Build log
Bubble and Squeak and FDS
How founder delusion syndrome took a Brexit-era hiring idea, through a three-sided marketplace, past a competitive wipeout, and into something that actually needed to exist.
Let me tell you about a disease.
It is not fatal. In fact the people who have it tend to build more, ship more, and tolerate more sustained uncertainty than almost anyone else in any room they walk into. But it will absolutely cause you to build the wrong thing, confidently, at full speed, for longer than is strictly rational.
Founder Delusion Syndrome. FDS. Every founder has it to some degree. The ones who say they do not are either lying or they have never actually shipped anything.
I have a reasonably advanced case.
Brit Hire
About a year ago there was a lot of noise in the UK about young British professionals leaving for Dubai, Costa Rica, Lisbon. The reasons were obvious: better weather, better quality of life, and a significantly reduced tax burden. If you are in your thirties and thinking seriously about building generational wealth, the UK is a difficult argument to make. That is not cynicism. That is arithmetic.
I saw a marketplace in it. British professionals abroad, with British cultural nuance, British industry knowledge, British work patterns, available at rates that made sense precisely because of where they had chosen to live. Match them with British companies that needed that capability without the London salary. No language barrier. No timezone problem worth speaking of. Just the right people in the wrong postcode.
The app was genuinely good. Internal name: Brit Hire. Clean, simple, well-built. I mothballed it when Panamorphix consumed every available hour, which if you have read anything else on this site will come as no surprise whatsoever.
That was FDS round one. The idea was not wrong. The timing was wrong. Into the crate it went.
Deployed Works, Version One
Two months ago the crate opened.
I pulled Brit Hire back out and looked at it differently. The underlying mechanic, matching capability to need, was sound. But the scope was too narrow. What if the match was not just people abroad, but any form of capability: human, AI agent, MCP, consultant, SaaS, service as software? What if the system started not with who you needed but with what success looked like when the work was done?
That became Deployed Works. Start with the outcome. Define what done means. Then and only then does the system recommend across the full capability spectrum. Human or tool or combination. Matching happens last, not first.
There were a lot of moving parts underneath that made it work. A knowledge graph improving recommendations over time. A whole-platform matching system, also graph-based. Structured JSON agents handling the logic between layers. The architecture was genuinely interesting and the product was, I still believe, the right shape for a real problem.
FDS round two. Full speed. High conviction. Three-sided marketplace. The absolute insanity of it only becomes clear in retrospect.
The Wipeout
I do competitor research monthly at minimum. These days it is daily, because I built an internal tool called Metri-Graph that tracks ten of the closest competitors across all channels automatically.
Metri-Graph started surfacing names I had not seen before. Large incumbents, well-funded, already repositioning toward exactly the same idea. They had all three sides of the marketplace already populated. They had millions in spend available to move. They had distribution I could not match and a runway I could not compete with on any realistic timeline.
I pulled the product the same day I understood what I was looking at.
Staging site down. Production site down. Marketing site left standing as a placeholder while I thought about what had actually happened and what, if anything, was worth keeping.
The Bubble and Squeak Moment
This is a term I have used before on this site. Bubble and Squeak is what you make from leftover ingredients. Nothing wasted. Everything that survived the original meal goes into the pan together and becomes something better than any of the components would have been alone.
I sat with the wreckage for approximately two hours.
The knowledge graph. The outcome-first briefing structure. The capability matching logic. The JSON agents. The understanding of what happens when a care system needs a human to show up and nobody has built a clean way to arrange that.
That last one. That was the thing.
Octeryx handles care coordination. Just Hail Mary handles autonomous hardware deployment. But neither of them solves the last-mile human problem: when the care plan says someone needs a visit and the phone calls start and the same information gets repeated across three providers and nobody knows whether anyone actually went.
Software can spot the problem. Software can organise the context. Software cannot knock on the door.
Two hours after I pulled the original Deployed Works, the new one existed in outline. Not a general-purpose capability marketplace. A human deployment layer for health and care, built specifically to turn a care team's need into one clear request, one responsible provider, and one useful update back to the team that asked.
This is not a pivot of the old codebase. The Go and Next.js version is gone. Deployed Works is being rebuilt from first principles in governed Rust.
The care sector does not get approximate software. It gets compile or die.
The outcome-first structure from the original product is still there. The matching logic is still there. The graph is still there. The ingredients survived. The pan is new.
Why FDS Is Not the Enemy
Founder Delusion Syndrome gets you into trouble. It also gets you started.
Without FDS I do not build Brit Hire. Without Brit Hire the outcome-first matching mechanic does not exist. Without the original Deployed Works the graph infrastructure does not get built. Without the competitive wipeout I do not sit still long enough to see what the components were actually pointing at all along.
The delusion is the entry point. The FAFO cycle is the process. And the Bubble and Squeak moment is what happens when the finding-out part finally catches up with the fucking-around part and the two of them produce something neither could have reached alone.
Deployed Works is now the human last mile in a care infrastructure stack that needed exactly that piece to be complete.
The secret sauce, it turns out, was everything that did not survive the first version.