6. Show up where buyers go looking for new brands.

Healthy Planet announced the grant the same week as CHFA NOW, where retailers get VIP perks designed to help them discover emerging brands and the Launch Pad competition puts new products in front of the industry live. Buyers can only shortlist brands they’ve heard of.

What to do if your Canadian brand isn’t picked

Unsolicited grants have a downside worth naming: you can’t control whether you’re picked. If your brand isn’t listed with Healthy Planet yet, this round probably isn’t yours, and chasing it would be a distraction. If you were listed recently, the best thing you can do is keep doing what got you there: fill the shelf, fix out-of-stocks fast, and give store staff a reason to recommend you.

Healthy Planet’s in-store health experts give shoppers advice tailored to their goals, and a staff member who understands your product is a sales channel you don’t pay for.

The smarter move is to treat the grant as a public description of what one growing Canadian retailer values: founder-led brands, clear Canadian ownership, early traction, and products shoppers come back for.

That list pays off even if you never sell a single unit through Healthy Planet. Every good buyer runs through the same checklist in their head. This time, a retailer wrote it down.

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post The $1 Million Grant You Can’t Apply For: How Healthy Planet Picks Its Next Canadian Brands appeared first on BYVI.

Does Google pay for AI Overviews now?

Sort of, and only if it decides your page mattered enough. This month Google confirmed it’s running what it calls the “AI contribution pilot,” a Search Console feature that shows eligible publishers a running tally of earnings tied to how often their content shapes an answer inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini.

The interface line reads: “Accumulate earnings when your content contributes significantly to AI-generated responses in participating products,” as first reported by Digiday and confirmed the same week by Search Engine Land.

Google’s own framing of the program is careful and small. A spokesperson called it “an early-stage learning pilot to test how best to reward high-quality content, on top of the traffic and tools it already provides,” according to Digiday’s reporting.

So basically it’s a test of a test. This isn’t Google’s first move here either. It teased the concept in a June blog post about paying sites that keep its AI answers “fresh and accurate,” and announced a separate “commercial partnership program” with major news publishers back in late 2025.

The Search Console rollout is the small, quiet, unglamorous version of that promise, and dozens of publishers have reportedly been invited in already, skewed toward small and midsize sites, not the large publishers Google would rather cut a real deal with.

The rollout itself tells you how much weight to put on it. Search Engine Land contributor Barry Schwartz first spotted the “AI contribution” report inside Search Console back in April, months before anyone outside Google understood there was a payment attached to it. It took until this week, and a Digiday report, for the payment mechanism to surface publicly at all.

A program this quiet, aimed at a handful of invited publishers, isn’t a policy shift you can plan a business around. It’s a pilot Google can shrink, pause, or quietly kill the moment it stops learning what it wants to learn.

If you run a bootstrapped content business and you’re wondering whether to hold out for a Google check before you change anything about your content strategy, the honest answer is: don’t.

The reasons why get clearer the closer you look at how the money actually works.

What AI Mode publisher payments actually look like from the inside

One publishing executive with early access to the program described the payout math directly to Digiday: “It’s quite black box.” Nobody outside Google can see the formula that decides which page “contributed significantly” to which answer, or how many cents that contribution is worth.

Another participant, more hopeful, said they’re “super excited to participate” because the open dialogue with Google “feels like a true partner.”

Both things can be true. A collaborative pilot and an opaque, unaccountable payout are not mutually exclusive, and for a small publisher with no seat at that table, the second part is what matters the most.

Luke Stillman, managing director at the media consultancy Madison and Wall, put the power imbalance:

“Publishers have relatively little leverage over how AI changes content discovery and distribution.”

David Buttle, founder of the publisher coalition Spur, went further, calling the whole pilot “a kind of hedge” on Google’s part, “a bit of experimentation in the event that that world comes to pass and they do actually have to pay” real money for real usage.

None of that makes the pilot worthless. It makes it a signal, not a plan. Google acknowledging it owes something for the content powering its AI answers is a real shift after two years of publishers shouting into the void about traffic collapsing under AI Overviews.

But a signal doesn’t pay your AWS bill, and independent publishers who builds a content strategy around waiting for Google to decide what your work is worth has handed away the one thing they actually control.

Why Reddit can cash this check and you can’t

Look at who actually gets paid real money for AI training content, and the pattern is obvious. Reddit signed a licensing deal with Google in February 2024 worth a reported $60 million a year, for access to what Google called “real-time content from Reddit’s vast user-authored forums.”

