entrepreneurship instead of college. a year later: private investor, team of 4, building @plumbhomes- ai native home servides company to cut cost of work by 30%
minneapolis/st pete
Joined November 2021
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2026 has been the year I actually started to “do the thing”
> skipped college to build businesses
> got an investor
> reached $10k MRR within 4 months
> performed at the Sydney opera house
> applying to yc with new biz idea
> had lunch with 30 business owners
> saw New Zealand and Australia
still much to do and a long way to go, but good to look back every now and then :)
The more creative you can get with guerrilla marketing, the better you shall do
X is definitely getting saturated
GTM is about finding alpha, and eventually that alpha disappears
Launch videos still work, but it’s now 3x harder and more expensive to go viral.
High value posts still work, but are not necessarily repeatable. For example, I can’t just manufacture 1M views for Context a day.
Field marketing still works, but now you need to be much more creative to fill rooms.
I’m seeing founders find success with UGC, Meta ads, Rednote, guerrilla marketing, podcasts, all kinds of stuff.
But every GTM operator needs to be on their toes: if poker nights/dinners don’t work as well as they used to, what’s next?
I’m a 19 year old founder, and am at a major inflection point in my life. My agency is slowing down, I now have a decision to make:
Should I:
> go all in on a high r/r startup idea, raise money, and risk being broke by 24
> continue to scale my agency, slight pivot to AI, more boring but could be making good money a year from now
> move to sf, get a job at a startup, and have the comfort of a salary?
If you look at non technical founders I bet the majority of AI usage goes towards marketing, and it is the only thing that still can’t be automated and needs a creative “head of content” to lead it
There can only ever be so much attention to be captured
Karu retweeted
Today’s reminder that running a company is now voice notes and inference
running a company nowadays feels kinda dystopian
my team is 50+ people in 12 countries, but i talk to my agents more than my human teammates
- voice note to grokbot
- mattpocock/skills /grill-me so the agent interrogates the idea before anything gets built
- spec drops into linear through the linear mcp
- exa + firecrawl agent reads every competitor site, pricing page and changelog
- ideabrowser.com to find ideas and trends
- apify pulls g2, reddit and app store reviews
- prompt: "find the 10 complaints that show up most and quote the users"
- context7 so the agent reads the latest docs before it touches any api
the design
- claude code + paper mcp
- 4 versions of every screen before a single line of code
- pick pieces from 2, it merges them. diverge then converge
- frontend-design skill from anthropic/skills + our own design system skill
- cleanshot screenshots of any ui i like go straight in with "make it feel like this"
the build
- pingdotgg/t3code as the control surface for every agent, from my phone too
- stablyai/orca runs a fleet of agents in parallel, each in its own git worktree
- graphify maps the whole codebase into a knowledge graph so agents navigate instead of guess
- headroom compresses tool outputs before they hit the model, so tokens go 20-95% further
- lsp plugins so the agent sees types and errors like an ide does
- security guidance hook flags risky edits before they land
- supabase mcp for the database, stripe for billing
- github mcp opens the pr, vercel spins up a preview
- loops run overnight, i check what shipped over coffee
the user testing
- lightpanda as the headless browser, way lighter than chromium so you can run hundreds at once
- agents click every flow on the preview like a first-time user
- one persona is impatient, one is confused, one is on a phone
- playwright + chrome devtools mcp for regression tests
the bugs
- sentry mcp catches the error
- agent reads the stack trace and opens a fix pr in under 10 minutes
- human just approves
the data
- posthog mcp cron at 7am on yesterday's funnel
- any step that drops more than 10%, the agent watches 20 session replays and tells me why
- stripe mcp pulls every cancellation reason into one doc every monday
the agents' tools
- orgo so every agent gets its own computer
- agentmail so every agent gets its own inbox
- agentphone so i can call them from the car
- composio connect-apps for every other connector
- akitaonrails/ai-memory, a git-backed markdown wiki so they remember what we decided last week
the skills
- wshobson/agents so skills work across claude code, codex and opencode
- my writing voice
- our design system
- how we write specs
- skill creator so the agents write new skills themselves
some helpful tricks
- one agent per platform. the x agent never touches email
- cheap model for triage, opus for anything that ships
- every output gets scored 1-10 by an llm judge. under 8 goes back
- every agent writes a 5-line log at night so i can read the whole company in 2 minutes
- every agent mistake becomes a new skill, so it only happens once
the team
- humans get version 5, not my voice note which they are happy about lol
- their job is creative feedback, relationships and telling the agents what they got wrong
a human pm reviews the funnel once a week. this reviews it every morning
running a company is now voice notes and inference
As a 19 year old business owner who skipped college, the past year has been by far the greatest learning experience of my life.
So, one of the questions is how can I retain all the learnings and information I take in on a weekly basis?
This is my solution.
I made 737 cold calls in October for my digital marketing company, here are the final numbers:
> 351 of them answered the phone
> 291 rejected me
> 42 people asked for more info via email
> 3 booked calls
Main learning is that the decision makers you reach when dialing are often too small for a $$$$ monthly retainer. All the big companies have receptionists that can't help at all. May experiment with paid ads to try to reach those who actually have decision making authority at larger companies.
A big home equipment replacement costs about $5,700 to actually do.
$3,500 equipment
$1,200 sub-crew labor
~$1,000 of legit add-ons
At a private equity-backed home services company, equipment and labor come to far less half of what the homeowner ends up paying. The rest is overhead.
There's an opportunity to build something to change this. Someone is going to do it, the window is now.
I’ve now had over 60 lunches with business owners this year as a 19 y/o trying to make it without college.
The single greatest value I get out of them is always access to more people, not knowledge or advice.
Point in how knowledge is becoming more commoditized as a result of AI.
We’re to the point where I’m tempted to intentionally make typos in a deck to prove to investors it wasn’t one shotted with Claude
UGC gets a lot of hate but I talked to someone who has scaled to 200k ARR with an $0.80 CAC from UGC.
Eighty United States cents to acquire a customer.
Ridiculous.
I played violin for a venture lab, and now I'm pitching them...
This summer I played at the Sydney Opera House. Last week I played a borrowed violin in a room full of founders, and it got me a pitch.
I was at a 16 hour worksesh with other local tech founders in Minneapolis. We began the day with intros and hobbies, and violin came up as my #1.
There just so happened to be a violin there, and the partners requested a short performance. I didn't want to at first, but I ended up playing for them, and that moment granted me an opportunity to pitch that venture lab on my new startup.
So much of business comes down to simply being skilled at building relationships. Whether you're learning new skills, getting clients, or raising money, it really comes down to who you know.
That's why making yourself memorable and getting people to like you is so crucial. No one would have remembered my intro, but they remember the violin.
Lesson is that if you play an instrument, have it handy next time you're in front of a VC, and you'll be set!
