What i learned from Apparatus.ai

I’m squeezing in another post today because i’ve been thinking a lot about Apparatus.ai. i wrote last time about how we got acquired, which was wild for a scrappy startup i started in 2024. rn, as i’m messing with Nexora, i keep coming back to what apparatus taught me. figured i’d share some of that, since it’s shaping everything i’m doing now. first off, building something from nothing is hard but doable. apparatus was just me and a few friends, coding ai tools for small businesses—stuff like forecasting sales or optimizing ads. we didn’t have fancy offices, just laptops, remote meets, and way too much coffee. i learned you don’t need a big team or tons of cash to make an impact. we got our first users by being relentless, tweaking python scripts and ml models till things worked. that grind got us noticed, and eventually led to the acquisition. lesson? start small, but don’t think small. crazy how we got acquired before a general public launch (all we had were a bunch of enterprise clients that were paying us).another big one: failure’s your best teacher. i can’t count how many times our code crashed or investors said no. one time, i spent a whole night debugging a forecasting model that kept spitting out garbage—turned out i missed a data preprocessing step. felt like an idiot lol, but fixing it made the tool way better. same with pitches—early on, i bombed so many because i overcomplicated the tech. i learned to keep it simple and focus on what users actually care about. that’s something i’m carrying into Nexora—clarity over everything.working with a team taught me a ton too. i was CTO, so i had to balance coding with leading a few people, like our ui designer. it’s tough when you’re all learning on the fly. i figured out you gotta trust your team but also check in enough to catch problems early. we had a rough patch where miscommunication slowed us down, but once we got on the same page, we moved faster. i’m thinking about that as i plan Nexora—building something bigger means getting the right people and keeping them synced.lastly, i learned to bet on myself. starting apparatus as a uni student felt insane sometimes, especially during finals season like rn. but gosh every late night, every bug i squashed, it added up. the acquisition wasn’t huge, but it proved i could build something real. Nexora’s my next bet, and i’m pumped to take what i learned and go bigger—connecting startups with ai in a way that’s never been done.i’m still figuring out Nexora while dodging exam prep, so i’ll write more when i can. i just couldn't help but write one more for the day lol. — ciao, basab