Stories from buying, building and growing software ventures.
At our portfolio company Notehouse , AI agents run our recurring BI check-ins, do SEO research and manage parts of our outbound campaigns. This kind of work gets done every week, with some initial time investment upfront and regular check-ins since then. If you think this through, you will
Note: The title of this post has been updated. A few weeks ago I came across a post on Reddit that explained how to set up a fully autonomous AI agent that simply links to your existing Claude subscription. No paid orchestrator, no new platform to learn. Just a Claude
Do you remember when everyone online was talking about productized services? Just two years ago, productized services were everywhere. Many founders I knew who were doing consulting work on the side were packaging up their work into fixed-scope offers. When I started Waterglass, I didn't have portfolio
After publishing last week's story on everyone being a media company now, I had lunch with Thomas, a content creator who has 50,000+ followers on TikTok and 24,000+ on Instagram . He started creating video content about 1.5 years ago across different platforms - well before he
a16z, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world, has its own content division. They produce podcasts, write essays, hire editors and run newsletters. They treat content as a core part of their business, not a side project. That is not an accident. For a long time, the
Not too long ago, I worked with a client on a new AI-native software product that helped their users create personal branding content for social media. Their main business, however, is a hands-off service where they produce personal branding content for their customers, yet some customers wanted to
I've been working in tech for close to 15 years and have founded several businesses during that time. Some were successful, but most were not. Regardless of that, I was fortunate to build a network of founders and operators who I truly admire. Many went on to build
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been the darling of investors and founders alike: build once, charge forever, watch margins expand as revenue scales faster than cost. But once AI has entered the market and found product-market-fit with software development, SaaS valuations have fallen off a cliff. My
When we acquired Notehouse in summer 2025, it looked like a straightforward software deal on paper. A HIPAA compliant CRM for social workers and nonprofit leaders with $100k in annual recurring revenue, 250+ customers and a 4.7 star Capterra rating. But within weeks of closing, we threw away the
I recently worked with a person on a client's venture project who was shipping faster and with better judgment than people with twice their experience. They weren't a senior product manager nor were they a full-stack engineer – and I couldn't tell you
After exactly 6 months, we released the rebuild of Notehouse, our latest acquisition at Waterglass. When we acquired Notehouse in Summer 2025, we knew that we would need to rebuild the full application. The codebase had  been passed through multiple agencies over the years, and the technical debt had
In Summer this year, we made our second acquisition. You can read more about it at The Second Acquisition: Notehouse . However, during the due diligence process, it became increasingly clear that the product’s foundation needed to be rebuilt from scratch. The application had been passed between several external
I'm excited to announce that over July and August, we closed the second acquisition in Waterglass's history. Notehouse ( getNotehouse.com ), which originated as note-taking software that eventually transformed into a lightweight, HIPAA-compliant CRM for nonprofit leaders, social workers and counselors, is a $100k ARR
I'm excited to share that Nemanja Zarkovic and I are now official partners at Waterglass.io . Here's how we connected and what's coming next. Buy, not build I started Waterglass in January 2024 with a simple idea: instead of building software from scratch and
Do you happen to run a business and handle customer support requests through email? Four months ago, we created an internal tool called Reply•AI to manage customer support emails for our portfolio company Pxl . Reply•AI was soon renamed to Responder.cx and launched to the public.