The story so far.

Where lucix came from, what we killed and why, and where we stand today. Weekly updates follow below, newest first.

Nick & Ryan · updated weekly · click to read the whole arc

lucix exists because of one sentence, and everything since has been in service of it: getting a group of people to actually agree is one of the most common, most expensive problems in business — and almost nobody has good tooling for it. Neither of us arrived at that as a market-sizing exercise. We lived it, from two different sides, for years before we ever thought about building a company around it.

I spent over a decade around Imagen, a video asset management platform, most of it in sales and revenue leadership. In between, I ran sales for Diversified, where I watched good enterprise deals stall — not on price, not on product, but on cross-functional buy-in that never quite landed. I went back to Imagen as CRO for the Americas, and shortly after, we were acquired by Thomson Reuters. The integration surfaced the same problem from the inside: decisions made without real visibility or agreement across a much bigger organization made what should have been a straightforward acquisition far harder than it needed to be. Trying to fix that from inside a company far larger than the one I'd help build, and not fully succeeding, is a real part of why I left.

Ryan Burrus joined as co-founder in January 2026, running go-to-market from day one. His background is enterprise B2B product marketing — at BlackBerry he ran go-to-market for a global business unit on a $1.2M budget and built account-based marketing that generated $9.9M in pipeline, on top of six years at Verizon before that. Nearly everything below on real market interest is Ryan, largely by hand, with no marketing budget at all.

What follows is the honest version — including the parts that didn't work.

Three ideas, one thesis, each one killed on purpose

lucix has been built three times. That's not indecision — it's discipline. Each time, we found out something the market was telling us clearly, and instead of forcing the existing idea to fit, we stopped and rebuilt around what we'd actually learned.

Dec 2025 – Jan 2026

The idea, before it had a name

Two months between roles. An idea about visualizing organizational decisions, validated informally, then rebuilt twice in three weeks as the real thesis sharpened. By mid-January, the name was lucix.

Jan – Jun 2026

A production platform, a real go-to-market motion, and an honest dead end

Five months, 291 commits, a full multi-tenant application with real security architecture, deployed live. We ran 25–30 structured discovery interviews, built an active outbound pipeline, and demoed the product in person to enterprise prospects. The market's answer was consistent: the mechanism itself, provoking a reaction from stakeholders, wasn't the right one. So in June, we stopped shipping it.

Jun – Jul 2026

A prototype, deliberately, and the pivot that mattered

Before writing a line of new code, we ran a structured adversarial exercise against our own new idea: steelmanning the alternatives, running a premortem, then steelmanning ourselves. Only once that came back “genuinely novel, real business case” did we build — and we built a prototype on purpose, deliberately narrow, and held it in prototype mode past the point where graduating would have felt natural. It modelled a single decision as the unit of everything: a scoping choice we made deliberately and recorded as temporary, because it was the cheapest structure that could answer the question we were actually asking. Three weeks in, while scoping how the product would sit inside Slack, we ran the query that cashed it in — all 42 decisions in the prototype were single-origin, exactly as designed, and nothing in the schema carried the same person across two of them. That was the prototype doing its job. The constraint we had knowingly accepted sat precisely where our real buyer turned out to live: the Chief of Staff, the person who owns getting a decision made, not the decision itself. Its answer in hand, we retired it and priced the rebuild.

Jul 22, 2026 – today

The real build

We rebuilt the prototype into a real product codebase: a tenant-per-customer data model with row-level access control, an independent team adversarially reviewing our own architecture before anything shipped, a real production database. Yesterday, August 3rd, I logged in as the first real user and pulled my own real record through the entire live stack: identity, permissions, database, all of it, for the first time in this product's history.

Everyone else uses AI to replace the human in the loop. We use it to make the human in the loop more powerful.

Locked as the company's anchor belief, July 2026

Weekly updates

Update No. 6 · September 22 – 25, 2026

A short one: the first agreement came back signed, investor outreach is out and awaiting responses, and the product now builds the plan for you

Four days rather than a week, and deliberately short. We are sending it because two things happened that we said last time we would report the moment they did, and neither should wait another week. We have also re-counted the funnel, which we held flat last update.

Where the real signal is today

The first agreement came back signed

Last update we said the final partner and beta agreements were going out. They went out on Monday. On Tuesday the first one came back signed — from the fractional Chief of Staff who had told us in writing she was ready to commit, and who had read both agreements closely enough to send us her own analysis of them before signing. It is the first signed agreement in the company’s history. It carries no money: it is a beta and partnership footing, not revenue. What it does carry is a senior operator putting her name to us in writing, having read the fine print properly, before anyone has paid anyone anything.

