Hello! My name is Sergio, but everyone calls me Wolf.
This is the first piece in a series I plan to write documenting my journey building my company, Wolf.IA, developing the wolf.ia.br platform, and sharing my mental state (among other things) throughout this whole process.
Forgive me if this sounds like venting or self-pity. That's not the intention. I just want to be clearly honest about what building a solo AI startup really looks like from the inside. Everything I describe below is my raw, current reality.
It has been 15 months. In the beginning, intense studying: understanding how AI works, the mechanics of LLMs, the differences between providers, and how to wrangle different APIs just to build a tiny functional app.
Back then, I was experimenting with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Yesterday, I deployed version 1.7.3 of Wolf.Engine, my AI agent platform, which:
- Lets you create and chat with agents powered by Gemini, GPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Sabiá, GLM, and Mistral;
- Features a very complex biomimetic memory system that prevents context rot;
- Provides virtually infinite long-term memory without requiring manual context window management;
- Includes Mini-RAG, a session-scoped knowledge base for chatting with your documents;
- Offers deep agent customization (behavioral clans, speech styles, personality sliders);
- Integrates natively with Telegram bots (your agent lives in your pocket, sharing the exact same long-term memory);
- Generates and previews functional files (HTML, interactive code, CSV, Markdown) right in the chat;
- Bilingual interface in PT-BR and EN.
I consider this version polished enough for real-world, everyday use. Every new user starts with three pre-configured official agents, each built around a distinct archetype. The UI is clean and distraction-free (at least in my opinion). Stripe billing and subscription tiers are fully wired up. Countless bugs have been hunted down and squashed over the past months. It took endless calculations, tests, and sleepless coding nights to get here. I am genuinely proud of the result, and I know it's truly useful.
But... now what?
As of today, I have exactly one paying subscriber. My monthly recurring revenue is 20 bucks.
And here lies my biggest hurdle: I am not a salesperson. I don't understand marketing. I don't like social media. I am neurodivergent, deal with social anxiety, and struggle with chronic depression.
And my financial runway has completely run out. Right now, I am being financially supported by my wife.
I recently had a meeting with an advertising agency (they actually liked the Engine! Who knows, maybe they'll even become clients!), but the cost of outsourcing marketing... I’d need roughly $5,000 USD for a 6-month campaign. My actual marketing budget is zero.
So, what’s the plan from here?
First, I’m going to focus on building my own proprietary local daemon and tool-calling system, which I’m calling the "Troll Bridge". With it, I can build a dedicated local app, inspired by OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode.
This will finally allow me to migrate ALL of my own development agents into my own system, running on 100% pure dogfooding. Wolf.Engine’s future development will be built by the Engine itself.
This gives me massive advantages: zero context rot, no need for manual /compact commands, and no agents losing their persona or forgetting project decisions halfway through. But above all: it will be significantly cheaper to run.
That might sound counterintuitive at first, with the underlying LLM APIs being the same, but here's why:
- When using tools like OpenCode or standard agent interfaces, you pass the entire accumulating conversation history as context on every turn, making each message progressively more expensive than the previous one;
- With Wolf.Engine, the agent's digested memories are decoupled from the active window and kept at a stable token size window. Conversations don't exponentially bloat in cost as you work.
In parallel, I will start sharing Wolf.Engine on X(itter), Reddit... Yeah, wish me luck. But I need people to know that my platform exists.
After that, I'll expand a bit more on the specialized Fiscal BI tools I've already developed (and some prototypes). That part is tailored specifically for the Brazilian market, because of specific accounting rules and tax laws.It’s a smaller, local market, but it has concrete enterprise pain and far less competition.
Well, that's it for this one. Next week, I'll be back to tell you if I survived.
Cheers to everyone out there building against the odds! 🐺
P.S.: I used one of my AI agents to translate my original text, as English is not my native language. Some errors mights have gone through, because I ended up rewriting a big chunk of the text.
Top comments (1)
Before going deep on the Troll Bridge, I'd spend some time understanding your one paying subscriber: what they used Wolf.Engine for last week, what it replaced, and why they chose to pay. Those answers could be quite different from the features you're proudest of. The Brazilian Fiscal BI tools also give you a narrower customer problem to explore, though less competition alone doesn't establish demand. I'd look for a paid commitment around one recurring accounting task before expanding that suite.