Bootstrap Blues
Life after leverage ...
Eleven months ago I had a surgery that put me on bed rest for a couple weeks. During that time I began experimenting with Anthropic’s Claude AI. Just four weeks later I had a name for the pain that stole all of my forties and most of my fifties - mast cell activation syndrome. Having a disease that is both difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat is not how I wanted to spend my golden years, but it beats the heck out of having a mysterious malady and no clue what to do about it.
We started a repeatedly renamed company last September - my LinkedIn says HealthBuddy.ai, the domain for production is seenwhole.ai, and the incorporation paperwork says Minowa. Inc. I purchased, but we could not use Kanagami.com - we have a couple people with dyslexia, and I got thorough roasted for this name.
Here, at the start of June, a reality check was needed. We didn’t move quickly enough to ride the AI leverage wave. I think we still have a viable bootstrap operation, and this is echoed by my cofounders, our small set of beta testers, and most importantly by more than one vendor in the healthcare space. There’s a burning need for what we’re doing, and despite all the activity in this area, no one else seems to be taking precisely the same course we chose.
So this week we’re taking inventory - we do we have that is done? What can be made ready in time for the start of Q3? There are a lot of vibe coded apps in the world, we’ve always been playing an enterprise/FOSS game - making something for a user is one thing, making something that an entire health system could adopt is many things, and none of them are within reach unless the builders have enterprise experience.
So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, that’s half of it. The other half has been a move to a lovely house that I’m sitting during probate. I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve been struggling with MCAS symptoms that were formerly pretty well controlled. Perhaps due to the shift from San Francisco climate to the California Delta, perhaps the reduction in walking due to there being much less to do here, or maybe it’s a side effect of the slow roll of prescription solutions, all of which seem to take a solid month to show any results.
But whatever the case, the only way out is through … so I’ll keep trudging.
