Max Musing

After four long years of grinding, building, fundraising, and hiring, we decided to pivot. I wanted to write down my thought process and timeline because I wish I d seen more honest pivot stories when we were stuck. Not just we pivoted and everything was instantly great but the real version where we kept trying to make the original idea work for way too long because we already put so much into it.

I went through YC S20 (the first COVID batch) as a solo founder working on @Basedash. After YC, I did what you re supposed to do. I talked to users. I built product. I did founder-led sales. I hired a great team. It felt like progress because I was constantly busy and the product kept getting better.

The funny thing about building an AI product right now is that the hard part keeps changing.

A couple years ago, I was obsessed with offline evals. They felt clean. You write a test, you run it every time you change something, and you get a number you can trust. If the number goes up, you ship. If it goes down, you fix it. It s the kind of engineering loop that makes you feel like you re in control.

We ve been growing really fast (30%+ MoM ARR) at @Basedash since launching last year. Most of that growth has been the result of hard work, but we ve also had a secret weapon: an AI agent that acts as both a data analyst and a PM, working 24/7 to optimize our product s activation and conversion rates.

For decades, companies have been making product decisions based on intuition and manual data analysis. We wanted to see what would happen if AI could take the wheel completely.