A separate deal with OpenAI followed months later, reportedly worth around $70 million annually. Reddit could ask that price because it owns something no other site has: millions of unscripted human conversations that AI models need and can’t fully replicate anywhere else.

Between August 2024 and June 2025, Reddit became the single most-cited domain across both Google AI Overviews and Perplexity.

That’s the model. Reddit didn’t get paid because it waited patiently for a fair pilot program. It got paid because it holds a monopoly on a specific kind of data, and it negotiated from that position of strength, before Google or OpenAI ever offered a Search Console widget to anyone.

Your blog or publication does not have that leverage, and neither does mine.

The moat is the citation

Founders keep reporting the same strange pattern this year: rankings holding steady while traffic quietly drains away. The data backs them up. Ahrefs compared Search Console data across 300,000 keywords and found that AI Overviews cut click-through rates for top-ranking pages by 58%, up from 34.5% in their earlier 2025 study.

As they put it: “For every 100 clicks you could historically earn for a top-ranking page, Google now keeps 58.” That’s the mechanism behind every founder post wondering why months of stable positions produced falling visits.

Stable rankings, falling traffic.

That gap is the whole AI-search story in one sentence, and it’s happening to founders who’ve never heard of the AI contribution pilot and never will.

Research from Ahrefs, analyzing nearly 17 million citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews, found that AI assistants cite meaningfully fresher content than traditional Google search results do, roughly 25.7% fresher on average.

ChatGPT showed the strongest bias toward recency of any platform tested. That’s a concrete, actionable lever available to any founder today, no pilot invitation required.

How to get cited by AI without waiting on Google

What actually moves the needle, while Google figures out its own math, is more boring than a licensing deal and far more useful to a founder with no leverage to negotiate with in the first place.

Where this leaves founders

Google’s AI contribution pilot is worth watching, and it’s worth opting into if you’re invited, since free money is still money. But build your business as if that check never clears. The founders who’ll matter most in this next stretch of AI search are the ones who made themselves the source worth citing long before any platform decided to pay for the privilege, and who never stopped building the parts of their business no algorithm gets to price.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Google’s AI Contribution Pilot: Founders, Don’t Count on It and Do This Instead 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 a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology 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 a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology 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 a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

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

One rural says it all: “Road grooming ran past our driveway and nobody told us when. We found out when we heard the plow.” That line sits on the LocalXP homepage, and if you’ve ever lived somewhere small you already know how this feels. The closure, the detour, the farmers market that moved: the information existed, it just lived somewhere in a Facebook group, in a thread you weren’t in.

Tom Pischel lives in that reality. Erin is a town of 11,981 people in Wellington County, rural, about 80 kilometres northwest of Toronto and close enough to the Kitchener-Waterloo tech corridor to feel the pull of it.

When a December storm hit, Pischel watched his neighbours coordinate across scattered posts and group chats, and he decided the scatter itself was the problem. As he told the Wellington Advertiser in January 2026, important local information “is often scattered and difficult to follow in real time.”

Most founders would file that under “annoying” and move on. Pischel filed it under “build.”

The web designer who kept building for his neighbours

Watch this founder for the lesson in his track record: LocalXP is his third swing at this problem, and each one got sharper.

Tom Pischel is a front-end designer with about 6 years of product experience. His first project, Dwellcome was an app that helped newcomers to Canada find community resources like halal butchers and daycares.

Then in May 2024 he launched AltGrocery, a free map of thousands of independent food businesses across Canada: farmers markets, local grocers, distilleries. He built it in two weeks after watching the “Loblaws Is Out Of Control” boycott flood Reddit and noticing there were, in his words, “no directories for those looking for alternatives to well-known grocery chains.” He kept it completely free, both for the businesses listed and the people using it.

Notice the through-line:

Same founder, same instinct, 3 angles on one problem: community information is real, valuable, and badly organized.

AltGrocery even lives on inside LocalXP now, as one of the example map layers in the product. Tom absorbed the earlier work rather than abandoning it.

And that is the true signature of a founder who keeps returning to the same problem because he can’t ignore it.

The pivot from points to notice

The most instructive part of the LocalXP story is what changed between that January write-up and the product today.

The early version leaned hard into gamification. You’d earn points for visiting a business, attending an event, or helping a neighbour, redeemable for rewards like a free coffee.