The raise is out with investors

We asked our capital advisors, Post Oak Group, for a straight answer on where outreach stood. It came back on Tuesday: the materials are out to investors and they are awaiting responses, with an update due to us next week. Scheduling is wired at our end so meetings can be booked without a round of email. No investor meeting has happened yet, so there is genuinely nothing to report on reception — that remains the next update’s job, and now with a date attached to it rather than a hope.

Seven conversations in four days — and one of them was someone using it

Three first-time introductions, an advisory principal, an executive-coaching consultancy, a Chief of Staff community leader, and a beta tester who has now run a full initiative through the product end to end on his own and has agreed to run several more, then bring colleagues in for a live test. That last one matters most: it is the first time someone outside this company has driven the product through a whole decision without us in the room. The operator evaluating us against her firm’s wider AI review put the distinction better than our own deck does — our asking people for their own input landed with her where tools that quietly read the team’s Slack did not.

The funnel, on the same definition as always

We re-counted our own record today, counting potential buyers only — investors, counsel and partners excluded. We reached further this fortnight and the response rate went up rather than down, which is the harder direction. Still entirely cold outbound, still no marketing spend.

Contacted96was 85

Replied54was 45

Response rate56%was 53%

The product now builds the plan for you

Until this week, a Chief of Staff opening lucix faced a blank initiative. Now they pick a template. It reads the organisation chart, lays out the workstreams, proposes a lead for each one from the roles already on record, and sets out what each workstream is for and what “resolved” means for it. The first is an AI-adoption programme for a 1,000-plus organisation; the second, built this week from real domain research, is an annual operating plan. This is the answer to the most common thing we hear on demos — I can see it, but where would I start?

The shape of what we’ve built

Four days, 149 changes, and the automated test count from 7,783 to 8,469. Beyond templates:

Answering is one screen. The question, its terms, the evidence and the answer box in one place — including a plain “not now, remind me” with a date, because the honest answer to a question is sometimes “not yet” and the alternative is silence.
An ask and its answer now read as one conversation wherever you meet them — on the map, in the list, on a person’s record. Yes-or-no is a real answer type rather than a sentence someone has to interpret.
Two changes came from us using it, not from a roadmap. One of us could not find the Answer button on his own home page and said so; the page was rebuilt around what needs you first. Then he answered a question in his own words and found the product had stored the commitment without them, on a page that promised otherwise. Both were fixed within two days. We would rather find these ourselves than have a customer find them.

Risks and challenges

The next update is the one that matters, and we do not control it. Investor responses, and what they say, land in the coming fortnight. We have done the work we can do; the rest is other people’s calendars.
One signed agreement is one, not a cohort. A handful of others are in the same place, and until they sign and use the product in earnest we still have no usage figures to publish. That line has not moved and will not until the record supports it.
The gate has not moved. SOC 2, penetration testing and a signable commercial agreement still sit ahead of revenue, and they are sequenced behind the round.

Nick & Ryan

Founders, lucix

Update No. 5 · September 12 – 21, 2026

Ten days: the raise is in market, the first partner is ready to sign, and the product learned to hold a number

This update covers ten days rather than a week, and it is a different shape from the last four. Three things moved: the raise went to market on the day we said it would, the first partner told us she is ready to sign, and the product went through the densest ten days of its life. The funnel figures hold at last update’s floor; we restate them below rather than re-count them.

Where the real signal is today

The raise is in market

On September 16 we approved the final confidential information memorandum and teaser. On September 17 our capital advisors, Post Oak Group, opened investor outreach: their team is scheduling the first meetings now, and an associate sits in every one, runs diligence and gathers feedback after each pitch. No investor meeting has happened yet, so there is nothing to report on reception — that is next update’s job. If you want anything specific in front of you before then, ask us directly.

The first partner is ready to sign

Last update we said a draft partner agreement was with four fractional Chiefs of Staff for review. One of them wrote back this week: “Do you have the final Partner Agreement for me to sign? I’m ready to commit to it.” She had read both agreements closely enough to send us her own analysis of them, unasked — the kind of scrutiny you want from someone who will carry your product into her own clients. The final version goes out this week. Three more testers in the practice environment asked for their signed copies in the same window, and one gave us written consent to be named as a beta participant, the first.

