"I didn’t delete the repo. I renamed it to MVP.
And somehow… that solved everything." 😅
There was a time...
There was a time when I had a job, a salary, and a plate of projects. And then, I got that vision. So I put everything on one card.
Yeah — sorry for making this personal. That’s not usually how I write, but you know what?
Back then, I didn’t even know I was committing to building an infrastructure product — one that would require inventing a new DSL and writing an entire runtime just to prove the idea was even viable.
My background in R&D helped. I knew how to get hard things into production. So I coded — mostly from 7 AM to midnight, day after day. Months passed. Everything that had once been “my life” started to feel like a distraction.
Plumbing Done, Now What?
Eventually, the grind shifted. I had the plumbing. The thing worked. It checked the boxes of my original vision.
It was time to make decisions. I started preparing for a company. Researched trends, went to summits, talked to competitors. I was in founder mode now.
And that’s when the real stress began.
I started comparing:
What am I doing better? What worse?
How do I meet investor expectations? What about grants?
Is what I’m building too complex? Or too simple?
Who reads my content and why?
Demo after demo, users asked for things like web search or LLM-based shopping recommendations. Every second request needed live web data to answer properly.
Sure, I could have just wrapped Bing and given them what they wanted… but it wasn’t aligned with my vision. And it likely would make me competing with the biggest players out there.
Meanwhile, other tasks started piling up — SEO, domain wiring, cloud credits, newsletter setups, status pages, discovering who could help and how. My once-focused vision became blurred by a thousand small operational demands.
Nothing snapped together.
The product was vague.
And for the first time, I almost hit “delete” on the repo.
The Rename That Changed Everything
But I didn’t delete it.
I renamed the repo to mvp/.
And that changed everything.
Funny, isn’t it? Why would a rename fix burnout?
Because the pressure wasn’t real. It was all in my head.
What was real? The code I had written.
A runtime. A DSL. A system to accelerate GenAI-based application development.
Something solid. Something I believe in.
What I Saw in Others
At summits, I saw other founders. Their setup looked totally different.
They were focused on finding pain points and automating them — on selling something people would pay for, not building something people might not understand.
I asked myself: what can I learn from them?
What can I learn from the grant reps who didn’t even understand what I was building?
And why can’t I just give users what they ask for?
The Curse of Knowledge
The answer: the curse of knowledge.
I knew what they were asking for wasn’t feasible — technically or practically.
I couldn’t just “add” features that would violate the entire architecture.
I couldn’t pretend this was a no-code wrapper around LLMs.
And that’s what made me realize something else:
I had entered a new phase.
The New Phase: Productization
I’m no longer proving an idea.
I’m not inventing the base layers anymore.
Now it’s about turning what I’ve built into something people can adopt.
Into something clear, usable, and opinionated.
Into a product.
I hope you learned something, thanks.
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