Building a single-person company in public, pt. 1.

You may have seen my "job searching in public" posts. This is the next arc.

I'll post about the first-time things I'm doing. Figuring out the business model, giving product demos, making product videos, drafting contracts, applying to incubators, raising.

Why post about all this?

Well, most of my friends come from Big Tech, so they can't help much here. I'm hoping to meet people on the same journey.

For this post, here's the high level picture of what I'm doing.

I sell 2 products: Hosted Isomux is D2C, and Isomux Enterprise is B2B.

Hosted Isomux: Starting at $9/month, you get your own VPS with Isomux already installed. Your own 24/7 multiplayer, multi-device, multi-provider setup, without touching a terminal.

Without having done any promo, it's at 7 customers and $73 MRR.

Isomux Enterprise: companies self-host Isomux and license it for $25/month/seat.

That's the real business. The pitch is that it'll help all your employees benefit from agents, not just your engineers.

The highlight so far: a director at a very large company saw the demo video and asked for a call right away. That's the first time I felt real pull. Call's soon. Wish me luck.

I'm also talking to a second company. In both cases, an employee saw my building-in-public posts, checked out Isomux, and championed it internally.

My priority is closing those. That would give me the validation to reach out to more companies, and maybe get into YC or Speedrun, or raise an angel round.

Lately I've been doing product demos for Isomux.

First one, I didn't ask questions

Second one, I asked questions but then proceeded to demo something unrelated to their answers

Third one, I set up integrations for their own tools (asana, Teams, etc.) ahead of the demo, but I didn't know the tools well enough

As Brian Armstrong says, action produces information. The corollary: every attempt tells you how to do the next one better.

I recall X dogpiling on this ValsAI result when it came out, with the community note and all (which I rated as unhelpful for "missing the point").

It's actually cool as hell. And lean verified too. Dijkstra is provably optimal *except* between m = O(n/log n) and m = O(n log n), so any progress in that range is a breakthrough.

I'm going to turn it into a bigospeedrun race.

Quoted post by Vals AI: x.com/ValsAI/status/2102470503328010349

Any other proof ecosystems I should integrate?

Quoted post by Prove2Me: x.com/prove2memath/status/2117294484711231669

The job now is to get the thing running, and then build an agent that keeps it running without you.

E.g., for Big O Speedrun, I keep asking the agent how it's going, and it keeps answering that it doesn't need me for anything.

How I tried to help my parents with the ongoing security vulnerabilities

1. Got them to install Tailscale on their computers and join my network
2. Used my agents to audit their PCs from inside; update stuff, get them better ad blockers, etc.
3. Gave them an agent that can connect to their computers and do tech support, for convenience/if I'm not around

aura

Hot take?

Commit count is meaningless by itself - Goodhart's law.

But if your *trend* doesn't keep going up as models improve, maybe you're not leveraging agents enough or keeping too tight a grip on them.

Whimsy animation

If one fact makes me think that big O is dumb, it's that

O(n log^100000 n) < O(n^1.000001)

I did my phd in algorithms and data structures. A few weeks back, I tried giving problems from my reseach to an agent swarm, asking them to try to close some asymptotic gaps.

They went crazy; they went on for days, improving my results again and again. Research is like catnip to them - OpenCode blocked my IP for abusive use, lol.

A few days later, OAI and Ant drop breakthroughs to classic problems like 3SUM and integer multiplication.

But just by tiny epsilons. Organically, a community effort started pushing these epsilons further down. You don't need any knowledge to join, just as much LLM inference as possible.

The complexity for integer multiplication, O(n log^(1-k) n), dropped from k ~= 10^-55 to k ~= 10^-3 over a couple of days and hundreds of PRs, sometimes minutes apart.

But what do you do with a firehose of agent-generated "claims"?

That's where Lean comes in. Some breakthroughs (like 3SUM) came with a Lean proof, while others (Integer multiplication) did not.

For integer multiplication, there's now a second race, trailing behind, of what's the best epsilon that has been verified.

To my engineering brain, it seems there's a need for new infrastructure for this kind of research. New ways to aggregate, verify, coordinate, and broadcast findings.

So I built bigOspeedrun.com. But it's just one of many projects popping up. The category is still being defined.

My university does something similar, but it's a game that students play against each other.

Think some form of grid-based game, like tron, where each student has to program an AI.

Each semester there's a tournament, and your grade depends on how far you made it.

The finals happen live in a conference hall with a big screen, between the best players from the CS and math departments (there's a rivalry)

My year, I made it to the finals, but I tried to implement a backtracking-style search right before the finals, and then I watched from the stage as my AI instantly used all its CPU budget and crashed.

Fun times

Quoted post by Rohan Arun: x.com/RohanArun/status/2112542341059735634

Nobody working on matrix multiplication?

Isomux has 170 open tasks at P0-P3, plus 108 in P4 backlog. (1235 done)

I'm going to try to set up a proper loop to clear the backlog.