Seven conversations in a build week

Between September 11 and 18 we held 7 recorded conversations with operators, advisors and prospective partners, plus one working session with our capital advisors. The Chief of Staff at Oracle took a second session with us. The EVP at Inizio who committed to advise last update held his first working call with us as a commercial advisor, on how lucix goes into biopharma. A boutique consultancy ran a live demo and sent the recording back with positive notes. Three first-time intros came in, and two more are booked for the weeks ahead, including a co-founder and Chief of Staff at a growth-stage company.

Three sentences we will now say the same way every time

We spent a day this week on positioning, provoked by a competitive conversation, and came out with a statement we can both repeat without notes: “Fewer meetings. Clear priorities. One record of who committed to what.” Behind it sits our first competitive battlecard, written for the biopharma conversation above, against a decision-analytics incumbent. We wrote down where they beat us first — a decade of logos, Slack and Teams apps, a SOC 2 report — and then the five things we do that nobody can answer with a screenshot: a commitment in the person’s own words with a date; the clock paired with whether the decision held; the person who answers as a first-class citizen with no login and no score; staying for the part after the decision; and an AI that cannot act on a person. A one-page version exists; reply if you want it.

The funnel holds at the floor

Update 4’s figures — 236 prospects across 75 organisations, 85 contacted, 53% responded — stand as the floor. This was a build-and-positioning window rather than an outbound one, so we are restating them rather than re-counting; the next count comes with the next outbound wave. The pipeline board reads 26 companies, one added this week.

The shape of what we’ve built

Ten days, 498 changes to the product — more than the previous three weeks combined. The automated test count went from just under 6,000 to 7,783. The theme was making the product trustworthy to an executive who reads it cold:

A number on the record is a figure, not a sentence. When someone asks for a number, they cite the one they have; when someone answers, they cite their own with its source and date. Both sides sit on the record, typed and dated, and cannot be quietly edited later. Every commitment tool we have looked at stores numbers as prose. Ours now stores them as data.
Company health: the executive’s one-glance readout, with the saving worked in the open. A single “saved, by your baseline” figure with its whole working visible — decisions committed, the company’s own before-figure and who set it, people and days — by function and by initiative. A figure resting on seeded benchmarks says so on its face. Live in production September 18.
The war room became a resolution room, and it works like chat. Enter sends, you can @-mention a person or add one from inside the room, and a room can be opened from anywhere a question appears. Every room you are in sits behind one door with an unseen count, and a room tells its people when something happens in it. Live September 19.
Home now reads like an initiative page. One rule decides what still needs the person running the decision, so the tile, the list and the count agree by construction. In rehearsal that rule took a runner’s “needs you” list from 40 items to 22, every removal accounted for.
One colour language for state, across the whole product — needs you, waiting, settled, committed, danger — applied to every row, chip, badge and map mark, with a guard that stops ad-hoc colour creeping back.
An in-product “What’s new” that users can read: 35 entries shipped in the window. And a private channel for testers, linked from Getting started, so the people in the practice environment can talk to us and to each other.

Risks and challenges

Usage is not yet a number we will print. People are in the product and a testers’ channel exists, but we said in Update 4 that we would report what people do inside only once our own record shows it, and that line holds. Expect the first usage figures once the partner and beta agreements are countersigned and the first cohort has had a full cycle inside.
Two people cannot do outbound and a build week at once. The funnel did not grow this window because nobody was working it. That is a capacity fact, not a demand signal, and it is the clearest argument for what the round funds.
The gate has not moved. SOC 2, penetration testing and a signable agreement still sit ahead of any revenue. The incumbent we will be compared with in biopharma already holds a SOC 2 report. It is sequenced behind the round, and the battlecard says so out loud rather than pretending otherwise.

What would actually help this week

Anyone who has taken a planning or commitment product into pharma or biopharma commercial operations. The advisory door is open and we have one battlecard, not one reference.
Anyone who has structured a paid channel or advisory agreement with fractional executives. We have a willing first partner and would like the terms to be ones we can repeat.
In-seat, budget-holding Chiefs of Staff or COOs at organisations of 1,000 or more. Unchanged from the last two updates, and still the ask that matters most.

