The story so far.
Here's the whole arc — where lucix came from, what we killed and why, and where we actually stand today. Weekly updates continue below, newest first.
Nick & Ryan · updated weekly
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.
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.
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.
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. Three weeks in, while scoping a routine integration, we hit a wall: our data model couldn't represent the same person acting across more than one decision. That single technical finding pointed us at our real buyer, the Chief of Staff: the person who owns getting a decision made, not the decision itself.
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.
Weekly updates
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
What's actually hard right now
- 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 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
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.
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.
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.
What's actually hard right now
- 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
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:
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.
"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.
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.
What's actually hard right now
- 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