alexis sabourin

0/$100000 before september 1st, 2026 | @uwaterloo cs

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

day 9 (0/$100000)

i have recently been struggling with understanding what i wanted out of entrepreneurship and how to not get insta killed by the next update of openai/anthropic

after much reflexion, i don't really care about becoming a billionnaire or "building a unicorn", i want to use entrepreneurship as a tool for financial independence, which doesn't require the former

i'm talking about this because the route to unicorn versus the route to financial independence looks extremely different and i wanted to know where to commit my energy/time and where not to

finding a moat is also a challenge in a world where intelligence is cheap and readily available for anyone to use

i was set on building ai automations for real estate landlords but quickly realized that the ai automations market is heavily saturated and getting commoditized fast unless you go downmarket or find a rare niche

but at the same time i can deal with competition and saturation fine enough because i'm not aiming to capture full on markets by myself. i just need a small pie of it to achieve my goals

so i'm slightly pivoting but i'm also aware that the idea is just part of success and that distribution has the biggest impact. the most important thing is to start working, which i'm doing right now

i have about three months left this summer where i can spend about ~20 hours a week on my venture every week alongside my full-time coop. to generate $100k in that timeframe, i will need to be extremely aggressive

from september to december, i will be full-time in school so i can expect a similar amount of hours every week dedicated to the business

then, from january to may 2027, i will be using my coop semester as an enterprise coop to continue building full-time+ (60-70 hours a week) without much other commitments/responsibilities (if the business is doing well at that point, i might as well drop coop altogether)

starting from today, i will be posting once a week on saturdays like clockwork, describing my progress. this is my way of keeping myself accounta

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

@jamoran1356 @EazoAI yes i love building too and wanted to try out the Eazo platform because it was basically selling a dream

but ngl just using codex/claude code is still far better if you know how to prompt and orchestrate agents anyway

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

life update: me and hundreds of hackers got scammed out of our saturday by @EazoAI

their submission pipeline is broken and like 60% of the participants (including me) got cooked and app can't get votes

funny thing is that they are still going forward with the major awards. teams with the highest votes have been running around and begging strangers to vote for their slop app

who tf gave these people $300k? they must be fired immediately

feedback:
- platform is honestly slop, so many bugs and issues, extremely far from being a finished product
- communication was and still is disastrous, extremely distasteful
- hackathon format was one of the worse i've ever seen

anyways, life must go on

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

@RFASEOPM @EazoAI platform was definitely hit or miss. prompts were taking like 20-30 min each for some small changes. also the context window that made forced you to start a new app was very annoying. communication was a bunch of ai generated slop that wasn't even confirmed

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

this weekend, i will be building online for $300000 @EazoAI hackathon

$300000 in cash prize but the real kicker is their full stack agentic development platform

everything is in natural language, the platform handles backend, frontend, database, infrastructure for you

let's see if i can pull off a quick win

https://t.co/1VQHwMJSWU

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

will be at uc berkeley ai hackathon 2026 in late june, looking for a team and side quests

btw cutc montreal 2026 has been postponed to october so i guess i'm not going

also, $100k challenge has not been abandoned, i just ended finals season, started an internship and i'm resolving some stuff in my life but day 9 will finally arrive soon

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

will be at cutc montreal 2026, excited to see what people are building

https://t.co/TNrcdVJW5k

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

day 8 (0/$100000)

finals are lowkey frying me so i'm back to an hour of work a day. this is pretty bad as success in entrepreneurship is not done part time. schedule will free up in about two weeks though

i also laid out my basic life maintenance hours and i currently have 84.4 hours locked every week (including sleep and all chores), a week is 168 hours btw. soon enough, i will be able to free up about 10 hours a week from that, that compounds fast in the long run

i also realized that sales is the most important thing for a business after having a good product, so i'm learning from one of the best: alex hormozi. technical founder with sales knowledge is the most diabolical combo

i'm also currently conducting a little bit of market research in the real estate world to really see how it can be fluidified with my agents, i'm also looking into setting up basic infrastructure for such agents

will write day 9 on apr 13 (not enough will happen in between), apr 11 will be next milestone post for 𝕏 account. first sale estimate is postponed because i realized i need to lock in more on what value do i provide, this might require some clever tactics on my part