Nick & Ryan

Founders, lucix

Update No. 4 · August 22 – September 11, 2026

Three weeks in one: the funnel grew by nearly half, twelve operators asked for the keys, and the raise goes to market next week

This update covers three weeks rather than one. Nearly all of that time went into two things at once: getting the seed materials through our capital advisors’ process, and shipping the parts of the product a Chief of Staff needs before they can put lucix in front of their CEO rather than describe it. Both are done. The figures below are stage-derived from our own record on the same definition we adopted in Update 3, and as before they are a floor, not a ceiling.

Where the real signal is today

The funnel, on the same definition as last time

Counting potential buyers only — investors, counsel and partners excluded — we now hold 236 prospects across 75 organisations, up from 161 across 71. We have contacted 85; 45 have replied. That is a 53% response rate, up from 47%, on a pool that grew by nearly half — the rate rose without the denominator shrinking. 151 identified prospects are still untouched, because two people can only write so many messages by hand. All of it remains cold outbound at no marketing spend.

Twenty-three conversations in eighteen days

Between August 24 and September 10 we held 23 recorded conversations with operators, advisors and prospective partners, plus two working sessions with our capital advisors. The seniority moved up. Serving Chiefs of Staff at Salesforce and Oracle each took a meeting, as did a Chief of Staff at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, an EVP at Inizio, the founder of the largest Chief of Staff community we know of, the CEO of an executive-search firm that serves the Office of the CEO, two leaders at an HR platform, and the founder of an angel network.

Twelve people asked for the keys

12 of those conversations ended with a request for a practice environment — the product itself, not another demo. The Chief of Staff at Salesforce wants hands-on time before he makes introductions ahead of Dreamforce. The Chief of Staff at Oracle asked for a sandbox to run real scenarios in. A Chief of Staff at a professional-services firm wants to build next year’s operating plan inside it. The founder of the Chief of Staff community asked for trials for his own team. We are provisioning against that list now, and we will report what people do inside once our record shows it, not before.

Three advisors, committed

Three senior operators, each running a public advisory practice, have committed to advise lucix: an EVP at Inizio with 38 years in biopharma leadership, who has already made two introductions without being asked; a former Chief Digital Officer at Teva who now runs an AI-and-strategy advisory practice; and a COO and executive advisor in Berlin who has mentored more than 200 leaders. The arrangement is the same for each — monthly working sessions and content now, formal advisory terms after the round. Two of the three came to us, not the other way round.

The channel now has paper

In Update 3 we described fractional and independent Chiefs of Staff asking to carry lucix into their own client engagements. A draft partner agreement and a partnership rubric now exist and are with four of them for review; the first signed version follows once both sides are happy with the terms. In the same three weeks the channel widened on its own: a startup-accelerator co-founder proposed bringing lucix to her cohort and introducing her CFO, an HR platform proposed an integration with mutual sell-through, and an executive-search firm proposed a referral programme. None of it is revenue. All of it is people who already hold the trust we lack, offering to spend it on us.

Last update’s ask, answered again

We asked, for the second time, for people who convene this audience. The Chief of Staff Networking Group — 10,300 members — published our recorded tech talk to its community on September 5 and made Ryan an admin. The founder of the largest Chief of Staff community we know of agreed a joint tech-talk series with us. An executive-search firm that serves the Office of the CEO is planning a podcast series. Every one of these came through the pattern we named two updates ago: reach the person who convenes the room, not the room.

The raise goes to market next week

Our capital advisors, Post Oak Group, ran two pitch-coaching sessions with us in this window and have approved the confidential information memorandum and teaser; their KYC on us is complete. On their notes we rebuilt the seed deck to 11 slides, wrote the talk track, and rebuilt the moat slide around distribution, the team and early traction rather than technology alone. Investor outreach begins the week of September 14, with first feedback expected the week after. If you would like anything specific before then, ask us directly.

The shape of what we’ve built

Three weeks, 494 changes to the product, and this time most of them were features. The theme was everything a Chief of Staff needs in order to walk into their CEO’s office with lucix rather than describe it:

A one-page decision brief for the executive who never logs in. The person running the decision seals it and sends it; the CEO or board member opens it with no account and no login. Prospects kept describing this on calls. It now exists.
What the decision is costing. Seeded cost bands per team turn “this is taking too long” into “this is costing this much of people’s time”, and a buyer can correct the seeded figure to their own.
A war room. One shared thread per decision, where a proposal can be accepted straight into the record — the first threaded conversation inside the product.
The map got hands. A lead can now hand a question to someone else, accept a suggested reroute, see when two teams are each waiting on the other, and see when a promise breaks. Each is a real action, not a picture.
Correcting a locked-in number, on the record, for the first time anywhere in the product.
A live “how fast are decisions moving” readout in place of a placeholder: real time-to-decision and durability figures, with an honest “still running” state for decisions not yet closed.
And the connective tissue: a real notification bell, one five-stage progress spine through every screen, a guided worked example as a single real room, and a full scripted practice company that stands up on a clock so we can demo without a customer’s data.

