joseph d’andre

Founder to $1M ARR. Business ideas, tools, AI.
SF Bay.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

@Gonzohall @ClintFiore Yes.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

@samesfandiari Plus the extra teams are putting up good fights

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

This summer, when you’re sitting by the pool at a Six Flags or a Disney resort, there’s a nine-figure business right in front of you. You’re watching it the entire time and have no idea.

It’s the lifeguards. The ones whose heads never stop moving, scanning the water, making sure nobody’s kid slips under. You can’t miss them. What you’d never guess is the company standing behind them: Ellis & Associates.

They don’t own the park. They don’t run the rides. They don’t even employ most of the guards. They built the standard everyone else has to meet, then sold it to the entire industry.

Here’s how the money actually works.

They train and certify the guards. Ellis wrote the 10/20 Protection Standard, the reason a lifeguard’s head never stops moving. Scan your entire zone in 10 seconds, reach a drowning guest in 20. That constant, never-at-rest discipline you assume is just a serious teenager? It’s a manufactured protocol, drilled and certified.

Then they audit. This is the part nobody knows. Ellis sends auditors who show up unannounced, dressed as ordinary guests, and watch the guards when the guards think no one is. They run vigilance drops, sinking a manikin or a disguised employee into the water to see if the guard catches it in time. Pass or fail, on the record, tied to the facility’s liability.

Now run the math. 700+ client organizations. 1,600+ facilities. Four continents. Recurring training, certification, and audit revenue, plus a risk-management layer no operator can afford to rip out once a drowning lawsuit is on the table. I bet it’s a nine-figure business.

No kid grows up saying they want to build a lifeguard business. No college student, no adult mapping out their career, ever says it either. Yet here’s one worth nine figures.

That’s the whole lesson. If lifeguarding can be worth nine figures, almost anything can. Take real expertise, an unfair advantage most people don’t have, point it at one niche, and become the undisputed best at it. The size of the niche matters less than being the best in it. Do that, and nine figures is on the table no matter how unglamorous it looks.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

@Bill_Gerrard Banger

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

@thesamparr To be fair, this is mainly just called living in NYC, which even minimalist by the things you own, is maximalist by cost spent to live.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

Claude maxxed out until 7pm?

My work for today is done.

Off to the gym.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

A festival did $11.2M in revenue and still went bankrupt. Three childhood friends bought the wreckage and turned it into one of the most profitable festivals in America.

The BottleRock story:

2013.Two Napa locals launch a 5-day festival on Mother’s Day weekend. 120,000 people show up. Looks like a hit.

It wasn’t. Expenses topped $20M against $11.2M in revenue. Hundreds of vendors and union crews went unpaid. The company filed for bankruptcy by February.

Enter Dave Graham, Justin Dragoo, and Jason Scoggins. Napa natives, childhood friends, all from tech and business backgrounds. Zero events experience. They had gone to year one as fans and walked out thinking the same thing: the concept works, the operators didn’t.

So they ran it like a distressed-asset deal.

Move 1: They didn’t buy the company. They bought selected assets out of bankruptcy. The BottleRock name, and crucially, the deposits BR Festivals had already paid to the Napa Valley Expo. They got a locked venue slot and a known brand with zero liability for the $10M in debt.

Move 2: Then they voluntarily paid down $4.6M of that debt anyway. Half of it. They were not legally on the hook for a cent. But they needed agents, vendors, and the city to trust them, and a town full of unpaid creditors is no place to build a business. They bought goodwill, on purpose.

Move 3: They flipped the festival model. Every other festival is music first. Latitude 38 made it food and wine first, because Napa already had the best chefs and wineries on earth and 4 million tourists a year showing up regardless. They built the Williams Sonoma Culinary Stage, brought in Gordon Ramsay, and priced VIP suites up to $3,500. Critics called it “Whitechella.” It sold out anyway.

The grind: 2014 was brutal. Agents were spooked, so they overpaid for talent and openly called it a rebuilding year. 2015 was the first year it turned a profit.

The exit: In 2017, Live Nation bought a majority stake. Latitude 38 stayed on to run it. It now draws 120,000 a weekend and is considered one of the best-run festivals in the world.

The lesson: a failed launch is a pricing event, not a verdict. The demand was structural. The brand had equity. The only thing broken was execution, and execution is the one thing you can buy cheap.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

Wowzers

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

@samesfandiari Flew to New York a month ago. Both there and back WiFi didn’t work.

Flew to Hawaii 2 months before that, WiFi didn’t work on either.

Looked it up and right now the starlink is only on their small crj type aircraft.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

When I was in law school, I’d ride into the office with my dad in the summers.

On the drive in, he’d murmur to himself, over and over: “I’m so sick and tired of working. I’m so sick and tired of working.”

I was 23. I remember thinking: holy shit. This is what I have to look forward to?

He didn’t hate his job. He just didn’t love it.

That stuck with me.

Most people spend their whole career waiting for work to be over. The real goal is the opposite. Build a life where you can’t tell where work ends and the rest begins:

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

Stop waiting for work to be over. Build the kind you don’t want to end

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

Today I built a Hermes agent.

No meetings. No boss. No status updates.

Just fun, deep work.

I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.

And I got paid to do it. #onward

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

am i gonna have to beat Claude's ass?

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

I look at this weekly.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

@trashh_dev Hahahahaha

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

Set up a Hermes agent. I’ve seen some people online creating UIs for Hermes and Claude Code. Can anyone point me in the direction on how to build that?

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

Life is one big game.

If you’re intelligent and motivated, you can get good at almost any game you pick.

The catch: you only have bandwidth for a few in a lifetime. Career, parenting, a few hobbies. That’s it.

So choosing your career game matters more than people realize.

Corporate America is one option. Stable. Predictable levels. Capped upside. Not particularly fun.

Entrepreneurship is the other. Brutal at the early levels. But once you clear them, you level up exponentially. The rewards compound. And the game itself is just more interesting to play.

Most people pick the easier opening and trade their endgame for it.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

@Jason @Lovable Yep, same.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

I know this is gonna sound like rage bait, but it’s not, it’s just how I feel right now.

Society needs worker bees. That’s fine for the NPCs.

But if you’re not an NPC, you cannot let an employer own 40 hours of your week, five days out of seven. You have to own your own time. Period.

[joseph d’andre @jdandre404]

This is huge. Downgrading my Max plan to $100/m now.

[Claude @claudeai]

We’ve agreed to a partnership with @SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity.

This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.