At the beginning of 2026, I dropped out of Penn with my cofounders with a thesis in manufacturing: that AI would be the future of the industry. Starry-eyed and funded by Y-Combinator (YC), we set out to try and change a pillar of the global economy.
At the time, I had spent months tossing around ideas to Daichi (my roommate and eventual cofounder), with none of them really gaining any traction. We had briefly tried pursuing data annotation for AI CAD in August of 2025, but quickly concluded we weren’t the right founders to really tackle such a technically challenging problem. It didn’t take us long to move on, so Daichi and I continued problem validation by approaching and talking to as many friends and family as we could, eventually settling on a problem that my aunt’s trading company faced.
They were a small team relying on archaic spreadsheets to process millions in volume. And upon seeing these inefficiencies, we mocked up an agentic ERP and submitted it to YC, eager to set out and conquer the problem. The underlying thesis was theoretically sound: use AI to solve manual work, and profit! We were accepted, and I still remember barely being able to sleep the night after our interview and staring at the phone whilst waiting for a call. Looking back at it, I think we were tackling the right problem at the right time - the problem was just execution/fit.
We got in early and had two months before YC started, so during the early stages of problem validation, we flew to Asia to build the product out of my aunt’s office. It provided a faster feedback loop: they described the problem → we added features to solve it → repeat.
It was great in theory. However, we messed up in two ways:
-
We overbuilt every feature. As ambitious young founders, it was natural to want to build the best technology. Instead of talking to our customers more, we created solutions in collaboration with AI (please don’t do this), resulting in heavily overengineered code that was barely better than the incumbents. As a founder, the group that you should be talking to the most after your cofounders is your customers. The goal is to build the best product for their needs, and not the version of them you have in your minds.
-
We never bothered to truly understand the market. We were working with a trading company, yet targeting the manufacturing industry. We assumed that working with some manufacturing knowledge from my time in automotive automation was enough, and that things would just scale, fast. We never bothered to figure out if other people had the same problems, and wasted several months building a product with no real input. Our expectations didn’t meet reality, and the product wasn’t truly something that people needed.
Soon after, we moved back to SF for YC. While we kept working for a month after the batch started, we soon decided to pivot. We believed that the problem we were facing was that people didn’t want another ERP to migrate to. Thus, we decided to build AI agents that just did the work that existing employees did, instead of tools to help them do so. We created a new repo, and started from scratch.
I want to say that we learned from our mistakes, but we didn’t. Our insights came from trying to self-validate the direction we were heading in, and once again, we began building a product without the customer. We scheduled many meetings with employees who were high up in manufacturing, and combined with deep research on Claude, we were satisfied enough to proceed. In reality, we didn’t really talk with anyone who would actually be using our product on a daily basis. We weren’t out on the factory floor watching workers completing their tasks or navigating the ERP. Out of all the mistakes we made, this was probably the biggest one. If we wanted to succeed, we needed to build a feedback loop that helped evolve and compound the product. Unfortunately, we never did.
We did eventually get our first customer, but the months and pivots it took to get there had mentally tired out the team. More importantly, we had lost our passion and drive for the idea. After all, it wasn’t really something that we would have dedicated our lives to building out anyways. Thinking back, I'm always reminded of this Paul Graham quote:
“since your intuitions about other people's needs are usually a crap signal, and your own needs are an especially valuable one, you should usually listen to the second signal; you should make something you and your friends want.”
Manufacturing wasn’t an industry we had an exceptional amount of passion for, it was just one that looked ripe with opportunity.
We spent a few weeks after YC taking a break and exploring new ideas. Working unreasonable hours during the batch has taught us to pursue a more routine schedule, and now the team is back and building something that actually matters to us personally.
Super excited to officially launch it soon :)