The automated test count went from roughly 4,200 to just under 6,000 in the same period, and a new tester now receives their link by email the moment their environment exists.

Nick & Ryan

Founders, lucix

Update No. 3 · Week of August 17–21, 2026

The doors opened, eleven conversations in five days — and the operators we built this for started asking to sell it

Last update we said we expected to start provisioning practice environments shortly, and that for the first time we believed people would get real value from one rather than politely tolerate it. That was the promise. This week we kept it: the invite path is real, the first Chiefs of Staff are inside the product, and the most interesting thing that happened was not something we planned.

Where the real signal is today

The product is in other people’s hands

Provisioning went from a script one of us ran by hand to a real invite path, and the practice environment now stands up on its own — a full initiative cascade, on a clock, that a new tester can run and then reset without us. We began seating people this week from those already waiting, working toward a first group of roughly 20–25. Around half are people who could eventually buy; the rest are there because they have the problem and will tell us the truth about it.

Eleven conversations in five days

Between Monday and Friday we held 11 recorded conversations. Most were first meetings with operators: serving and fractional Chiefs of Staff, a COO, a finance leader who held the Chief of Staff seat at a global consumer brand, and an operator who built the function inside a global manufacturer. Two were working sessions with people already close to us. None was pushed toward a decision, because there is still nothing to decide on — the gate below has not moved.

Three more unprompted offers — and one that stopped us

Our record now holds 7 unprompted offers of help, up from the four we reported last time. The new ones: a serving Chief of Staff at NORAD/NORTHCOM offered to act as an informal sounding board and said he wants to work with lucix when he retires; a second operator proposed an advisor or board role over LinkedIn without being asked; a third arrived inbound through our own site. The first matters more than its size suggests. He is not a consultant or an adjacent observer — he is exactly the person this product is built for, doing the job today, volunteering time to a company that cannot yet sell him anything.

Last update’s ask, answered

We asked specifically for people who convene this audience rather than people merely in it, because that pattern had produced our strongest responses. It worked. A coach who runs a Chief of Staff network of roughly 10,000 members is now in the record, and a fractional Chief of Staff offered an introduction into a Chief of Staff roundtable she has worked with closely. We repeat that ask below, unchanged, because it remains the highest-leverage thing anyone reading this can do.

A channel we did not design

The genuine surprise of the week. Several independent and fractional Chiefs of Staff, on separate calls, asked to be something other than testers: design partners, paid advisors, or people who would carry lucix into their own client engagements. We had modelled these people as users. They are proposing to be a distribution channel — one that arrives pre-trusted inside organisations we have no route into, and that is asking us for it rather than the reverse. We are formalising the arrangement now. It is early, it is unproven, and we did not think of it.

The shape of what we’ve built

Almost none of this week’s build was new features, on purpose. We put 165 changes into the product between Sunday and today, and nearly all of them went into the foundations of the interface: one spacing scale replacing the 44 improvised values that had been standing in for it, a legacy styling layer torn out surface by surface, three page layouts reconciled down to the ones that were genuinely different, and an entire second navigation deleted — it rendered nowhere and still carried 84 tests. Six screens that had been built but were reachable only by typing their address are now reachable properly.

This is unglamorous work and it was the right week for it. It is the difference between a first session feeling like a product or feeling like a prototype, and we did it deliberately in the days before handing out the first invitations rather than after.

