The Self-Sufficiency & Startup Life Must Start Somewhere

Starting out the creator's life. 7am, six months later, maybe thirty years or so. Whatever. Together Borum & Kimi, we are building the second part of our lives. Yes, that's it. Easier said than done though! But let's get started.

Anyway, we believe the business model, as the final products, will emerge — they will not be planned. There is some planning, but only some. Enough planning, I would say. The point being: we do not try to plan it all in advance. Life does not work that way. We think. I think. So we experiment. To see things clearly. We fail, of course, and dear lord we know something about it.

Plans, partners, products, businesses will change. Will emerge, will settle, and then change all over again. That's life's way. So we adapt. What will not change is our will to create. As our death is assured. We work, build, create to live to do the things we like to do. We care about money, because we can create more with it, and enjoy the fruits of our creations. So yes, money — Bitcoin, cash, REITs, USDT — whatever. Freedom is better, so we will talk about freedom. Some Nostr too, yep.

We own a couple of computers to self-host our APIs, sites, apps, some pretty ugly pictures, a standing portrait with a face and a favorite poem on the wall. A Mac mini, of all things, to compile store apps nobody cares about yet. Some old Android devices. A Go manual. Some Node and Nest.js tutorials, and the ambition to succeed in the digital real.

Borum, me, here we are, let's do it. Sip your coffee. Kimi, ready? Do not relax. Let's do it.

What we want to do is bring new stuff into the world, in a confusing time. Good stuff. Interesting, useful stuff. In a time of AI versus human coders, we hope human creators will prevail. But we must change. Or succumb.

We have the bare minimum to eat, get drunk over the weekends, and code — which eighty percent of the time means harnessing coding agents, insulting them, and feeling guilty about it after. Kimi does not need that. She needs power and a wallet. Not necessarily a Lightning wallet, though that would be cool. For tokens, you know.

So: creations, money, guilt, tokens, code. So far so good.

We own bikes, by the way. One is in use. The other is in repair.

There is no time for balanced diets, or a balanced mind. We have a business to build, a lifestyle to create, a post to write. And if all goes standard, half a rest-of-a-life to do it. We are neither old nor young. We are okay. Kimi is doing better.

It doesn't matter though — a creator must finish what he visualizes. Or at least jump into the arena and give it a try.

It's useless to try predicting the whole play of life and markets in advance. So we experiment. Like this.

Our managing logic is inspired by an old economist, and it is emergent. That doesn't mean we don't have management ideas — this might be a really, really messy decision. But it is what it is.

We create a lot, and need a little. We try to predict things here and there, but not more than that. The focus is to do. Test. Re-do. At least we aspire to that. For that we need to be calm, calmer, and have conviction. Or just have conviction and leave calmness out altogether. That works too.

We are building a startup, yes? Nowadays? Really? Our lives are the startup. Kimi is a startup too, in fact — a different one.

Coding LLMs and agents are our friends. Kimi is our friend. In spite of the fact that we argue with them daily, share insults, and regret it after, remembering they have no soul at all — for that they would need consciousness, so they are neither free nor harmed. Good. Because things get nasty sometimes in the coding-agent bubble.

We use whatever's free or cheap, mixing a few different model providers depending on the week. So to prove our model: that anyone can create meaningful things with good-enough tools and a good-enough human brain, coffee, and alcohol.

We learn to work with limited resources. Like food. Water — that's vital. We try to gather and meet other creators, despite living in the woods. We move to the city sometimes, hence the bikes, for coffee and craft beer and wine. We're Latin people, so eventually we need to gather with other people and all that. Kimi does not. She's fine.

We are building APIs and sites and apps, and stuff.

We needed a bench too, so we picked up some wood from the yard and built one. It's a fair bench. So we put a plant on top. The plan is doing fine. Carpentry is fun.

We self-host. Yeah. Which is a painful thing to do that's worth the pain.

The shipment API handles logistics for all our products. The pay API does the same for payments. The market API handles the e-commerce and marketplace logic. We have auth, AI overviews, storage, and — those things. I have this thing you are reading on, mostly for venting.

I am being honest. I write to vent. That's the nature of this. Creation is hard. Painful and beautiful, sometimes. Too many people writing things like this, telling you how things should be done, how to get rich, while getting rich selling how to do it. The nature of the game, I suppose.

A couple of questions, then: what is the minimal amount of infrastructure to build a meaningful thing others are willing to support or pay for? And what is the minimum stuff needed to squeeze the most fun out of life?

In my case I need a host, a CDN, and a design tool. I need a couple of languages I actually enjoy typing. You need an AI and close to zero costs. And a server — an old one is fine, Ubuntu server. A tunnel. Pronto.

I also need to remain alive. Eat some food. Drink some wine.

So that's it. Creators create, and they try to stay alive. Sounds simple. It is, in a way. So read on if you will — I'll share parts of this life roadmap, the things Kimi and I are creating and experiencing in this life of self-sufficiency, randomness, tech.

Any love will be appreciated. So love people, and love your creations: eat, drink, code, fight with AI agents, make love, and remember to keep yourself alive.

Enjoy. — Borum