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.
Claude is genuinely impressive, but it doesn t remove the need to understand programming fundamentals. You still need to know how systems connect, where data lives, how state is managed, what environments are (dev vs staging vs production), how deployments work, and how things actually run (& fail) in the real world.
For developers, Claude is an incredible accelerator. For non-programmers, it can feel magical at first, but at some point, real engineering knowledge becomes unavoidable.