Risks and challenges

We reported a relationship footprint as traction, and we are correcting it. Last update’s headline — 53 people across 24 organisations, 412 interactions — counted everyone we had a recorded interaction with: advisors, our own counsel and investors, alongside actual prospects. A single advisory firm accounted for 35% of that record. Counting demand only, the honest figures are 161 prospects across 71 organisations, 75 contacted and 35 responded — a 47% response rate. That is a better number than the one we published, and it is the one we should have led with. Twice running we have restated our own measurement rather than let a flattering figure stand. It is uncomfortable to write and still the right trade.
We say a number out loud that our own system cannot yet evidence. We describe roughly 75–80 Chief of Staff conversations to date, and we believe it. Our record substantiates a fraction: only 22 of 249 contacts have a title captured against them, and LinkedIn — where a large share of this actually happens — is not ingested at all. We committed last update to figures that trace to a dated record, so we have published the traceable ones here and left the larger claim out of the count. Closing that gap is active work, not a promise.
The person who loves it may not be the person who buys it. Chiefs of Staff respond to this product strongly, and several told us just as plainly that they do not hold budget — the C-suite or the board does. Our answer is to let them run their first decisions free and arrive at the budget conversation holding evidence rather than a pitch. That is a reasonable hypothesis. It is not yet a result, and it is the single assumption most likely to be wrong.
The gate has not moved. SOC 2, penetration testing and a signable agreement still sit ahead of any revenue, exactly as they did last update. Everything above converts to nothing until they are done.

What would actually help this week

Anyone who runs a community, roundtable, or newsletter of operating leaders. This was our ask last time, it produced the strongest results of the week, and it is unchanged.
Operators for the practice environments — people who would genuinely use this, not evaluate it. We would rather a tester tell us it is wrong than tell us it is nice.
Anyone who has sold software into an organisation where the enthusiastic user was not the budget holder. That is our sharpest open question, and we would take twenty minutes with someone who has solved it.
We are convening an advisory group at the end of August or early September — operating leaders, plus a few people who have offered board-level time. If that is you, or you know who it should be, tell us.

Nick & Ryan

Founders, lucix

Update No. 2 · Week of August 10–15, 2026

Same product, new words, different conversations — and four people offered us help we never asked for

We are not trying to close anyone right now, and will not be for another month or two. That is a choice, not a shortfall. This week the product crossed a real line — a full reskin and a rewrite of every word a user sees changed how people talk about it within 48 hours — and we finally measured what the choice has been quietly building, having under-reported it to you by half.

What we are actually doing right now

Worth stating plainly, because the numbers below read very differently depending on it. lucix cannot sell a production system today and we would not try: SOC 2, penetration testing, an EULA and a signable agreement all sit ahead of any transaction, and we sequenced them deliberately after the product rather than alongside it. So we are not running a sales motion. We are building awareness, gathering feedback, and warming a group of people who will be waiting when that gate opens in the next one to two months. Everything below should be read as evidence about the problem and our position in it — not as a pipeline.

Where the real signal is today

Engagement, measured properly

We now count 53 people across 24 organisations with at least one recorded interaction, and 412 interactions in total since June 29 — sustained at 45–80 a week for eight consecutive weeks, by two people with no marketing budget. Our last update reported 27 respondents. The difference is not new activity; it is activity we were already having and had no reliable way to count. Every figure here now traces to a dated record rather than a hand-maintained note.

These are not 53 prospects

Treating them as one group is what made us undervalue them. Some are practitioners who would use the product. Others are advisors giving us time for nothing, people who run communities of exactly our buyer, operators who have offered introductions into their own networks, and organisations whose name alone carries weight in this category. A few will also be customers eventually. Most are something more useful than that, and we have started recording which is which rather than filing everyone under one word.

Unprompted advocacy

The signal we would not have thought to look for, and the one that matters most. Four separate people have now offered something we never asked for: an enterprise architect volunteered specific go-to-market advice; a pharmaceutical executive agreed on a call to act as a thought partner, speak on a panel, and introduce us into his industry network; an HR and labour-relations advisor offered to refer us to six or more of his own clients; and a business advisor pitched us a podcast interview. Separately, a published academic and think-tank president with a substantial following wrote about Decision Velocity — our core thesis, and the phrase we built the company around — before we had ever spoken to him. Nobody is being sold to. These offers cost the people making them something, which is why we weigh them above any number of conversations we initiated.

The language changed how people respond

The clearest signal of the week came from the product, not the outreach. We reskinned the entire interface and ran a full pass over every word a user sees, replacing our internal vocabulary with standard business terminology. The effect was immediate and measurable in conversation: within 48 hours, people we had already demoed to moved from “I understand what this does” to “I can see exactly where I would use this.” Same product underneath, same people, different words. That gap between comprehension and self-insertion is the one that decides whether a tool gets adopted, and we had been sitting on the wrong side of it without knowing.

