Welcome to the tenth edition of keiki weekly. Yes, tenth. Yes, it’s been two months. No, I wasn’t on vacation.
The short version: I killed two products, had conversations with investors including Google Ventures, restructured the entire studio, and came out the other side with sharper focus and two new products that actually make sense.
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The long version is below.
Thanks for reading keiki weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
+ what happened
Let me be honest. The last two months were messy in the best possible way.
When you’re a solo founder running a venture studio, you don’t have the luxury of a board meeting to validate your direction. You have your gut, your data, and the occasional conversation that changes everything.
Here’s what changed:
I killed our UX copilot product. The tool we’d been building to help teams fix UX issues faster. It worked, but it was playing in a crowded copilot space with thin differentiation. The more I used it, the more I realized the real problem isn’t helping people fix UX issues. It’s helping them find and measure them continuously. Different problem, different product. So I killed it and started over.
I killed Houra AI. Our meeting scheduling product. I had serious conversations with major VCs, including Google Ventures. The feedback was consistent: the timing isn’t right, the market is brutally competitive, and the moat is thin. When multiple smart investors tell you the same thing, you listen. I unpaused the idea. Maybe it comes back someday. Not now.
I restructured the studio. Keiki is now leaner, faster, and more focused. Some decisions were hard. Some were overdue. The result: clarity.
Every venture studio goes through this. Especially when there’s a solo founder making the calls. Paths shift, products die, new ones emerge. That’s not failure. That’s the process.
+ what I learned
Two months of killing products, talking to investors, and rebuilding from scratch taught me a few things worth sharing:
“Copilot” is a crowded word. Every AI product calls itself a copilot now. The moment your positioning sounds like everyone else’s, you’ve already lost. I moved from “helping you fix” to “measuring and detecting for you.” Different verb, different category.
VCs don’t kill your idea. They sharpen it. The Google Ventures conversation didn’t discourage me. It forced me to ask harder questions about moat, timing, and market readiness. Every “no” made the next product better.
Subtraction is a feature. I went from 10 ideas in the pipeline to 2. The portfolio looked impressive on paper. In practice, it was a distraction factory. Two focused products with real development time beats ten concepts with fancy landing pages.
Solo founder ≠ alone. I still run blurple studio with an incredible team. The venture side is solo, but the thinking isn’t. Every product decision gets pressure-tested against real client projects and real user pain.
+ what’s next
Two new products. Both in stealth for one more week.
Product 1: UX, but intelligence this time.
I took everything I learned from our UX copilot and from 20+ projects at blurple studio, and I’m building a product experience intelligence platform. Not a copilot. Not an audit tool. A continuous intelligence system that measures, scores, and tells you exactly what’s wrong with your product’s experience, with the code to fix it.
Same problem space, completely different category. Landing page goes live next week.
Product 2: AI meets the pet industry.
This one might surprise you. I’ve been quietly researching the pet health and longevity space for months. There’s a massive gap between what pet owners need and what technology offers them. I’m building an AI-native product to close that gap.
Landing page also goes live next week.
Two products, two very different markets, same AI-native DNA.
+ studio updates
blurple studio is running strong. Multiple active projects across mobility, energy, and fintech. The team is solid. We recently completed a full repositioning (v5.5) as an AI-Native Product Studio, sharpened our service lines, and updated everything from pricing to proposals. The studio side funds the venture side. That hasn’t changed.
keiki studio is now fully focused on two products instead of a scattered portfolio. Real development hours, real progress, real deadlines. Not theoretical roadmaps.
+ the return of this newsletter
keiki weekly is back. Every Monday.
The difference from before: more signal, less noise. Two focused products instead of five scattered ideas. Real progress updates instead of vision documents.
If you’ve been here since issue #1, thank you for sticking around through the silence. If you’re new, welcome to the build.
I’m curious: what would you rather see in these updates? More technical build details? More business/strategy thinking? More honest founder reflections? Hit reply, I read everything.
See you next Monday with two landing pages and a lot more to talk about.
Best!
Thanks for reading keiki weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.