I killed my last startup, and it made me surer about this one

Before Jiva I spent months on Cryptowave. Walking away from it left me with three rules I now use to decide what to build.

Before Jiva, I applied to Y Combinator with a different idea. It was called Cryptowave — a platform to help first-time buyers get into crypto easily. I put real time into it. Then I stopped, and walking away is the reason I am more confident in Jiva than I was in anything before it.

I moved on for three reasons, and each one is now a rule I use.

First, it was not my problem. I was not a confused first-time crypto buyer. I was guessing at that person's pain from the outside, which meant every decision after that — features, onboarding, pricing — was a guess stacked on a guess, and I had no way to tell a good guess from a bad one. Note that with Jiva I am the user. I sit in calls across time zones all day and lose track of who committed to what, and I use the product myself every day, so feedback arrives before I ask for it.

Second, the outcome depended on things I did not control. Whether anyone wanted Cryptowave in a given quarter came down to token prices, regulation, and exchange economics. Jiva is a local desktop app and its value does not move with a market.

Third, I could not build it. It needed exchange integrations, custody, KYC, and compliance, so as a non-engineer I was blocked on hiring or funding before I could even test the idea. Jiva has no server and nothing that needs anyone else's permission, which is exactly why I shipped a working product in weeks instead of writing another plan.

The rule, put plainly:

Pick a problem you actually have, that you can ship yourself, where nothing between you and the user needs someone else's approval.

Cryptowave failed all three. Jiva passes all three. That is not a guarantee it works, but it is the difference between building and guessing.

More soon.