What happens next

16 conversations are already scheduled ahead of us and 42 sit behind. None of them is being pushed toward a decision, because there is nothing yet to decide on. The work between now and the gate opening is keeping this group engaged, not converting it.

The shape of what we've built

The product crossed a real line this week. Beyond the interface and language work above, we settled the V1 structure for how work is created and made visible across workstreams — the core organising model the whole system hangs off — and we are most of the way through building it. It is genuinely elegant, which matters more than it sounds: this is the layer every other feature has to sit on, and getting it wrong would have been expensive to unwind later.

The practical consequence is that we are close to putting it in front of people. We expect to begin provisioning practice tenants shortly for those already waiting, with real confidence they will get value from it rather than politely tolerate an early build. That is the first time we have been able to say that about any of the three iterations.

Two things shipped alongside it. A complete seed data room — company overview, team, traction, commercial model, cap table and financial model — that regenerates from a single command, so every document reads its figures from one source and cannot drift from the others. And the fix behind this update: our operations layer now records every external interaction as it happens, rather than depending on someone remembering to write it down.

Risks and challenges

We knew our reporting was behind, and left it there on purpose. Our engagement record was spread across email, meeting notes and manual lists, and we knew it was under-counting — that is precisely why we went looking this week. Fixing it sooner would have meant one of us stepping off the product build or off the outreach that is generating all this momentum, and for the last month neither was the right trade. The cost was real: we under-reported ourselves to you by half in the last update. We have now spent the time to fix it properly rather than patch it, and it will not recur — the system records interactions as they happen instead of depending on someone finding a spare afternoon.
Everything now sits behind a single gate. Sequencing compliance after the product is a choice we would make again, but it concentrates risk: nothing above converts to revenue until SOC 2, the penetration test and a signable agreement are all done, and if that slips, everything slips with it. We are carrying one dependency rather than several, which is cleaner to manage and worse to be wrong about.

What would actually help this week

Warm introductions to Chiefs of Staff, COOs, or similar operating-leadership roles — especially in financial services, healthcare, or enterprise tech, where engagement is already strongest.
Anyone in your network who runs a community, group, or newsletter of operating leaders. The strongest responses we have had came through people who convene this audience rather than people who are simply in it, and that is the pattern we most want to repeat.
Specifically now: people who would genuinely use this rather than evaluate it. We are provisioning practice tenants shortly and would rather fill them with operators who have the problem than with people being polite about an early build.

Nick & Ryan

Founders, lucix

Update No. 1 · Week of August 3–7, 2026

Five demos, real conversations at Salesforce and Simmonds Lamont, and the honest cost of moving this fast

Five product demos, real conversations at Salesforce, Simmonds Lamont, and Phasecraft — and an honest look at what running product, marketing, sales, and fundraising as two people is actually costing us.

Where the real signal is today

Product demos

We held 5 product demos this week with Chiefs of Staff and senior operators across financial services, enterprise tech, and healthcare. Three worth naming: an Enterprise Transformation Architect at Salesforce; the Chief of Staff/COO at Simmonds Lamont, who gave what we're tracking internally as the strongest direct validation of the product thesis captured so far; and the Chief of Staff to the CEO at Phasecraft, who has confirmed interest and is finalizing time for a deeper conversation.

Conversations

18 conversations are open across financial services, enterprise tech, healthcare, and higher education, following an expanded outreach push (34 new qualified connections this week). None of them is being moved toward a decision, and that is deliberate: we are not selling until the product and the compliance work behind it are finished. The goal at this stage is to understand these roles properly and to be the thing they are already interested in when we can transact.

Team & ops

We continue to run our own operations — CRM, pipeline tracking, and this update itself — through the same AI-agent architecture underlying the product, now backed by 23 active internal agents/skills supporting engineering, sales, and reporting. A human always reviews and publishes anything investor- or customer-facing; agents draft, they don't ship.

The shape of what we've built

We run our own build the same way, mapped into a living knowledge graph: every module, doc, and decision as a node, every real relationship between them as an edge. This is a schematic rendering at the same scale as the actual graph — not the literal internal map, since that's exactly the kind of detail we keep off this page — but it's an honest picture of the size and density of what two people have actually shipped.

3,136 nodes · 4,371 edges · 378 communities in the real graph as of our last full build (code + docs, Aug 4). Illustrative rendering, same shape and scale — not the literal data.

