Startup Journey of Internode (Week 1.)

The two-week retreat that taught us the difference between impressive technology and useful products.

Building an AI startup with a remote global team sounds like one of the most exciting things you can do! It is fun - but the reality is more challenging than the average person would expect. Since starting our journey together in April, we’ve been building Internode’s foundation and have just started work on our customer-facing product. We're going to publish short bi-weekly updates on our journey and progress. Here's what happened in the last weeks and how it impacted us.

- The Founders (Istvan, Sean, Balazs)

The Tahoe Experiment

The three of us traveled to Lake Tahoe and locked ourselves in a cabin for two weeks. As a fully remote team, we thought an intensive in-person session might help us tackle our biggest challenges as founders. Those two weeks felt like a complete startup journey compressed into 14 days: emotional highs and lows, strategic pivots, personal growth, and the exhilarating rush of building something new.

At the beginning of our trip, we got rejected from an accelerator. For a moment we sat in silence, dealing with disappointment, questioning our previous decisions. Had we been wasting time on the wrong vision? That afternoon on the cabin deck, we asked ourselves the hard questions. Why did our pitch fall flat? How come we put so much effort into something and didn't get the desired results?

We had met with many exceptional engineering leaders worldwide who all got excited about our technology, but they struggled to see how they'd actually use Internode in their daily work. Then it hit us: We had been pitching an AI technology, not a real solution to a human problem. In our excitement about deep tech, we'd lost sight of the people we wanted to help.

That realization stung, but it also set us free. When you're the leader, builder, and first user as a startup founder, facing this truth was a breakthrough for us.

Putting Humans First

We literally pushed our laptops aside and revisited our user interviews. Scanning through the words of our first interview candidates, we began listing the everyday pains people face in workplace collaboration. We focused on finding the first step of productizing our technology. We wanted to find the core problem that everyone faced and what our users would be most excited about. We also conducted online calls and interviews to get more feedback on our business model and product ideas. After hours of discussions, testing prototypes and workshops, a clear pattern emerged.
We had something to start with.

The atmosphere in the cabin completely changed. We weren't building technology anymore - we were building a product, laser-focused on users. Sitting around the hot tub that evening, we brainstormed three product ideas that could use the exceptional tech foundation we'd spent the previous months building. It was a humbling experience, to say the least.

As founders being successful previously in our careers, we thought we knew what was best. But we needed this failure to see that we were building the wrong thing. Our excitement returned, but this time for simplifying instead of adding features. This shift to a human-centered approach cleared our heads, aligned our team, and set us up to build an MVP.

Building Something Real in 10 Days

With our new purpose, we dove into building our minimum viable product. Turning our big vision into something tangible in two weeks seemed impossible, but in retrospect, we created a working MVP in just 10 days. It was tough for us as perfectionists, since the first MVP was clunky, slow, and ugly and lacked any security. Yet in just 10 days, we’d generated more value for customers than we had in the months since our April kickoff.

There were embarrassing moments. Our first demo took nearly 20 minutes to generate output. We looked at each other anxiously, would any user wait that long? When we finally got our deployment pipeline working, we were extremely happy. It might sound silly, but for us it meant the difference between a project and a real product we could put in users' hands.

Building the MVP wasn't just about code, planning or design - it was about something much more: rebuilding ourselves as a team. Late nights debugging turned into deep conversations about what we want Internode to stand for. That night, we talked about our vision of helping teams make better decisions and how that mission needs to shine through every design choice we make.

The Power of Retros: Learning About Ourselves

We all acknowledge the mistakes we made in the past. From now on, we need to focus on avoiding them and consciously building Internode. Having an open discussion and agreeing that we’ll succeed only if we take full ownership, identify our missteps, and actively prevent them from happening again was crucial.

Through these personal retrospectives, we uncovered weaknesses and rediscovered strengths. More importantly, we created a space where calling out our own shortcomings wasn't seen as failure, but as growth. It was heartening to see us back each other up. This level of trust and mutual support has been one of the week's greatest outcomes. We grew not just as a company, but as people.

Perhaps the most profound lesson from this week is the value of saying "no" to distractions, to unnecessary features, even to good ideas that just aren't great right now. Anything that didn't serve that goal had to be reconsidered or dropped. And you know what? Saying "no" was hard at first, but quickly became liberating. We saw immediate improvements once we adopted this focus. Our sprint planning became sharper - we set clear, quantifiable goals and stuck to them.

This philosophy also extended to work-life balance. We realized that focusing on what matters meant not only saying no to unnecessary work, but also knowing when to step away and recharge. One afternoon, we all said "no" to building for a couple of hours and went on a hike along a scenic mountain trail. That break - that deliberate refusal to grind non-stop, paid dividends. It reinforced that every "yes" is a trade-off, and every well-placed "no" protects our energy and attention for what truly matters.

Looking Ahead: A New Chapter Begins

As we write this from our homes, there's a sense we're closing one chapter of our startup story and beginning another. The emotional rollercoaster from accelerator rejection to technical breakthroughs bonded us in unexpected ways.

We came home with a working MVP, clearer vision, and stronger team. More importantly, we're carrying a new mindset: one that balances our passion for deep AI technology with unwavering commitment to solve real human problems.

The early-stage startup journey is often portrayed as relentless optimism and quick success, but the truth is it's messy, humbling, and incredibly human. In those two weeks, we felt despair, hope, frustration, joy, doubt, and confidence. We learned to check our egos, embrace brutal feedback, trust each other deeply, and celebrate small wins.

To fellow early-stage founders and everyone following our journey: we hope sharing our real experience gives you a window into what this path is actually like. It's not easy, but it's worth it.

– The Internode Founders