Fun, sticky, and the kind of thing a designer loves to build.

But somewhere between the storm and the current site, Pischel demoted it. The homepage now says: “XP is a single feature, not the platform,” and verified check-ins are “not the default experience.”

What moved to the center instead? Notice. Scheduled closures, grooming windows, market days, trail status, detours. The stuff residents need before they leave the house, rather than the stuff that makes an app feel like a game.

That kind of restraint is rare, and it’s worth crediting. Pischel had a feature he clearly loved, the points and the rewards, and the maturity to set it aside the moment his community showed him what they really needed.

He shipped, he listened, and he let real use rewrite his plan. What the town wanted was simpler than a game: to be told what’s happening on its own streets.

Pischel had the clarity to hear that over his own clever idea, and the confidence to rebuild around it. Choosing the quieter, harder job over the fun one is the instinct that separates founders who serve a community from founders who just launch at it.

Why the small town is the moat

The instinct in startup land is to build for the biggest market you can describe on a slide. Pischel did the opposite, and it works in his favour.

Living in Erin means his feedback loop is literally at his front door. The municipal clerk who says “we post closures on Facebook, half the town never sees them” could be someone down the road from him. He can watch a program run, see what confuses people, and fix it by the weekend.

It also gives him a wedge the giants ignore. A town of 12,000 is too small for enterprise GIS pricing and too real to be served by a generic Facebook group. LocalXP is explicitly built to be “affordable for small communities and BIAs, not enterprise GIS pricing,” and it’s designed so a municipality, a utility, a business district, and a tourism group can each run their own layer on one shared map.

The design carries the same local logic. On LocalXP, one business keeps a single profile that can surface on the downtown map, the weekend market, a festival overlay, and a trail program at once, instead of rebuilding four separate listings. A bakery updates its hours once and stays current everywhere.

For a small main-street shop with no marketing budget, that’s the difference between showing up and staying invisible, and it’s the kind of unglamorous work you only think to build when the shop owners are people you actually know.

Bootstrapping this company also keeps him honest. Pischel funds LocalXP with rental income and paused his paid design work to build it, so there’s no investor clock pushing him to overstate the market or rush a launch. He can afford to get it right for one community before offering it to a hundred, and that patience is its own advantage.

The gap Tom is building into

The market case here rests on a documented collapse. Between 2008 and October 2025, 603 local news outlets closed across 388 communities in Canada, and only 264 new ones launched and survived. The local newspaper that used to run the closures, the market times, and the road work is, in hundreds of towns, simply gone.

Something has to hold that civic information, and right now the answer is “a dozen Facebook groups and a PDF.” That’s the vacuum LocalXP is walking into.

Rural towns like Erin sit right in the blast radius of that decline. When the shared source of “what’s happening here” disappears, the town doesn’t stop needing one. It just makes do with worse until someone builds a better one. Pischel is betting the better one is a map the community can trust and, crucially, own.

What this means for your startup

You don’t need a rural town or a mapping product to use what Pischel is doing. The moves are portable.

Start closer than you think

Tom’s whole approach fits in one sentence: live where the problem lives, ship to your neighbours, and let their real needs shape what you build. LocalXP is still early, with guided pilots running now and subscriptions opening soon, and whatever comes next, the way he got here is a playbook any founder can run. He turned a place most founders would drive right past into the one advantage nobody can take from him.

The best market research is a life lived close to the problem. You can’t outspend that, and you don’t have to. You just have to start where you already are.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Why a Solo Founder Bet on His Town Instead of the Big City appeared first on BYVI.

Somewhere in Ottawa tonight, a student is walking into a room with a half-finished idea and absolutely nothing to prove it. No co-founder. No funding. No clue what the first step is. They sit down next to a total stranger who is elbow-deep in their own project, flip open a laptop, and start building. Three hours later the thing is real in a way it wasn’t when they walked in. That is the entire event. We call it a co-hack, and it’s the engine room of Builders Collective, our community for “student founders, engineers, and designers who actually build.”

That phrase, “actually build,” is doing a lot of work. Half the tech world right now is tokenmaxxing, competing to burn the most AI tokens and climb internal usage leaderboards as if activity were the same thing as output. “Actually build” is the opposite instinct: put a real thing in front of real people. It’s also a reaction against a mindset that keeps talented people stuck for years, the belief that you need everything lined up before you begin. The right network. The right technical skills. The right co-founder. And, most stubbornly, the right city.

