Founder-Market Fit

I’ve been taking the YC Startup School curriculum at a slow pace and jotting down some thoughts.

1. Consumer Ideas are often the hardest to realize. Founders frequently come up with these, but they’re risky because anyone can come up with them.

2. Tarpit Ideas are like magnets for entrepreneurs. Think “social media for pets“ or other concepts that seem fun and obvious but have no successful track record. They wear the disguise of “great ideas“ but are dangerous—they make you waste time on something unlikely to work.

3. Founder-Market Fit is crucial. If you’ve been working in a construction and know the ins and outs of the industry, you have a natural edge there.

4. Competition, counterintuitively, is actually healthy sign. Your job becomes finding the edge that gives you an advantage, and that’s often where solid opportunities lie.

What does it mean for Sprited? Right off the bet, the ideas we’re iterating on are consumer facing. They fall into the same rough space as Minecraft, MapleStory, and Roblox—except with an AI-first approach. As I continue shaping the company’s vision, I need to be mindful of leaning too far into entertainment. I want to guid it towards a space more like OpenAI Gym: a virtual training ground and simulation enviornment for AI agent.

On the competition front, I think there’s a healthy mix of major players and wild successes—Minecraft, MapleStory, Roblox, OpenAI Gym, Deep Mind, etc. They’ve all built incredible things at massive scale. It’s hard to imagine Sprited standing alongside them one day—but that’s exactly the North Star I’m aiming for.

As for founder-market fit, here’s a little montage of my background:

• Built a physically realistic 2D ping pong game with topspin and backspin mechanics.

• Built multi-agent simulation where virtual ants generate artwork. Won two awards for it.

• Developed a PC platformer game.

• Worked at a major online game company on a live game with a client-server architecture.

• Released a cross-platform mobile game on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

• Built voxel path-tracer that renders voxel art entirely on a single shader file.

• Served as technical lead for a web application team at a FAANG company.

• Have machine learning expertise.

I’m proud of these accomplishments, even if recruiters mostly care about just the last two bullet points. Deep down, I’ve always wanted to build something truly unique and amazing. And right now, the timing feels right. The AI revolution is giving small teams—or even solo founders like me—the chance to build something from scratch that actually matters. It’s also unlocking new markets. Honestly I don’t think there’s ever been a more favorable environment for starting a startup.