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

day 7 (0/$100000)

yesterday was basically my first roadblock. i got word that smaller landlords couldn't be clients because saas can already automate their issues and also they don't have enough money

my updated hypothesis is that my aaas paradigm is still useful for more complex/personalized workflows. so like interactions between multiple systems and departments

here's the thing, agents are like micro saas that can do something very quick very well, and i can build them fast. but compared to saas, they don't need as much setup, it's just a pipeline, very portable and easily manageable

so right now i guess i'm trying to see where they would fit, and i'm planning on exploring mid sized property management firms next

now something i quickly realized, i can't do sales if i have nothing to sell, and i am trying to sell workflows, but i don't actually have them because i don't actually know what are the automatable workflows/processes in my addressable market

without having that anchor, i won't be able to sell to cold leads, because they won't give me a chance (probably) to prove myself

to solve that, i'm going to do a little bit of market analysis on relevant forums so as to identify common repeated pain points from prospects

then i'm going to build some initial demos for what i found. after which i will be able to leverage those demos and knowledge when selling, which hopefully will help my case

then with each clients, i will get insider knowledge and more workflows that i can then market with others...

anyways, tomorrow i'm going to use up my daily hour for market research. i'm also postponing my first cold outreach batch that was due on tuesday because this won't make me progress at this point

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

day 6 (0/$100000)

i disqualified my first lead today. after leveraging my first warm lead in the real estate management industry (small landlord), i realized something: my business model can't really work with smaller landlords ($1m - $10m portfolios)

while talking with them, i noticed that first of all their cash flow was heavily limited and second of all, most of the repetitive tasks were easy enough so that traditional saas could already automate them with a pretty cheap monthly subscription

i'm building personalized agents, which are more expensive than traditional saas because it's not as easily scalable. i need to cover the workflows that even saas can't cover

so i'm upgrading my target leads to mid-sized landlords (around $25m+ portfolios). i have my second warm lead which is located in that range but they're known to be a very hard negotiator so i'm going to hold a bit on that front

i'm upgrading my initial lead batch and my pitch to reflect this new reality, first cold outreach batch is still planned for next tuesday and i'm raw dogging it with @Fastmail, no smartlead or whatever here for now

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

day 5 (0/$100000)

you know i'm starting to understand why so many "founders" are unproductive and won't be successful, they never talk to their users

especially in this day and age, it's so easy to build features and post on 𝕏 but at the end of the day, you need to talk to the users in order to validate your market hypothesis

that's what i'm doing right now, selling before building. the revenue will probably remain at 0 for the next few weeks, until i secure my first client but then if my market hypothesis is right, it should create a snowball effect

tomorrow i have my first discovery call with a warm lead, i'm going to gather insider knowledge and try to get my first client even if it's at a steep discount

next tuesday i'm launching my first cold outreach batch. i worked hard to target the companies directly in order to maximize discovery call book rate

today i mostly built my in-house crm in one hour with notion, i'm basically running my whole business on notion. so i can track my leads, automatically track status changes, etc.

i also have a very long term vision for this venture, it's very exciting. if my current market hypothesis is validated, i think i might have an unicorn under the rug. but that's cheap talk, back to work

other than that today i mostly worked on honing the sales pipeline and preparing for tomorrow's call

[alexis sabourin @ctrlsombre]

day 4 (0/$100000)

today was mostly finding cold outbound leads in my market segment (montreal). gathering contact info and everything, that's actually a pain to do ngl

i'm preparing my first cold outreach batch for next tuesday (can't do it tomorrow, it's easter friday). warm lead call on saturday incoming, will prepare for that tomorrow

also did a bit of back and forth with opus 4.6 to nail down the business model, what makes me resistant and valuable compared to saas that can build agents, i still need to reflect on that but i think there is still a lot of value in the fact that i'm focusing on a specific vertical with security and reliability in mind, which is tough to achieve with ai agents in general

right now for the leads, i'm just raw dogging google maps in montreal. it's pretty slow and i know how to automate it but for now volume isn't the main goal. the main goal is to get those first clients so that i can build some case studies and social proof and eventually switch to a inbound/warm lead passive strategy

i've thought about the business model once more and basically it's planned as being selling a scoped pilot, then renting the agents on a retainer every month and possible expansion plan by the company, we'll see if that holds up