Why we are building VentureFactory

Someone asked me this recently and I gave a tidy answer that I did not entirely believe. So here is the longer and more honest version.

There are three of us. Between us we have over thirty years of building companies, across three nations. One is an English serial entrepreneur. One is a Swedish product and technology builder, our CTO, who built one of Sweden's largest systems integrators, which was acquired by Cambridge Technology Partners, then went on to build one of the first corporate portal vendors and one of the earliest cloud companies, before most people had a working definition of cloud computing. The third built the platform you are reading about and runs our AI. Before this he built one of the first smartphone operating systems, back when nobody was certain smartphones were going to be a category at all, and it was later sold to Fujitsu. Earlier still he created one of the first cryptocurrencies, an early attempt at a genuinely web native currency, years before any of that became a mainstream conversation.

I mention all of that for one reason, and it is not credentials. It is because building this company was still hard. Genuinely, embarrassingly hard. We made decisions that were fine in isolation and wrong in sequence. We lost weeks to questions that had known answers. We rebuilt things we should have validated first. And at some point one of us said out loud the thing that became the company: if it is this hard for us, what is it like for someone doing it the first time?

The thing we could not stop thinking about

Y Combinator accepts around two percent of applicants. Set aside whether that number is exactly right this cycle. The shape of it is the point. A very small group of founders gets access to a structured system, a framework for what to decide next, and a room full of people who have already made the mistake you are about to make. Everyone else makes hundreds of business critical decisions with none of that.

The uncomfortable part is that the knowledge is not secret. It genuinely is not. Almost everything a good accelerator teaches you exists in public, scattered across a thousand blog posts and books and podcast episodes. The problem was never that the knowledge did not exist. The problem was always access, sequencing and context. Knowing which piece of advice applies to you, at your stage, given what you already decided last month.

That is the gap we kept circling. And the reason we eventually built something is that large language models changed what was possible about it. Not because AI writes decent copy, which is the least interesting thing about it. Because a system can now hold your context, apply a structure to it, and tell you what to do next in your specific situation rather than in general.

What we actually built

VentureFactory is a venture building platform with a seven stage framework called Innov@te sitting underneath it, running from first idea through to exit. Alongside it you get AI co-founder agents covering strategy, product, growth, finance, legal and fundraising.

The part we care most about, and the part that took longest, is that the agents share context. Your finance agent knows what your product roadmap says. Your fundraising agent knows what you recorded three weeks ago. Everything the platform produces lands in your own data room, tagged to the stage it came from, so you are accumulating a record of the company rather than a folder of disconnected AI output.

That design choice came directly from our own frustration. We were all using AI heavily and all quietly doing the same unpaid job: carrying context between tools. Re explaining the business to a fresh chat window. Being the integration layer. The individual tools were not the problem. The missing layer between them was.

Where we actually are

We only launched in the spring, so this is early and I am not going to pretend otherwise. We are currently adding around one and a half customers a day. That is a real number and it is also a small one. I am putting it here rather than talking about momentum, because Indie Hackers punishes vagueness far more than it punishes being early, and because a rate is more honest than a total when you have only been live a few months.

What I take seriously is not the number itself but what sits underneath it. Most people who register actually go on to start building something rather than looking around and leaving. That is the only early signal I trust, and it tells us the problem is real even when the revenue is not yet meaningful.

Why we keep going

Because the thing we suspected turned out to be true. The founders using this are not short of intelligence or drive. They are short of structure. They know roughly what to do and have no reliable way to know what to do next, in what order, given everything else that is already true about their company.

We are also, unavoidably, our own test case. We are three people building a platform that claims a small team can operate like a much larger one. If that claim is false, we will be the first to find out, and publicly. That is uncomfortable and it is also the most useful accountability structure we have ever had.

If you are building something and any of this sounds familiar, you can create a free account at letts.group and tell me where it falls short. Critical feedback is more useful to us than encouragement right now.