here's a raw and real story about building buster that i think most founders would resonate with. most of the rocket ship stories that you hear are typically preceded by some form of intense perseverance and pain. the airbnb team tried raise $150k at a $1.5m valuation when they first started and weren't able to the notion team built from 2013 to 2018 until they found traction nvidia spent years failing in different markets patrick collison described the early days at stripe like this: "I remember just reflecting on the enormity of the challenges that we would face in the future and all the work we still had to do and all the stuff that was still broken and all the people we had to hire and all the customers we'd have to convince to use us that we had not yet convinced. And it was just this moment of vertigo." now heres the story of buster so far: mar 2023: we started building our first mvp of text-to-sql analytics. reflecting back on it we were absolutely crazy to thing that the openai davinci models could do what we were trying to do. we got a basic version of our apis (somewhat) working and some customers who were excited about them for customer-facing applications. may 2023: we tried to raise a preseed round and basically found zero interest. june 2023: given that our customers at the time wanted our apis and were excited about customer-facing use cases, we focused on that and completely abandoned bi. we figured that if that niche didn't pan out, we could use the same tech to tackle a bi product. **i think all of us were more excited about killing legacy incumbents in the space. personally, i think i lacked the confidence to commit to that. nov 2023: we get into yc **yc was transformative for us. spending the time in sf with other ambitious builders and our group partners changed our entire mindset about what we could accomplish. we left feeling like we could build and do anything. june 2024: despite interest, customers, etc. the customer-facing play was not panning out exactly how we had hoped. based on conversations with customers, it seemed pretty clear that no one had actually made a significant impact in the ai-powered bi space. people who were using power bi (who released an ai copilot) were wanting to use buster to embed into their own internal products as an ai powered bi tool. we decided to come full-circle back to what we initially set out to work on. now, with way more learnings and understanding than we originally had sep 2024: we're launching the product we originally set out to build with much, much more on the way. as you can tell, almost our entire business has been us navigating the idea maze. while its definitely preferred to nail it the first time, that rarely happens. keep grinding, building, talking to customers, and maintaining optimism. usually the only thing that kills startups is when they give up.