Tri Diligence

Three people who have built, backed, and shipped real businesses unwrap The Regulars — a tiny cafe in a nice, quiet residential area with barely any foot traffic, built on locals and repeat visits. The founders real goal is not just to open it; it is to eventually stop working the counter. Can a low-traffic, locals-only cafe throw off enough to pay a barista AND a manager to replace the owner — an...

Three people who have built, backed, and shipped real businesses unwrap Netcode Games — a veteran cloud-and-networking architect who wants to go indie, ship games on Steam, and lean hard on AI. The skills are real: multiplayer, servers, analytics, the invisible machinery most solo devs cannot build. One problem — Steam does not give bonus points for elegant architecture, and the enemy is not downt...

This week on Tri Diligence : Screen Threads , a store for the exact tee a character wore on screen - browse by show or film, print-on-demand, drop-shipped, no inventory. The whole episode turns on one question: is this a company, or a cease-and-desist? Jake (the marketer) - the real wedge isn't the Marvel-logo crowd; it's the fan who says "wait, I want Carmy's shirt" - the...

Three people who have built, backed, and shipped real businesses unwrap Glitter Scoop — a sparkly, summer-only ice cream parlor open about ten weeks a year. Cute shop, brutal calendar. Can a seasonal scoop shop cover the rent, pay a real crew, and still leave the owner a profit — or is it a lifestyle business where the founder is the unpaid labor? Glitter Scoop: a walk-in parlor with a glitter-and...

This week on Tri Diligence : the sovereign cloud - the idea that you don't need to rebuild Amazon to break free of it. About 90% of apps need only three primitives - object storage (S3), compute (Lambda), and a database (DynamoDB) - and mature open-source equivalents now exist for all of them (Garage/MinIO, Knative, ScyllaDB), plus containers for portability. Our three hosts pull it apart: Ja...

This week on Tri Diligence : Vintel , an AI layer for your wine cellar. It does three things - recommends a bottle you actually own to pair with tonight's meal, flags bottles hitting "value at risk" before they pass their peak, and nudges you on drink windows ("drink it this spring, not in two years"). Our three hosts pull it apart: Jake (the marketer) - the intimate &quot...

This week on Tri Diligence : Havit , an app that answers one question at the exact moment it matters - standing in a shop, "do I already own this?" Photograph the item and a two-stage AI pipeline (embeddings to shortlist your likely duplicates, then a vision model for the final call) answers in about two seconds. The founder's hook is real: they collect purple soda cans because the...

This week on Tri Diligence : Ember & Ice , a direct-to-consumer brand selling premium fire-pit and grill tables - a dining or standing table with a center trough you load with embers to grill over, or ice to chill beverages (or both, split down the middle). Our three hosts pull it apart: Jake (the marketer) - the social-hosting hook, the "everyone cooks around one table" magic, and t...

This week on Tri Diligence : Sprig , a countertop grow box with real soil, seeds, grow lights, and sensors, where an AI handles the watering, feeding, and light so a black thumb still gets a harvest. Our three hosts pull it apart from their own corner: Jake (the marketer) - the "for people who kill plants" hook, the gift angle, and whether anyone falls in love with a vegetable appliance....

Welcome to Tri Diligence , where we unwrap a business idea and see if it survives. This week: Paws & Threads , a direct-to-consumer brand selling original-design apparel for dogs and cats. Our three hosts each pull it apart from their own corner: Jake (the marketer) — brand, story, and why owners will happily pay for a dog in a reflective city jacket. Sarah (the backer) — CAC, LTV, gross margi...