I built an investment education audience on YouTube, grew it beyond 9,000 subscribers, and offered a private Telegram community at $30 a month. As AI became better at explaining concepts, I began questioning what I should continue to offer. That question now follows me into game development and engineering work for a merchant-agent platform.

From Learning to a Paid Community

I started by learning investment principles and using Python to explore them. An early tutorial on periodic investing captures that stage: a beginner trying to make an idea concrete through code.

I went on to publish YouTube videos. Viewers joined my Telegram group, where I shared investment perspectives and taught them to use programs to understand investment questions. I also offered a private group at $30/month. The YouTube channel still has more than 7,500 subscribers as of September 2026, after peaking above 9,000.

Running the community also gave me a firsthand view of how a business’s value can change. As ChatGPT and agents improved, I began reconsidering which parts of the service still deserved members’ time and money. Explanations were becoming easier to obtain; publishing more information wasn’t necessarily providing more help. I chose to reduce my activity while reassessing the offering. That experience left me with a question I now bring to every project: as technology changes what customers can do for themselves, what should the business become?

The Same Question in Game Development

I’m now developing an indie game and refining its core mechanics. Part of the attraction was a digital product that could reach another player without repeating the work of creating it. I also wanted to express my philosophy through a story.

As coding agents improve, I worry about a market flooded with easily generated games. That is a concern shaping my decisions, not a claim that generating a prototype is equivalent to making a compelling game.

It pushes me to ask: why would someone choose this experience, spend time with it, and come back? Easier production makes that question more pressing for me.

Taking Responsibility for Delivery

When software engineering agents began emerging, I encouraged a longtime friend to explore them for his business. He has since built an agent platform intended to help small marketplace businesses manage their operations.

My role is to guide technical direction and evaluate the work of external engineering teams. I review proposals, architecture, and code, and make technical acceptance decisions. He remains the CEO and gives final business approval.

This work brings the question of value down to specific decisions: whether a proposal is reasonable, whether an implementation matches the intended architecture, and whether a delivery meets the requirements. A convincing demonstration is only part of that assessment.

Principles I Build By

These are working convictions drawn from my projects, rather than rules I expect every business to follow.

Start with the customer and the need

Before deciding what to build, I want to understand who needs it, what they currently do, and what would make them choose another solution. My investment community taught me to revisit those questions as alternatives change.

Explore capabilities that agents make possible

I’m especially interested in products whose core service depends on agents: things that would be difficult to offer without them. I want people to experience the usefulness of AI through the help a product provides.

Make the philosophy part of the design

A business expresses beliefs about people through its product and its incentives. I want to examine those beliefs explicitly: what people should control, how a product earns their trust, and what kind of relationship it creates with them.

Keep human needs at the center

People remain the customers. I want automation to translate into useful support for them, and I want to understand where human interaction still matters. Commercial viability matters to me, alongside whether the product is worth having in people’s lives.

Question what will remain distinctive

I’m wary of assuming that something difficult to build today will stay difficult. For each project, I want to ask what would remain valuable if the underlying technology became widely available. I’m still working out the answers through the products themselves.

I’m interested in working with people who share these questions and are willing to test their answers by building. Get in touch.