Hey Everyone,
I want to start with a thank you. To everyone who's walked through 1717 Cleveland with an idea, half an idea, or no idea at all, and just wanted to be around people building something.
Some of the people that came out to our Ice Cream Social invite to the community!
He wasn't done impressing us
A few weeks ago, a founder toured the house. What he'd already built was impressive on its own, a health tech company built around helping people actually stick with a hard, long-term treatment plan. That alone would've been a solid tour.
But that wasn't even half of it. He also had a side project, something he'd built just for fun.
He loves to build. So one night he went on Reddit and searched for the biggest problems people complain about. He found one: something like one out of every five DoorDash orders comes out wrong, and the restaurant eats the cost every time. So he built a fix, computer vision running on a Raspberry Pi and a camera, about $600 in hardware, wired into a restaurant's POS system. The camera watches what's actually getting made and packaged. Wrong order, an iPad up front flashes red before the plate goes out the door. He tested it on a friend's restaurant and cut chargebacks by a wide margin.
He told us all this in one of the front rooms like it was no big deal. We didn't think so.
At House Jam, we put him on the spot in front of his breakout group: tell everyone what you just told us. He did. Sitting in that same small group was someone who runs health innovation events out of one of the city's hospital-adjacent innovation hubs, and he couldn't stop thinking about it.
A little while later, that turned into something concrete. Turns out the health-innovation lead had something on the calendar that same month, a reception tied to a regional health AI conference, a couple hundred clinicians and health system people in the room, and a handful of startups getting a shot to show what they'd built. He'd been thinking about the founder's story since House Jam, figured the work could hold its own in that crowd, and reached out with an invite to apply for one of those spots.
The founder didn't hesitate. He said yes almost immediately, and mentioned, almost as an aside, that he had two more stories just like it, other tools he'd already quietly built that were changing how people work, tools he said he still doesn't fully understand himself.
He came here with a side project, something he built just for fun on top of the company he actually runs, and walked out having applied to show it to a couple hundred people who might actually use it.
Collisions leading to breakthroughs at the House Jam
What Collision Day sounds like once it gets going
Every Collision Day kicks off the same way, quick intros, then somebody demos what they're building. But the good stuff usually happens after, once everyone's done presenting and just starts asking each other questions. What are you using for that? Can I see how you set that up?
I pulled five of those moments from the last two Wednesdays. Nothing about them was planned, but each one stuck with someone:
One builder kept losing hours to messy file structures across client projects. He started dropping everything into an Obsidian vault instead, markdown files, all interconnected, so Claude could reason across an entire project at once instead of him digging through folders. Took five minutes to explain. Saved him hours a week.
Someone in the room keeps a Claude session running on a VM (a virtual machine, basically a computer that lives in the cloud instead of on his desk). He uses an app called Termius to SSH into it, which just means remotely logging into that other computer over a secure connection, so he can shut his laptop completely, walk away, and pick up the exact same conversation from his phone later, right where he left off.
One founder had built her whole workflow in Notion for months, then ripped it out and built her own custom system instead. Once she knew exactly how she worked, the generic tool was more in her way than it was helping.
Another builder was burning through his AI budget on simple stuff, so he started routing the easy tasks, like pulling an action item out of a meeting, to a cheaper model instead of the expensive one. Cut his bill without losing anything.
One founder doing cloud security consulting was trying to figure out who to even talk to at a mid-market company, heads of architecture, heads of cloud platform, that kind of thing. He started using a tool called Apollo to find the right people directly instead of guessing.
Nobody was selling anything. People were just handing each other what they'd already figured out.
Darcie, a member of the house, sharing what she has been building!
The Other Side of Startups
Last week, Chris Rosbrook, Kelly Moulton, and Craig Ready sat down with Drew for a panel called The Other Side of Startups, the stuff nobody posts about: pricing, insurance, contracts, the partner who turns out to be a problem.
Here's what came out of it:
Get your pricing right from day one. Get it wrong early and you can be paying for that mistake for a long time.
The best time to work out money with a co-founder is before there's any money on the table.
Insurance isn't a cost, it's a door opener. Bigger clients won't sign with you without it.
Treat your runway like the whole game. Know where the cash is actually going.
Trust your gut. Listen twice as much as you talk. And when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time, before they get the chance to prove it to you twice.
Our amazing panelists dropping real wisdom from experience
What's coming
House Jam IV is September 10th, 6 to 8:30pm, back at 1717 Cleveland. We're trying something new this time. Before the night, we'll send out a short questionnaire and sort everyone into one of two groups. Founders are the people who've got a real problem or an idea, but can't build it themselves. Builders are the people who can actually build, or vibe-code, but don't necessarily have an idea of their own yet. Instead of putting founders with founders like we used to, we're pairing builders with founders, closer to a Steve Jobs and Wozniak setup, so people leave with more than just a good conversation.
Collision Wednesdays keep happening every week. Here's how the day runs: come in anytime starting at 9am, intros kick off at 10, 11 to 12 is time with Drew, and after that it's a free-for-all, stay as long as you want, work on your own stuff, or go find whoever's got the tool you need.
Wrapping up
Build alone long enough and you hit a ceiling you didn't even know was there. The house helps you become the best version of yourself, because that version of you doesn't show up when you're building alone.
You don't have to be a member to have a breakthrough here. You just have to be in the room. The more you come to the house, the richer the soil becomes.
Until next time,
Chris
P.s. What are you building, and what are you building it with? Reply and tell us. You might be the next story in this newsletter.
