I've been building for months without a single customer demo.
Just terminal curls. Testing each service individually. Making sure the architecture holds.
Every startup book says I'm doing this wrong. Ship fast. Get customers. Iterate based on feedback. Don't build for scale until you have traction.
I'm doing the opposite. And it keeps me up at night.
The Decision You Can't Undo
When you start building, you make a choice.
Point Solution: Solve one specific problem really well. Get to market fast. Hardcode what you need to. Refactor later when you have revenue.
Platform: Build horizontal infrastructure. Every feature works for every customer. No hardcoded anything. Take forever to ship.
The MVP for these two approaches looks completely different. Point solution MVP: 3 months, 10K lines of code, one perfect use case. Platform MVP: months longer, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, works for everyone but perfect for no one yet.
I chose platform. And I question that decision daily.
The Reality of Building Horizontal
I'm not building a customer service tool for e-commerce. I'm building an operating system for synthetic labor that works for customer service, medical billing, data analysis, finance operations, manufacturing, and 47 other use cases I haven't thought of yet.
If I hardcode for e-commerce, I'm fucked for medical billing. Every decision has to be horizontal or it becomes technical debt.
What this actually looks like: 16 services that talk to each other, a governance engine that works for any industry, a memory system that handles any data type, an action layer that abstracts 2,800+ integrations, a workflow engine that executes anything.
Hundreds of thousands of lines of code. And I test it with curl commands in the terminal. No UI. No sales pitch. Just infrastructure that will work for everyone once it's done.
Why Platform Can't Be Refactored Later
When you hardcode customer-specific logic, it spreads like cancer. Build for e-commerce first and you hardcode order status checks, refund workflows, and customer data structures. Now try adding medical billing — insurance verification, HIPAA compliance, CPT codes. You can't just "add" this. You have to rip out the hardcoded assumptions and rebuild the foundation. That's not refactoring. That's rewriting.
What Keeps Me Up At Night
Am I too slow? Competitors are shipping customer service AI tools every week. Have I lost my edge? I've built and sold companies before. I know how to ship fast and iterate. Why am I violating every principle I know works?
Why I Keep Going Anyway
Because I've seen what happens when you build vertical first. At my last company, we built for one use case, got it working, got customers. Then tried to expand to adjacent markets. The architecture was too specific. The assumptions were baked in too deep. We stayed narrow, made money, sold the company. But I always wondered: what if we'd built it right from the start?
The Bet I'm Making
AI employees are infrastructure, not features — like operating systems, databases, cloud platforms. Infrastructure has to be horizontal or it's useless. The technical debt from vertical-first is unfixable. You can't bolt horizontal onto vertical. You have to rebuild from the foundation.
Point solution or platform. Whatever you choose on day one becomes either your moat — if you chose right — or your technical debt — if you chose wrong.
I chose platform. Ask me in two years if I was right.
For now, I'm just running curl commands and making sure the foundation holds. Because once you ship, the architecture is locked. And I'd rather ship slow with the right foundation than ship fast with technical debt I can't escape.
Even if every startup book says I'm doing this wrong.