Three startups, no code: Evidence vs encouragement

I'm a solo founder with three ventures running in parallel and no product code written for any of them. That's deliberate. This talk covers the rule I set — no code before conversations — why I keep wanting to break it, and what I've learned about the difference between validating demand and collecting encouragement. I'll show what I build instead of product: structured intake tools, architecture specs, and an evidence log that separates what I think from what I actually know. Including the venture I talked myself out of, and what that saved me.

Who is this talk for?

Solo founders and very small teams; product managers who own discovery; engineers with a side project they've already started coding; anyone who has confused an encouraging conversation with a validated one.

What will attendees take away?

• A concrete test for whether a customer conversation produced evidence or just enthusiasm, including the specific questions that separate the two and the ones that reliably generate false positives.

• What to build during discovery instead of product — artifacts that are genuinely useful to you day-to-day and also legible to a funder, and why an honest evidence log outperforms a polished pitch deck in a due-diligence conversation.

• A rule for handling new ideas without fragmenting: test each one as a vertical of something you already have before letting it become a separate venture.