I had to let go of a friend & co-founder

Building a startup is difficult, especially when done with friends. Naturally you build friendships with the people who join your startup journey, but almost always, eventually some founders have to be let go.

I had to let go of one of the non-tech co-founders. On paper he had excellent experience, knowledge, and on the surface seemed driven. But after months went by, his passion for the startup seemed to fade. A lot of plans made, but not much execution.. If you're building a startup, you need to make sure all the founders have a burning passion every day for what you're building.

If you want to be founder of a company, you have to be capable of navigating tough conversations gracefully. I think I handled it well.. awkward conversation, but ended things on good terms and I wish him all the best.

The new replacement founder has been killing it, already gotten 5 leads just 1 week in, and is ramping up the GTM strategy, taking action and moving fast.

Hitting that 100 customers before Q1 target is gunna be tough, but I have high hopes 🔥

When to build vs When to sell

You're told everywhere that DISTRIBUTION is more important than the product That you can grow to $1m ARR after spending 1 month building the product... This is mostly true, with one caveat. A constant feedback loop from customers is the lifeline of your startup. It's your best path to success. If your product is ridiculously buggy and incomplete, your feedback loop quality goes down the drain. Customers cba to even ATTEMPT to use your buggy product. Find a customer, get real genuine feedback from them, improve the product, continue.

This has been a challenge for me, my previous startup was a CRM style healthtech platform, building the product was fairly simple. FrameKit is a Photoshop/Figma style design tool, with 3d editing, juggling multiple coordinate systems, 3d rendering, local ai image gen, advanced pattern recognition... We planned on launching the first public version of FrameKit on 1st Jan 2026. I decided to delay the launch by another month.

Your product doesnt need to be perfect for MVP. But if you're starting to go after 100-1000 customers it needs to be GOOD.

FrameKit is finally at that stage now. We've spent the past month improving the most critical journeys in the app. Production infrastructure, DB Backups, Server Backups, Payment processing, Large file uploads, the list goes on. We've gotten amazing insight the past 6 months from our small feedback loop with 10 customers. Now it's time to move up a gear.

I need 100 customers in the 1st Quarter of 2026

Now the product's in a good enough MVP state, I'm spending all of February focusing on DISTRIBUTION It's time to increase the speed and size of the feedback loop In doing so, all sorts of unforeseen problems, objections, and use-cases will appear

I can't wait.

So nano banana pro is insane...

The release of nano banana pro definitely takes framekit up a notch, mainly because we can now natively support 4k resolution. We found another lead, a skincare brand called JoonByrd, and used them to trial out handheld product shots, I've attached them to this post, i think they turned out pretty good :)

We also set some audacious goals, we're aiming to launch a public version of product on Jan 1st 2026, and aiming to get 100 customers in Q1 and 1000 customers by the end of 2026. Lets see how that pans out...