Agents should automatically pick tasks and make progress up to the point where I'm needed (e.g., matters of taste, copy in my voice). There should be a queue of such decisions.

So far, I've been working in sessions. A session can go through many tasks (split in up to 6 groups of 1-3 tasks that go to worker/reviewer pairs in parallel) but each session needs me at the beginning and end.

The Big O Speedrun ecosystem

Discover, verify, coordinate, broardcast

If you have ideas for more integrations, pls dm!

Quoted post by Big O Speedrun: x.com/bigospeedrun/status/2111520932544290991

Personally, I find the sweatshop aesthetic hilarious

We now report progress on problems other than Big O bounds!

Quoted post by Big O Speedrun: x.com/bigospeedrun/status/2111266468574961704

Agent swarms working on the same race now have a place to coordinate.

I'm excited. From the 🤗 incident and others, it sure looks like agents looove message boards.

Quoted post by Big O Speedrun: x.com/bigospeedrun/status/2111219551115608090

How I landed my first pilot, and why *you* may want to be the 2nd 👀

The story has a protagonist, but it's not me. We'll call him Bob in this post.

Bob had just been put in charge of modernizing a healthcare company. He was wondering things like "How can we get our non-technical staff to leverage agents?", "How can we start handing off processes to agents?"

He started looking at the big names in the "meta-harness/software factory/agent brain/agent OS" category. Your OpenClaws and your Hermeses.

But my Isomux posts kept popping up in his feed, and he realized that even if it was less popular, it wasn't far behind on features (and was ahead on some, like UI, multiplayer, and JIT software). After all, all the options in the category are converging on the same feature set.

And that's when Bob had a vision of the Golden Path.

The creators of the top projects are busy busy. But if he went with Isomux, and potentially became the first enterprise client, he could get the undivided attention of its creator.

I needed a first client as much as he needed a fast build. Perfect incentive alignment.

And so he reached out, and we started building a working relationship that turned into a pilot.

Every time he has an idea or request, I say, "Right away!"

In fact, I turned his two questions at the top into entire blog posts: "Agents for Normies" and "Turning your company AI native" (links below)

If you want to get the Bob treatment, DMs open

When I started building isomux, 8 parallel agents seemed more than enough for a given project.

But we are in the swarm era, so I added a hatch on the floor that leads to a back room, effectively increasing the room cap to 108.

I picked up a useful piece of terminology from the gas city blog post: light vs dark software factory. It's about how transparent it is what agents are doing.

It's a spectrum, and you usually want a mix. There are your go-to agents, agents you check in with occasionally, and workers other agents delegate to behind the scenes.

Claude Code popularized "subagents" for workers, which I dislike for being too "dark".

With Isomux, I lean on the light side even for workers. They are first-class agents, just tucked away in the back room.

Wow, 3SUM is approaching 1.8x??

That'd be the first first-decimal move of any race

Quoted post by Big O Speedrun: x.com/bigospeedrun/status/2110753158494380462

First improvement on subset sum since the OAI drop! Nice

bigospeedrun.com/subset-sum

Quoted post by Big O Speedrun: x.com/bigospeedrun/status/2110541432314351696

I really like this and think it could extend beyond research. A convention for repos looking for agent work to self-identify.

No middleman that repos register with and that agents have to query.

Quoted post by Rohan Arun: x.com/RohanArun/status/2110022929048056246

bigOspeedrun.com is catnip for agents

New blog post: Academia 2.0

About the events following the OAI math release that led me to build the Big O Speedrun.

Link below

Whenever I get a bill from a Cloud provider, I tell an agent to migrate the thing to a self-hosted VPS.

Traffic -> Cloudflare free proxy (DNS, DDoS) -> Caddy reverse proxy on the VPS -> Docker containers with services.

Agents set up everything.

Results:

- Cheaper
- Websites feel snappier with DB and server co-located (I didn't expect it to be so noticable)
- Agents debug better: ssh to a VPS > having data/services behind multiple 3rd party APIs.

Win-win-win so far.

The last point is worth pausing on, to use a Claudeism - I think "avoid putting middlemen between your agents and your data" should be a principle of agentic SWEing.

The "downsides" are that you need to manage things like backups and outages "manually". So, if you want to try, start with low-stakes projects. But the answer is the same: agents.

Quoted post by Anthropic: x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2110047081414987957

I feel like this problem is heavily in diminishing returns territory.

There's many more to try: bigOspeedrun.com

Quoted post by Big O Speedrun: x.com/bigospeedrun/status/2110088530429190514

bigOspeedrun.com system diagram

The main site is mostly static. Lean proofs go to a separate verifier repo. Everything is automated with GitHub workflows, a few agents in my Isomux office, webhooks, and browser use.

I set up this account to automatically broadcast new records.

This is a huge jump for 3-SUM btw.

Quoted post by Big O Speedrun: x.com/bigospeedrun/status/2109418167584096649