A Thorough Accounting of Time, Part 2
Month two. The foundation is laid -- the company is incorporated, the landing page is live, the infrastructure is automated, and the application skeleton is functional. Now comes the less glamorous part: the work that doesn't produce visible output but moves the needle forward. Taxes, outreach, conversations with real people in the industry, and laying the groundwork for validation beyond my own network.
The tension I wrote about in Part 1 -- speed vs. depth, The Engineer's Urge vs. the operator's bias for action -- is still present, but the balance has shifted. January is less about building and more about connecting. The holidays slow things down, and instead of fighting it, I lean into the operational side: getting the business in order, reaching out to potential customers, and making sure the foundation I built in December is pointed in the right direction.
Overview
Two months in. Eight weeks since I started hands-on work. The first month was about ideation, validation, incorporation, and building the technical foundation. This month is about the less sexy but equally critical work: making the business real on paper, talking to people who actually do marine construction, and starting to validate whether anyone will pay for what I'm building.
Receipts
Week 5: 12/29 - 1/4
The week between Christmas and New Year's is a strange limbo. Most people are checked out, and I use the quiet to handle the administrative backlog that comes with incorporating a company. I start organizing the financial picture -- what I've spent, what the runway looks like, and what I need to have in order for tax season. It's not exciting, but it's the kind of thing that compounds if you ignore it.
I also start thinking about the next phase of customer validation. The Reddit threads and friend-of-friend conversations got me to this point, but I need to start talking to strangers. Specifically, I need to talk to the people who deal with USCG and USACE permitting day in and day out. I start making a list of contacts to reach out to in January.
Week 6: 1/5 - 1/11
Back to work after the holidays. I start reaching out to USCG contacts -- people who work directly in the regulatory and permitting world for marine construction. These are cold and warm outreach attempts, and the response rate is slow, but a few conversations start to materialize.
I also connect with collaborators to talk through the product direction. These aren't customer calls -- they're more like advisory conversations with people who understand the industry or the technology, helping me pressure-test assumptions. The feedback is encouraging but also humbling: the industry is even more fragmented than I thought, and the compliance workflows vary dramatically by region and project type.
Week 7: 1/12 - 1/18
More conversations, more learning. I get a warm introduction to a contact of a dockbuilder in the northeast -- exactly the kind of ICP I identified back in December. The dockbuilder's world is exactly what I imagined: paper-heavy, regulation-dense, and running on institutional knowledge rather than software. They're not hostile to technology, they just haven't seen anything that respects their workflow enough to be worth the switching cost.
This is the insight that keeps coming back: time-to-value has to be nearly instantaneous. If the first interaction with the product doesn't save them time within 30 seconds, they'll go back to their binder and their spreadsheet. This has to be the north star for the MVP.
Week 8: 1/19 - 1/25
Tax season is starting to demand attention. I spend time getting the business financials organized -- Stripe Atlas made incorporation easy, but the follow-on paperwork is its own beast. EIN, state filings, making sure the Mercury account is properly categorized. I'm grateful I kept things simple in December, because untangling a mess at this stage would be a real time sink.
In parallel, I continue working through customer conversations. The USCG contacts are starting to respond, and the picture is getting clearer: there's a real gap between the regulations as written and the tools people use to comply with them. Most of the workflow is manual, and the people who are good at it have built their expertise over decades. That's both the opportunity and the challenge -- I'm not just competing with other software, I'm competing with experience.
Week 9: 1/26 - 1/31
Wrapping up the month with a clearer picture of what needs to happen in February. The customer conversations have validated the core pain point, but I haven't built anything new in almost a month. The builder in me is getting restless. I start scoping out what the next phase of product work looks like -- specifically, what kind of AI-assisted tooling could actually help with the compliance workflows I've been hearing about.
The dockbuilder contact in the northeast is particularly interesting. Their process for USACE applications is exactly the kind of thing that could benefit from automation -- not full automation, but the kind of structured assistance that takes a 4-hour form-filling exercise and turns it into a 30-minute guided workflow. This is starting to feel like the first feature to build.
At the end of month two, I have a business, a foundation, and a growing list of people who have confirmed the pain exists. Now I need to build something that actually solves it.