#1 Founder's letter: This week I made my first revenue

It's been a good 5 months since I started working on financial document processing. While I'm still not sure if it'll be up and to the right from here, it's incredibly satisfying to see those first Stripe notifications come in

But I can't deny that obsolescence is already on my mind. It's naive to keep thinking people will need one-trick pony software to convert PDFs into CSVs. Any VLM can do that nowadays

So it's about understanding the deeper use case for why they need that CSV. Depending on the customer, it's for budget planning, settling a divorce, or extricating money flows

While it won't be a prerequisite for everybody, some don't have the time or luxury of being wrong with financial data. Take an accountant who submits a tax report full of mistakes. That's where accuracy, reliability, auditability, and repeatability come in. VLMs cannot do that (yet). It's the constraint I'm building Bankstatemently around. Incredibly boring, but that's where the moat is

But still - it starts with documents now. It's not a mindstretch to imagine that, a few years from now, we're wearing augmented glasses (or a neural chip anybody?) that sees financial information on a screen and interprets it perfectly. A financial vision model trained on an infinite number of statement variations. It's undoubtedly where this is heading

On a productivity note: The best gift I got myself for 2026 is a Claude Code Max subscription. The higher token limit, combined with Opus 4.5, has completely unlocked the way I work. I can be creative in the SEO pages I create for banks, I can force the bar high for code quality and edge cases - I'm just so incredibly excited about building software again. Setting a vision and seeing it through

The irony is that while I have agents coding, I am working harder than ever. I'm realizing that building the tool is really about continuously getting clear about how the world works. You then distill those mental models into code that represents that newfound clarity. Intellectually, it's immensely satisfying

Every new opportunity I see feels cheap to execute, but is expensive in aggregate. Each one only adds a bit of extra time, and suddenly you're trying to do everything. I'm still not sure whether that's a good or a bad thing for a perfectionist

Anyway, back to work! Have a great Sunday 🫡