I signed off on Alpha V1 and immediately wrote that it was not quite there yet.
Both things were true.
Caroline and I had done a final walkthrough of Loop. The product was finally coming to life. After months of interviews, prototypes, pitch meetings, and explaining what we wanted to build, there was now an app on a phone that did some of it.
There was also a cleanup list.
We needed the updated app icon. Onboarding had to say “coming soon” for data sources we had not implemented. The scheduled follow-up design needed to become a plain text input. A capital letter in a username or LinkedIn URL could throw an error, so the app needed to accept what somebody typed and lowercase it for them.
These were not exciting features. They were the difference between a person understanding the product and getting annoyed before they reached it.
The repository history from that afternoon is almost comically literal: cosmetic changes, an iOS change so the app icon would update, and a merge. The work matched the email.
I thanked the development team and signed off on the phase. Then I started writing the next scope.
We had expected to put V1 in front of a few users. It was not ready for that. Some basic functions we assumed would be there were missing, including removing somebody from a group or adding somebody to one. The assistant also needed to become much more useful with the data we had.
The mistake was partly ours. I had a clearer sense of how specific the requirements needed to be. We could not rely on a shared idea of “done” and then discover at the walkthrough that we meant different things. For V2, I wanted designs, tighter specifications, more QA from our side, and less back-and-forth.
This was a week after the term sheet and the strange good week around it. We had momentum. We also had a product gap and a short clock.
So I went recruiting in the place I knew people.
My email to North Brooklyn Runners started with a warning: “Off Topic - Job.” The next line was more direct: “React Native Engineers needed for my startup!”
I had met a few engineers at the new-member run that Monday. That was enough for me to shamelessly ask the whole club whether anybody wanted side work with the possibility of a longer engagement.
The day before I sent the note, I had logged 17.1 miles. This was not a contact list I happened to join. It was a community I was actually spending time in.
I listed the stack: React Native and Expo, NestJS, AWS, and some LLM fun. I promised a flexible office in DUMBO, something genuinely early, and a silly-fast hiring process if the fit was right.
I also told them Caroline and I were both a lot of fun to work with. There are claims that require evidence and claims you just put in the recruiting email.
The ask worked its way through the community. Within two days, I had an introduction to an engineer and had added him to the mobile repository. Another person from NBR offered more introductions. I told her the next ten to fourteen days were critical and that we were trying to pull together the best team we could on short notice.
This is how the professional and personal parts of my life usually connect. I do not have a clean work network and a separate running network. I have people I know from companies, races, rides, old jobs, neighborhoods, and friends. Sometimes the person beside you on a new-member run knows the engineer you need two weeks later.
Alpha V1 was signed off.
Alpha V2 was already open.
The bike was against a monument. The recruiting email was in the running-club inbox. The product was coming to life.
It was not quite there yet.