I'm building Flowtex — a second brain for small teams that connects your apps, AIs, and team context in one workspace.
Before touching any code, I spent 3 weeks posting on Reddit asking small teams about their biggest workflow problems. No product pitch, no landing page link. Just questions.
Here's what I learned.
The problem is real — and emotionally painful
Every thread I posted got the same pattern. People describing lost decisions, context that disappeared between apps, and AI tools that started from scratch every session. One person said: "the decision-on-a-call-never-written-down thing killed us more than anything."
That's not frustration. That's pain with a price tag.
Everyone has a workaround. Nobody has a solution.
CONTEXT.md files. Notion as single source of truth. Weekly sync meetings. Voice memos transcribed into docs. People weren't lacking creativity — they were working around a problem that tools hadn't solved.
The moment I saw someone say "the context problem is real but not solved yet" I knew the gap was real.
The positioning trap
My first instinct was to build a horizontal workspace for everyone. Three weeks of conversations changed that. The pain is sharpest for small technical teams — founders, solopreneurs, and 2-5 person teams building products. They switch between the most tools, lose the most context, and have the least tolerance for it.
The narrower the target, the clearer the value.
What I built instead of automating
Most tools in this space are automation platforms. You configure agents, set rules, and they run in the background. That's Lindy, Zapier, Make.
Flowtex is different. It's a workspace you're actively present in. You connect your apps, give it context about your business, and then just tell it what you need — schedule a call, add a client, write a follow-up. It executes with full context across everything. No pre-configuration. No agents running while you sleep.
The numbers
3 weeks of Reddit posts across 15 subreddits
~40 comments with genuine pain signal
9/10 validation score before writing any code
Landing page live at flowtex.xyz with waitlist open
What I'd do differently
Start the DMs earlier. The most valuable signal came from private conversations, not public comments. People are more honest one-on-one.
What's your process for validating before building? Curious how others approach this.
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