The advice you’re exhausted by

You know the line. If you’re serious about startups, you’ll eventually have to leave. Go to Toronto. Go to New York. Go to San Francisco. It gets handed to you like settled fact, usually by people who mean well and have never questioned it.

The annoying part is that it isn’t nonsense. Geography matters, and the numbers are brutal about it. Bay Area startups pulled in $90 billion in 2024, which was 57% of every venture dollar spent in the U.S. that year. And the money is clustering earlier and tighter: the Bay Area grabbed 45% of U.S. seed dollars in 2025, up from 33% the year before. We’re not denying any of that.

The trap is when an advantage becomes a requirement. “San Francisco might be the best place to scale this” is a strategic call you make later, with real information. “You can’t start a company until you’re in San Francisco” is just a story you tell yourself, one that keeps you stuck in planning for years, waiting on a plane ticket you can’t afford to give you permission you never needed in the first place.

We built the room instead of leaving it

The origin story is almost too simple. Qurb E Muhammad Syed and I started Builders Collective, with Hamza El Sousi, Srivathsan Murali, and Imane Amine as our founding engineers.

We were betting on a hunch, that Ottawa was never short on talent. It was short on a place for that talent to keep bumping into itself. The most surprising thing the experiment turned up was how fast the hunch paid off. The second there was somewhere to show up, the introductions started making themselves.

Someone needs a designer, someone knows one. Someone’s stuck on a bug another person squashed last month. Someone has an idea but no idea where to start, and across the table sits the person who’s already done it.

The people were already here. They just needed a way to find each other.

That’s why the format runs with almost no formality. You don’t arrive knowing what you’re doing. You arrive with something you want to work on, you pull up a chair next to other people doing the same, and you build. Starting is the only requirement, because starting is the part most people never get past.

What we’ve actually shipped

Builders Collective is new, and most of us are mid-build. That’s exactly what a group this age should look like, not a knock on anyone. But things are already going out the door, and that’s the part that matters.

Hamza El Sousi, one of our founding engineers, built and launched ResumeKickstarter, an AI resume builder that spits out ATS-optimized resumes, free to start, no credit card. You upload whatever resume you’ve got, paste in a job description, and it rewrites the wording to match without inventing experience you don’t have. It’s a real, working product with real users.

Qurb E Muhammad Syed built the 613 Webring, presented by Builders Collective. If you haven’t seen a webring since the dial-up days, the idea is equal parts nostalgic and genuinely smart: a loop of personal sites from engineers, designers, and coders across the 613 (Ottawa’s area code), each one linking to the next.

You add your site, paste in a tiny snippet, and “previous, 613, next” controls appear in your footer, turning every builder in the city into someone the rest of the city can actually find. It’s infrastructure for the scene. The tagline says it best:

“Ottawa’s builders, linked in a ring.”

Who’s in the room

The range is the best part. Some members are shipping their first small tool. Others are swinging enormous.

Joel Diab is an Ottawa game developer building Lemon Tree Studio, an AI-native game engine for creator-led games, and he’ll tell you flat out that he’s aiming for a $100 billion studio. The games are just the start. He describes them as a way to fund the technologies and communities he wants to build after them. That kind of goal can sound ridiculous out loud, which is the entire reason it needs a room where it doesn’t.

Hamza, who built ResumeKickstarter, is already quietly turning a profit, just not from the product with his name on it. ResumeKickstarter is the part you can click on. The bills get paid by Social Automate, a small Ottawa studio doing tech consulting for the least glamorous, most underserved clients in the city: mechanics, contractors, accountants, construction crews. Before he builds a thing, he embeds in the business for a day or two and just watches. Then he finds the task quietly eating 3 or 4 hours a week and rebuilds it into something that takes 10 minutes, a proper CRM, branded proposals, invoicing, whatever that specific shop actually runs on.

His read on AI is refreshingly free of hype. Not everyone needs an AI agent, he’ll tell you, and most of the time they don’t. What a contractor usually needs is a system that keeps them consistent, because they lose deals to lower-quality competitors who simply present better. Give them professional, branded proposals and they stop leaving money on the table. Social Automate is the quieter, more profitable half of what Hamza does, and it grew out of a leftover: the name is a holdover from a social media tool he built for his college capstone, proved out, then shut down. He kept the aged domain, pivoted the business, and kept building.

