I study real founder case studies so you can build your own product faster, with less trial and error.
Who I am
I'm RAY, an independent developer. I study what independent founders actually did — especially the ones who built SaaS and AI products on their own or with a single partner — and I write about what I find here.
Why I write this
I started because of two problems.
First, there is plenty of writing about "how to find a product idea" and "how to validate it", but most of it restates concepts. Very few people have actually read through a large body of real cases and drawn their own conclusions from them.
Second, the cases themselves contain data — revenue figures, time to launch, how many attempts failed — but that data is scattered across hundreds of interviews, and nobody has organised it.
So I set out to do one thing: pull the scattered data together, work out which approaches genuinely help, which are mostly luck, and which get recommended everywhere but don't actually work. Then share it with independent creators who, like me, have no industry network and have to figure it out alone.
How I do the research
Sources. I study material that founders have published publicly — mainly founder interviews on Starter Story and similar platforms. So far I have read through and broken down 100 interviews, extracting the figures and the specific actions that can be checked.
Selection. I prioritise claims that carry concrete detail: specific amounts, specific timeframes, specific actions taken. Where there is only an opinion and no detail, I generally leave it out.
Disagreements. When founders contradict each other on the same question, I don't force a single tidy conclusion. I write the disagreement out as it is, because the disagreement is usually more informative than the conclusion.
Tools. I use AI tools for transcription, breakdown and sorting. The analysis and the judgements, however, come from checking the original interviews line by line — every key figure in an article is verified against the source transcript.
What I do, and what I don't
I sell paid reports on this site. I'm not hiding that: this writing takes a lot of time, and selling reports is how I can keep doing it. I also want the people who read it to actually build something. That's the two-way part.
But there are things I won't do:
- I won't predict whether you'll succeed, and I won't promise that any method makes money;
- I don't take paid placements, and I won't change a judgement in an article because of commercial promotion;
- I don't offer one-to-one paid consulting.
About the names and cases in my articles
I keep founders' names and project names, because they are publicly available information that can be verified. Strip them out and the content becomes rumour you can't check.
If you are someone I have written about and something doesn't sit right with you, write to me. I'll look into it and either remove the identifying details or take the passage down.
Get in touch
Thoughts, disagreements, or something I got wrong — write to me:
hello@neorayhut.com
I read every email myself. When I have time, I reply.
I aim for roughly one article a week, though it depends on how quickly the material accumulates. I'd rather take longer than publish something I can't back up.