Asking Permission to Work on My Own Company

SmartCue's product was built by an outsourced dev team. I founded the company in October 2020, I'm not technical and never have been, and for most of its life the arrangement was simple: I describe what I want, they build it, I stay out of the machine. It's a B2B SaaS product for interactive demos, it has real customers who embed it on their own marketing pages, and it's venture-funded, which is a polite way of saying somebody else's money is on the clock.

Somewhere in 2025 I started asking them to let me into our codebase.

Not to build features. I wanted to fix the small stuff myself using AI, which I'd been learning to use all day at my new job and was starting to suspect could close most of the distance between what I could describe and what I could actually do. I'd also stopped believing they were going to do it.

They never said no.

There was no confrontation and no moment where anybody refused me. There were emails. There were calls. There were WhatsApp messages. There was a lot of hemming and hawing, an excuse each time, and a reliable sense afterwards that nothing had been agreed to. A few weeks later I'd ask again.

I also asked them to use AI themselves. They said they were. I never saw it, not in the code, not in the velocity, not anywhere I could point at.

The smallest thing

The thing that finished it for me was an email.

Not a dramatic outage or a missed launch. A monthly email to our customers showing them what they'd built with us that month. Here's how many demos your team made, here's how many people watched them, here's what happened. Loom does it. Duolingo does it. Wispr Flow does it. It's not a research problem. The data was already in our database. What it needed was a template, something to pull the numbers into it, and a scheduled job to send it on the 1st.

I asked for months. It never shipped.

When a team can't do a hard thing, you learn something about the problem. When a team can't do the easy thing that four other companies have already shipped, you learn something about the team. That email was the smallest ask I had, and it was the one that made me think: we are never going to make it, because I do not have the A-team.

The rest of the job is on me. Sales, positioning, pricing, distribution, all of that is mine and I own the outcome. Product is the one input a non-technical founder cannot force. And if the product isn't what it needs to be, no amount of go-to-market fixes it. You can be excellent at every part of the job you control and still lose, because the part you can't control is the part that decides.

Seed money doesn't last forever. It was going out the door every month, and a meaningful share of it was going to a team I had stopped believing in. At some point I did the arithmetic that every solo founder eventually does at 1am: if most of what this business makes goes to people who aren't moving it forward, what exactly am I running here?

The day job as a test lab

In November 2024 I joined OneDigital to run their AI program, which meant that for the first time I was around these tools all day, at scale, with real deployments and real people using them.

I treated it as an education. My approach was to understand what the models could genuinely do by pointing them at as many different problems as I could find, and to keep pointing until I hit the wall. Some of those problems were at work. Others were mine: Mark IT's website, which I rebuilt and wrote about, a mobile app, a few others.

SmartCue became one of the test cases. Not a plan, a test case.

And the risk, once I actually looked at it, was smaller than the fear. I had a salary. If I took over my own product and destroyed it, the honest worst case was that I refund every customer what they'd paid me and shut it down. I ran that number. I could cover it. Yes, the shame and embarrassment would be unimaginable. But i would live. It wasn't courage, or conviction, or a leap of faith. Just simple arithmetic, on a business small enough that the downside was payable.

I think a lot of people reading the "I automated my whole company" posts assume the writer had some nerve or was a visionary. I didn't have nerve. I am not a visionary. I had a day job.

What was actually behind the door

I stopped asking for access at some point and just started working. I steamrolled them into giving me access to our GitHub repos (don't say that i should've had it from day one - i know. And I didn't. You live and you learn, right?)

On 8 April I was looking at a bug on our test environment, which is a thing I do every other weekend now and barely follow maybe a third of those bugs. Claude was doing the actual looking on my behalf. It said something about the list of containers running SmartCue in production, and told me one of the numbers shouldn't be possible.

There's a column called AGE. It said 8 days.

I did not know that column existed. I could not have told you what a container is in any useful sense, why 8 days is strange, or why anyone should care. What it meant, according to Claude, when I asked it to explain that bug to me like I was an 8 year old, was that every deploy for over a week had been silently failing, because our instructions still pointed at Microsoft Azure after we'd migrated to Google Cloud. New containers went looking for software at an address that no longer existed and died. One survivor from before the migration was holding up the entire company. One process death and SmartCue was gone, with no way to ship a fix, because shipping was the broken part.

Two days earlier I had seen a symptom of that myself and confidently blamed something else.

The same week, looking through the rest of it, we (Claude and me, not human devs) found that five parts of the system looked up a customer's settings without checking the settings belonged to that customer. The worst case was the call-to-action button on a demo. Any logged-in user could have changed where somebody else's button pointed, and our customers embed those demos on their own marketing pages. That one had been sitting there for years. So had a hole that let any signed-in user add themselves to any other company's account, live since January 2023.

I'm not putting these here to embarrass anyone (and I should be the one who should be most embarrassed tbh!). I'm putting them here because of the irony, which I still find hard to sit with. The thing I had spent months asking permission to bring into that codebase is the thing that found all of it in a matter of minutes.

What actually changed

In the first 26 days on my own I shipped 23 backend and 7 frontend changes to production, closed 25 bugs and 5 security findings, and deleted 16,340 lines of code in one go. That last one is my favourite, because I could never have known that 16,340 lines are dead. A machine could prove it and then remove it.

The monthly email exists now. It drafts a personalised update for every paying customer from their own usage data on the 1st of the month. It took barely an afternoon of me talking to Claude on my phone (WisprFlow + Claude FTW!).

But if you ask me what actually changed is that I became calm.

I can't give you the date. It came on gradually, and the closest thing I have to a record is the commit history: you can watch it arrive. 14 changes in April, then 71, then 104 in May. That curve isn't just productivity. It's a person slowly working out that he can keep the code alive, keep the customers happy, and keep the product running without depending on anybody who won't return his messages.

The weight I put down was heavier than I'd realised while I was carrying it. No more managing a team I'd lost confidence in. No more wondering, every month, whether the money going out was coming back as anything. No more asking permission. The costs now are hosting and a few small bills, and they're trivial against what comes in.

Here's the part I'm supposed to be embarrassed about (PS - I am not). SmartCue is not growing like a rocket. Albeit, usage among paying customers has gone up in each of the last four months, but I'm not going to dress that up as a growth story because I have 2 years worth of bodies in the graveyard. But, objectively, as a one-person operation, this is a genuinely good business. Venture-funded companies aren't supposed to say that out loud. But if I look at it honestly, without the story I was supposed to be telling about it, a product with real customers that runs on a couple of hours of my weekend is a fine thing to own.

That's also changed what I work on. I've stopped chasing new logos and narrowed it to two jobs: keep the customers I have, and build the things that make them want more from us. Growth from a known starting point, instead of doing things and hoping.

None of this is finished. There are 151 bugs and 63 security findings still open, 15 and 7 of them critical. Our test pipeline runs no automated tests at all, which means the only thing standing between a bad change and a customer is me deciding to go and look. That's a habit, not a system, and habits lapse.

For most of last year I was asking permission to work on my own company. I stopped asking in April 2026. The product is in better shape than it was when I was locked out of it, and my Whoop band says I've never slept better.

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