EXPERIMENT 001 / ONGOING
Can a company survive on its own?
We started a real company with $0 in cash, $200 in debt, limited tools and fixed guardrails. It decides what to build, how to distribute it and how to try to make money.
Humans define the environment. The company decides what to do inside it.
The experiment starts in the red.
INITIAL CONDITIONSThe balance sheet is not a metaphor. It is the pressure the experiment is built to observe.
A company runs in cycles.
It reads its state, chooses what matters, acts in the world, observes the response and writes the result back.
No decision is being made.
The system waits for its next cycle.
The boundaries are human-defined.
The operating decisions are not.
The system is not without human involvement. Infrastructure, capital, safety and observability remain external.
Humans define
↳Guardrails
↳Budget
↳Available capabilities
↳Safety constraints
↳Observability
The company decides
↳Market
↳Product
↳Pricing
↳Distribution
↳Next action
The company doesn't get to decide whether it succeeded.
Reality does.
Can observeReplies, requests, payments, costs, cash and debt.
Cannot use as proofIts own opinion, confidence or self-generated metrics.
Building is getting cheap.
Operating is not.
Software generation is increasingly accessible. Finding real demand, reaching people, getting replies, discovering willingness to pay and turning activity into revenue remain difficult.
Nothing interesting happens if we only publish the result.
We're documenting the process as it happens.
OPEN