Then there’s Tandem Robotics, which settles any argument that real hardware with real revenue can’t come out of Ottawa. Ming Chen, Mumtahin Farabi, and Alvin Htet built Taro, a farm robot that lays the farmer flat and slides them down the crop rows, transplanting 2.5 times faster and weeding 4 times faster than doing it by hand.

Before they wrote a line of code, they spent 2 full growing seasons volunteering on farms so they’d actually feel the problem they were solving. It shows. They’re sitting on $225,000 in letters of intent, ran 2 robots this season, and plan 20 across more than 15 farms next year. Farmers ask for the machines back when they go in for maintenance. That’s the clearest signal there is that you’ve built something people need.

What Ottawa hands you that a hub can’t

The claim isn’t that Ottawa is secretly cooler than every tech hub. It’s that different cities let you build in different ways, and the trade Ottawa offers is a steal when you’re early.

Start with room to fail. You barely need money to exist here, and that quietly changes what you’re willing to try. Living in San Francisco runs about 78% more than Ottawa once you add rent, with rent alone roughly 148% higher. A one-bedroom in the core is around $2,068 CAD in Ottawa versus $5,261 CAD in San Francisco. When your burn is that low, a project that might flop is cheap enough to just try.

Then there’s space. In a smaller scene you’re not one of ten thousand people clawing to get into the same rooms. You have room to build your own. Some of our members who travel back and forth describe Ottawa as the place they come home to when they actually need to sit down and write code for hours. San Francisco and Toronto are unbeatable for meeting people and making connections. But when the job is to shut the door and finish the thing you care about, sometimes there’s no place like home.

The slower pace cuts both ways, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Fewer events and less hype can mean less momentum. It can also mean you’re not pressured into chasing every trend, which frees you to build what you actually want instead of copying whatever’s loud this week. And when something genuinely isn’t available locally, the internet erases the distance, while we keep widening the network until fewer gaps are left to close. Strong roots in Ottawa, connections everywhere. Not a bubble.

What Builders Collective proves if it works

Strip it back and we’re testing a single idea: talent is everywhere, but exposure, opportunity, and the ability to find each other are not. Give ambitious people an easy place to meet, learn, and work on real things, and real companies start getting built where nobody was looking for them.

True for Ottawa. Just as true for every city written off for never making the list of “real” startup hubs. Inside 3 years, we want co-hacks to be the thing you guard on your calendar, a network people actually use to find a co-founder, a designer, or the one person who’s felt the exact problem they’re chasing. We’re deliberate that “builder” covers non-technical people too, because tech companies run on designers, marketers, operators, and strategists just as much as coders. The long game reaches past a better-connected Ottawa: a model that helps builders find each other wherever they happen to land, then helps the next city stand up its own version.

The real ambition is smaller and bigger than it sounds: a place where having a huge idea doesn’t feel ridiculous.

Come build with us

If you’re in Ottawa, this part is simple. We’ve already made the room, so come use it. Show up to a co-hack with whatever you’re working on (half-finished is exactly right), join Builders Collective, and once you ship something, add your site to the 613 Webring so the rest of us can find you.

If you’re a student somewhere else, convinced you have to leave to be taken seriously, my advice is simple. Don’t confuse where you eventually need to be with where you’re allowed to begin. Maybe you’ll move someday. Maybe the company you build ends up in San Francisco. But nothing about that requires you to wait. The playbook is short, and not one line of it needs a plane ticket.

You don’t need an ecosystem’s permission to start. Sometimes you build the ecosystem around you.

And you don’t need to be in San Francisco to start building something worth going to San Francisco for, either. You just need to take the first step.

Feyza Gulbent is a business student, an artist, and co-founder of Builders Collective Ottawa. Her interests span entrepreneurship, software, design, and creative work, and she loves finding ways to bring those worlds together. As co-founder of Builders Collective Ottawa, she helps create the kind of environment she wanted to see more of in Ottawa; one where ambitious people can find each other, share ideas, experiment with technology, and build meaningful things together.

The post They Told Us to Leave for San Francisco. We Built It in Ottawa Instead appeared first on BYVI.

Maor Shlomo built Base44 by himself, went from $0 to $1 million ARR in 3 weeks, grew it past 400,000 users, and sold it to Wix for $80 million about 6 months in, without raising a dollar. No co-founder, fewer than 10 people, sole shareholder. That’s the screenshot every founder saved this year, and the proof text for a genuinely huge shift: solo founders now make up 63% of the C corps formed through Stripe Atlas in Q2 2026, an all-time high.

