The silence was the worst part.
No WhatsApp messages at midnight. No links to articles with “thoughts?” attached. No one to argue with about whether we were solving the right problem. Dan was gone, and the space he left behind wasn’t empty. It was loud with all the things that weren’t there anymore.
When everything fell apart, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I opened my laptop and started building.
I called it Lumos AI. A browser extension that gave you real-time feedback during customer discovery conversations. It would flag when you were pitching instead of listening, when you were leading the witness, when you were fishing for validation instead of asking honest questions. Everything The Mom Test warns about. The exact skill Dan and I had been terrible at.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was building a tool to fix the thing that helped break us.
I started small. A minimal MVP. The extension sat in your browser, listened to your calls, and nudged you when you slipped into bad habits. It was rough, but it worked.
This is the moment where a founder is supposed to stop building and start selling. Show it to people. Get feedback. Find out if anyone actually needs this.
I didn’t.
Instead, I kept building. The real-time feedback became recording too, so you could review conversations afterward. Then I built a dashboard. Then more features. Then I explored making the whole thing generic, not just customer discovery but any kind of real-time coaching. Sales calls. Interviews. Negotiations.
The product kept growing. My contact list stayed at zero.
Every feature I added was one more day I didn’t have to show it to anyone. One more reason to say “it’s not ready yet.” But it was ready. I just wasn’t.
A mentor I trust told me to start selling. He was right, and I knew he was right.
So I did. Or at least, I did things that looked like selling from the outside.
I built a landing page. Bought a proper email address for the domain, lumos-ai.co. Ran ads on X. Posted in indie WhatsApp groups and founder communities. After weeks of working up the nerve, I even posted on LinkedIn. Started trying to build in public on X, sharing progress updates and screenshots.
Every one of those things felt hard. Every one of those things felt like progress.
None of them were.
They were all broadcast. I was throwing messages into the void and waiting. If nobody responded, it didn’t feel like rejection. It felt like the algorithm. I could blame the platform, the timing, the copy. I never had to sit across from someone and watch them decide that what I built wasn’t good enough.
That was the real work. Putting the product in front of an actual product manager, an actual founder, someone who might use it. Letting them try it while I sat there in silence. That was what I needed to do.
But after a year of hearing polite versions of “no” from operations teams, and then hearing it from my own co-founder, I couldn’t stomach one more person telling me it wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t selling. I was performing.
Around this time, Avi needed help. The same Avi whose startup energy at the Google Campus had made me jealous enough to start this whole journey. His company was growing and they needed someone to build out a few integrations.
I said yes immediately.
It felt good to be around startup energy again. To write code that shipped and mattered to someone. To sit in a room where things were actually happening. For a few weeks, I felt productive. Useful.
But I knew what I was doing. Building someone else’s integrations is safe. Nobody rejects you when you’re the hired hands. Nobody asks you to sell it.
Eventually I told myself I needed to get back to Lumos. I didn’t have a clean exit. I just slowly stopped answering messages. One of those situations where you disappear and hope the other person understands.
The whole Lumos saga lasted about six months.
Then it hit.
Not all at once. In waves. A day on the couch doing nothing. Then a burst of manic energy, rewriting code, rethinking the whole product from scratch. Then three days of nothing again.
The bursts got shorter. The nothing got longer.
I stopped pretending this was a strategic pause. I was burnt out. Properly, fully burnt out. The kind where getting dressed feels like a project. Where you open your laptop, stare at the screen, and close it again.
I was depressed. I don’t know if I would have called it that at the time. But looking back, the heaviness, the flatness, the complete inability to care about anything. That’s what it was.
I’d spent six months avoiding rejection. It turns out avoidance is its own kind of rejection. You just do it to yourself.
I called the same mentor. He didn’t give me a plan. He didn’t tell me what to build next or which market to chase. He told me it was okay to stop. To not have a next move. To just exist for a while.
That permission was more valuable than any advice about products or markets.
So I stopped. For a few weeks, I did nothing on purpose instead of nothing out of exhaustion. It sounds like the same thing, but it isn’t.
Slowly, something shifted. Not inspiration. Just clarity. I started thinking about what was realistic. Maybe it was time to find work. Maybe it was time to find a different partner. Not a defeat. Just an honest look at where I was.
The World Stars salsa conference had been on my calendar for months. It happened to fall at exactly the right time. I flew out. A week of music, movement, and people who had never heard the phrase “product-market fit.” It helped.
I came back feeling like a person again. Not healed, but functional. Not inspired, but open. The kind of open where you can look at your phone without dread.
I opened LinkedIn and saw a post from a VC partner I deeply respected. A startup in their portfolio was looking for a third co-founder. The role, the space, the team. Everything about it felt like it was written for someone like me.
For the first time in months, I felt something other than tired. Not excitement. I was too bruised for excitement. But curiosity. The faintest edge of it. Like a door appearing in a wall I thought was solid.
What was behind it is a story for next time.