Stories & Field Notes
What we've learned building well.
Real stories from the trenches of early-stage company building — the decisions, the mistakes, and the hard-won learnings behind finding the market problems worth solving.
The sunk cost fallacy is real
We almost didn't pivot Strongroom because of what we'd already built. That's the sunk cost trap. But when building gets cheap and fast, a different danger appears: pivoting before you've earned the conviction to know the difference between a bad bet and the wrong rig.
Read the full story →Pick a smaller mountain
We thought we could build a full ERP for all of real estate management. We couldn't find product-market fit. A serendipitous pivot to HOA management changed everything — and the lesson still holds in the AI era.
Read the full story →Don't build a tech company without a builder
When we started Strongroom in 2004, nobody could build the thing. Two years stuck, no income. Does that lesson still hold in the vibe-coding era? Half of it evaporated — the other half matters more than ever.
Read the full story →The cost of building the wrong thing
AI dropped the cost of building a product to near zero. So why are more startups failing, not fewer? Because the expensive part was never the code — it was building something the market actually wanted.
Read the full story →Go be uncomfortable somewhere
The most important growth in building Strongroom didn't happen in a boardroom or a product sprint — it happened when we put ourselves in situations we weren't ready for. A lesson on why discomfort is a feature of the founder journey, not a bug.
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