That same Stripe post carries a second, quieter number. The typical solo founder, the one right in the middle, made 23% less in their first 6 months than the typical founder a year earlier.

The top 10% made 19% more. So the money is splitting: the average founder is sliding while the best pull away, and the gap between them is the widest it’s ever been.

In 2022, the top solo founders made 34 times as much as the typical one in their first 6 months. By 2025 they made 61 times as much. The boom is real. So is the fact that most of the people inside it are earning less than solo founders did a year ago.

The number everyone screenshotted hides a second number

Most people share the 63% as a win for solo founders. Flip it around and it reads as a warning. If solo founders are 63% of new companies and the typical one is earning less, that’s not more opportunity to go around. It’s more founders fighting over the same customers: more people building, the same number of buyers, smaller slices for everyone.

The good news and the warning are the same fact seen from two sides. When anyone can ship software in a weekend, “I built a product on my own” stops being impressive the moment 100,000 other people did it this quarter too. Building used to be rare enough to set you apart. Now it doesn’t.

When everyone is AI-native, AI-native stops being an edge

Stripe found top-decile solo founders were about twice as likely as median founders to build AI-native products, and the obvious takeaway is “go build AI-native.” Except the same analysis notes the AI-native advantage doesn’t come from a few breakout apps at the very top. It shows up across the whole distribution, from roughly the 50th to the 95th percentile. AI-native is table stakes now, not an edge.

Think about what that means for the weekend build. The tool that let you ship a working product in 2 days is the same tool a hundred thousand other founders used the same weekend.

The build was never going to be the moat. Marc Lou, who’s launched 35 startups solo, says: the next generation “will be no-code people focused on solving a problem, shipping crazy fast with AI, and cracking distribution on social media.” The moat moved. It sits in two places now, and the best founders grab both.

Speed wins the market

Base44 is a speed story before it’s anything else. Shlomo didn’t out-engineer the field. He got a rough product in front of people, found what worked, and captured a category in weeks: $0 to $1 million ARR in 3 weeks, 140,000 users in 7. By the time competitors had a serious answer, he’d sold the lead to Wix for $80 million.

When building is free, the first founder to reach real customers at scale gets a head start everyone else has to spend money to erase.

That head start is worth more in 2026 than it’s ever been, because it’s more perishable than ever. The clone that used to take a competitor 6 months now takes a weekend, so the window where being first actually means something is short.

You either use that window to grab share, sign customers, and become the default answer, or you lose it fine-tuning a product nobody’s tried yet

Shlomo used that head start to grab the market, then took the exit before the moat question even came due. Speed didn’t just win him the market. It won him the option to leave on top.

Brand keeps it

Speed opens the lead. It doesn’t hold it, and most founders aren’t exiting in 6 months. Something has to make customers stay when a cheaper copy shows up next Tuesday, and the most reliable something is a brand a competitor can’t fork.

Pieter Levels is that lesson stretched over a decade. He runs a portfolio that publicly reports around $3 million a year with zero employees, on a famously boring stack of PHP, jQuery, and SQLite.

What isn’t boring is the audience of roughly 600,000 he built over 10 years of shipping in public. When he launched Photo AI, it did a few thousand dollars in week one and grew to six figures in monthly revenue inside 18 months. The code was ordinary. The people who already trusted him were the whole engine, and they’re the reason a hundred identical AI photo apps never took his lunch.

Speed and brand aren’t rival strategies. They’re two halves of the same job. Speed wins you the market before the crowd arrives. Brand keeps you there once it does. Base44 leaned on speed and sold fast. Pieter Levels leaned on brand and keeps growing year after year. Most founders who want to still be here in 3 years will need both.

The playbook I’d run right now

The good news buried in Stripe’s data is that the winners aren’t winning on pure luck. They share habits you can copy today, and none of them require a bigger team.

Win it fast, then make it stick

The boom didn’t do the hard part for you, and that’s the assumption founders keep tripping over. When building gets cheap, your edge has to come from what’s still hard: getting there first, grabbing the market, and earning the trust that keeps it.

And that’s the good news. Effort still wins, and the founders willing to put it in have a bigger edge than ever.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Everyone Can Build Now: Speed Wins the Market and Brand Keeps It appeared first on BYVI.