Risks and challenges

Founder bandwidth. Between the two of us we're putting in 120+ hours a week right now, split across product, marketing, outreach, and fundraising conversations, and shifted around by whatever's the actual priority that week. Right now that priority is finishing the product, so that the group of people Ryan has already built a relationship with have something to actually use — not a sustainable pace forever, but a deliberate one for this phase.
Keeping a warm group warm takes real time. A meeting (Oracle) moved this week and is now set for early next week; several others (Microsoft, Cerence AI, Meezan Bank, Inizio) are awaiting replies or a next scheduling step. None of this is a stalled deal — there is no deal yet to stall. It is the ongoing cost of holding a group of interested people's attention for the months before we can offer them anything, and it is a cost we are choosing to carry.
Our own tracking is still consolidating. Some outreach history has lived in scattered notes rather than one system — we're tightening that up now so a live thread doesn't go quiet by accident.

What would actually help this week

Warm introductions to Chiefs of Staff, COOs, or similar operating-leadership roles — especially at mid-market/enterprise companies in financial services, healthcare, or enterprise tech, where we're already seeing real engagement.

Nick & Ryan

Founders, lucix

Update No. 0 · Week of August 3, 2026

The first signal: 27 replies, a paused enterprise pilot, and what's still hard

Where the real signal is today

We're pre-revenue and we want to be direct about that — but "pre-revenue" is not the same as "no signal." This is what's real and current:

Market pull

Since Ryan began reaching out directly, 27 Chiefs of Staff and senior operators have written back across 4 outreach waves, at organizations including Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Google DeepMind, and Cerence AI. Several already have meetings on the calendar, and it's cost $0 in marketing spend. One of the clearest moments so far: a Chief of Staff at a large enterprise told Ryan, unprompted, that our thesis on compressing "Mean Time to Resolution," the metric this whole product is built around, hit home, naming the exact "everyone nods, nothing happens" trap the role lives inside.

A term catching on

"Decision Velocity," the phrase we've built the company around, is starting to travel beyond us. We run the LinkedIn community built on it, and we're seeing the hashtag picked up unprompted, with real, increasing frequency over the last three months.

Enterprise, paused not lost

We demoed the product in person to Sabre Corporation and proposed a structured pilot. We deliberately paused that engagement, since we weren't ready to deliver what they'd need, rather than push a pilot the old product couldn't support. Sabre is actively waiting on the current build, and we're planning to re-engage shortly.

How two people move this fast

We've been deliberate about compounding our own speed at every step, not just the product's. This company went from a single chat conversation, to a structured project, to a real development environment, to a versioned codebase, to whole teams of AI agents building alongside us as a development team. Now we're standing up the same pattern one level higher, as AI department leads that run pieces of our own business. At every step the question has been the same: how do we move faster, at higher quality, while staying two people.

The first of those department agents, covering marketing, is not a slide. It runs nightly against our own operations and already caught a real gap in how we were tracking our own pipeline within its first week live. We're building the thing we sell, on ourselves, before we sell it.

Risks and challenges

No signed customer, and we are not yet trying for one. Not at this iteration, not at either of the two before it. We are deliberately not selling until the product is finished and the compliance work behind it — SOC 2, penetration testing, a signable agreement — is done. So this is a consequence of sequencing rather than a failure to convert. It does have to change eventually, and the honest risk in the choice is that we are delaying revenue to protect the first customer experience.
The architecture just went through its most rigorous review yet, and isn't fully signed off. We run an independent, adversarial review of our own build before it ships, on purpose. It's slower. It's also why we trust what we've built.
We're two people. That's real leverage on conviction and speed, and a real constraint on how many fronts we can move on at once.

What this round is for, and what would actually help

This raise is about runway: the time to finish the product and the compliance work that sits behind it, and to reach our seed round, which we're already working on with Post Oak Group. It is deliberately not about signing customers yet — we are not selling until that work is done. Sabre and the Chief of Staff conversations above are real and growing, and they are what we intend to open with once we can.

Beyond capital, the highest-leverage help right now is:

Warm introductions to Chiefs of Staff and operating leaders in your own network — people who live the problem, rather than people who would buy the tool. We are looking for feedback and relationships at this stage, not purchase orders.
Anyone who's evaluated or bought "decision" or "alignment" tooling before — we want to hear what didn't work
A sounding board as we head toward the seed round

This is the first of what will be a regular cadence of updates on this page — the good weeks and the hard ones. Thanks for being part of this early.

Nick & Ryan

Founders, lucix