We've learned that building in public means sharing everything – the wins, the struggles, and apparently, the times when Matt gets locked out of his own house.
This weekend was supposed to be a focused sprint on Haystax, our AI-powered product discovery tool. Instead, it became something even better: a reminder of why we're building this in the first place.
When Life Gives You Lockouts, Make Product Demos
Matt's weekend didn't go as planned. After getting locked out of his house (classic), he found himself with less coding time than expected. But here's the thing about setbacks – they often lead to the most valuable insights.
Instead of heads-down development, Matt ended up showing infinitemoney to friends. And something magical happened: we watched them experience that exact moment we're trying to capture with our AI systems. The joy of taking a messy, half-formed idea and seeing it transform into something real.
We launched several of their ideas on the spot. Seeing their faces light up as we moved from "wouldn't it be cool if..." to actual working products – that's the feeling we want to bottle up and scale with our autonomous systems.
Going Viral (And Why Haystax Matters)
Speaking of wins, Matt had his first viral LinkedIn post about Haystax this week! The response has been incredible, and it's got us thinking – could this be our YC moment?
For those just tuning in, Haystax is our attempt at building "Cursor for product managers" – an AI system that can discover market opportunities and validate them at scale. Think of it as having a research team that never sleeps, constantly finding and testing new product ideas.
The viral post validated something we've been feeling: there's real hunger for tools that can bridge the gap between having an idea and knowing if it's worth pursuing.
The Beautiful Struggle of Building Hard Things
But let's be honest – Haystax is hard. Like, really hard.
We've had to rebuild major portions of it multiple times. We still can't nail one-shot product generation for complex ideas (turns out, nuance is tricky for AI – who knew?). The feedback loop for fixing issues feels like trying to debug a system that's constantly evolving.
Every time we think we've cracked it, we discover another edge case, another layer of complexity we hadn't considered. As we learned in our early days, breaking your own system is part of the process.
Some days it feels like we're building a plane while flying it, in a storm, with tools we're also inventing as we go.
But here's what keeps us going: we know we'll figure it out. Every challenge is teaching us something new about how to build truly autonomous product development systems.
What's Next: The Version We're Proud Of
We're close. Really close.
The version of Haystax we're about to release isn't perfect, but it's the first one we're genuinely proud to put in front of people. It captures that spark we saw in Matt's friends this weekend – the ability to take rough ideas and systematically explore their potential.
We've learned that building fast means knowing when to slow down first. This weekend's "setback" reminded us that the best product insights often come from the most unexpected places.
Sometimes getting locked out of your house leads to unlocking something much bigger.