Blog · Founder

Founder narrative

Honest notes from Aryan, founder of Gravity. Three prior shutdowns (a mental health platform, Super AI, Vibe AI). Why we're betting on a marketplace, not another agent platform. What's working. What isn't. Updated as we ship.

10 min

Why We Chose Credits Over Subscriptions for AI Agents

I have paid for a lot of software I did not use. Everyone has. The forgotten subscription is so normal that whole businesses are built on the gap between what people pay for and what they actually touch. When I…

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9 min

Why Most AI Agents Stop After One Task

Most AI agents stop after one task. They run the first step, return a confident-sounding output, and then either silently halt, hand back to the human, or hallucinate a "task complete" status that does not match…

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9 min

Why I Still Name My Failed Startups: The Transparency Thesis

I name MindWave, Super AI, and Vibe AI publicly. I write the postmortems with dollar amounts, named decisions, and dates. I link them from the homepage. I link them from every relevant blog post. The default founder…

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9 min

The Honest Cost of Three Shutdowns: A Founder Financial Postmortem

Founders almost never publish the dollar number. The number is uncomfortable, the breakdown is more uncomfortable, and the opportunity cost is the most uncomfortable line of all. So this post does the uncomfortable…

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9 min

How Vibe AI Feedback Shaped Gravity: The Signals That Became Decisions

Vibe AI did not get to product-market fit, but it got to enough users to be useful. A few hundred actives across late 2025 and early 2026 generated about 1,800 support tickets, 47 cancellation surveys, and roughly…

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9 min

Founder Mental Health After Three Shutdowns: What Burnout Looked Like and What Worked

This is the post I avoided writing for a year. The financial postmortem at the honest cost of three shutdowns was uncomfortable. This one is harder. Three startup shutdowns over four years did real damage to my…

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9 min

Why Bootstrapping, Not VC: A Founder's Decision Rationale After Three Shutdowns

The most common question I have been asked since Gravity went public is some version of: why are you not raising? After three shutdowns and a clean fourth bet, the assumption is that VC capital is the next move. The…

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7 min

What Vibe AI Taught Me About Product (Five Rules That Shape Gravity)

Vibe AI was an AI friend product. From mid-2025 to early 2026, real users showed up, used it daily, and told me, in their own words, that they liked it. It also lost money on every active user every month. The full…

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8 min

What I Learned From Killing a $100K Product (The Hardest Shutdown)

The hardest shutdown across all three startups was the one with revenue attached. Specifically, the $100K-annual-run-rate slice of Super AI that was working in 2025 even as the surrounding product was structurally…

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9 min

Weekly Retro: Week 1 of Building Gravity (Tools, Decisions, Problems, Week 2 Changes)

Week 1 of Gravity is in the books. This is the tactical retrospective, written in the format I plan to use weekly: what shipped, what tools settled in, what decisions got made, what problems hit, week-1 metrics, and…

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9 min

The Mistakes I Made With Super AI: A Founder's Decision Postmortem

The public version of the Super AI postmortem is on this site already (read it here). It explains the structural failure: an all-in-one AI router built in 2024, killed in March 2025, in a category that was getting…

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9 min

The Mental Health Platform I Wish I Built Differently

From October 2022 to October 2023, I built MindWave out of Pune. Mental health, private sharing, support, journaling, group therapy on the roadmap, free professional community next to it. The product worked in the…

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9 min

The Day I Decided to Shut Down: Three Shutdowns, Three Decision Moments

People ask what the day looks like, the day a founder decides to shut down. The truthful answer is: it does not look like a day. It looks like weeks of rationalisation followed by a small moment that finally tips the…

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9 min

How I Pick What to Build Next: A Founder's Selection Methodology After Three Failures

After three shutdowns, idea selection is no longer a creative act. It is a structured one. The cost of starting the wrong thing is now measured in years, not in weeks of energy. The rubric below is what I now run…

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9 min

Building in Bangalore, Not SF: Geography and Cost After Three Shutdowns

Aryan Agarwal, building Gravity, from Bangalore. The default assumption when a 3x founder builds an AI agent platform is San Francisco. The default assumption is wrong for this company; it is also probably wrong for…

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10 min

Why I'm Betting Against Workflow Platforms in 2026 (Timing Argument)

This is a timing post, not a thesis post. The thesis lives in describe outcome, not workflow,workflow editors are the wrong abstraction once intelligence has moved into the system. This post is the narrower question:…

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9 min

Vibe AI Postmortem: Lessons from Building an "AI Friend"

Vibe AI was an AI friend. From March 2025 to February 2026, I built it, ran it, watched it work in week one, watched it stop working by week three, and then watched the unit economics confirm what week three had…

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9 min

Super AI Postmortem: Why an All-in-One AI App Didn't Work in 2024

Super AI ran from March 2024 to March 2025. Twelve months. The pitch fit on a sticker: describe what you want, we'll pick the model. An all-in-one AI app that auto-routed each prompt to the best foundation model,GPT…

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9 min

Month 1: Building Gravity in Public,What Shipped, What Didn't

This is month 1 of Gravity, in public. Public means: I write the retro before I have all the answers, name what shipped and what didn't, and let the kill thresholds I set at month start judge themselves. The point is…

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9 min

Mental Health Platform Postmortem: Why MindWave Shut Down After 13 Months

From October 2022 to October 2023 I ran a mental health startup out of Pune called MindWave. Thirteen months. The core product,private sharing, journaling, and venting,shipped. Real users came. Real users came back.…

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10 min

Bootstrapping an AI Agent Platform in 2026: A Founder's Playbook

Three shutdowns ago, I'd have raised a seed round to build Gravity. After three shutdowns, the framework I came back to is bootstrap. Not because raising is wrong,it's the right move for plenty of founders,but…

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13 min

Three Startups, Three Shutdowns: What I Learned Before Building Gravity AI

In early 2026, 40% of AI startups launched in 2024 had already shut down (TechStartups, AI shutdowns roundup, December 2025). I'd already been in three of those statistics,just a year or two earlier than the cohort.…

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