small theoryLABS

THREE FOUNDERS. ONE SMALL THEORY.

Build a business.
Earn the freedom
to build another.

We were three founders betting that AI could help a small team build profitable software. One business would fund the next, without depending on venture capital.

Anirudh AgarwalMaharshi ChattopadhyayHarsh Jain
Anirudh, Maharshi & Harsh
Our time, our work, our bet to make.
Follow the experiment
THE IDEA WE STARTED WITHRevenue → room to experiment
3FoundersProduct · AI · Engineering
bf.BeatFantasyThe first business
$RevenueFund the next idea
{ }WireplainDeveloper tools c.CircuitProduct analytics LEARN & REINVEST

Start with a problem we understood personally.

Our first business reached 100K+ users and $200K+ ARR.

So why did we eventually close the lab?

01BEATFANTASYFantasy sports · Consumer app + APIs

Before it was a business,
it was our problem.

All three of us were avid sports bettors. We researched matches, wrote algorithms and built fantasy teams. Then came the scramble to turn that research into lineups before a match began.

BeatFantasy grew out of that routine. We wanted to take a player all the way from understanding a match to getting their teams into play.

FROM RESEARCH TO THE START OF PLAYThe BeatFantasy app
01 / 03

Sports-data pipelines, predictions and backtesting powered the research.

WHAT THE PRODUCT HAD TO GET RIGHT

A better prediction was only
part of the job.

It was easy to get absorbed in the models. But someone building twenty teams before a match also needed the practical steps to work: choosing players, generating lineups and moving them into the platform they used.

That shaped what we built. Our data pipelines, simulations and backtesting had to serve a complete experience, right up to the deadline.

THE BIGGER THESIS

Be the place a serious
sports fan starts.

We believed serious fans would play across more platforms and formats. Fantasy was our starting point; independent sports intelligence was the bigger opportunity. We also offered our predictions and team generation as APIs to other sports businesses.

Match dataPredictionsSimulations
bf.Research & decide
Fantasy sportsOther formatsPartner APIs
100K+

users reached

$200K+

annual recurring revenue

AT ITS STRONGEST

The business
bought us time.

Seeing people use and pay for something we had built changed the ambition. The next product no longer felt like a distant possibility. We could explore it while running a real business.

But the freedom we wanted still depended on one market.

India’s 2023 GST changes were putting pressure on real-money gaming. As we continued operating BeatFantasy, the tools we had made for ourselves began to look like possible businesses of their own.

Could a tool we needed ourselves
become the next business?

02WIREPLAINDeveloper tools · Chrome extension

The next idea was
in our browser.

Building BeatFantasy meant working with platforms whose APIs were not publicly documented. We examined network requests and responses, piecing together how they worked before we could build anything with them.

We made Wireplain to shorten that investigation. It captured the traffic and used AI to explain it, generate documentation and answer a builder’s questions.

Wireplain / API workspaceWorkflow illustration
01 CAPTURE
GET/matches/42200
GET/players200
{
  "match_id": 42,
  "starts_at": "18:30",
  "players": [ … ]
}
02 UNDERSTAND
AI-generated documentation

Get a match

Retrieve a match and its players.

match_idinteger
starts_attime
playersarray
03 ASK & BUILD
How do I get the players for a match?

The match response includes a players array. Start with the match ID.

Grounded in captured requests
THE QUESTION THE PROTOTYPE COULDN’T ANSWER

Useful today.
Needed again tomorrow?

We could see the value in our own work. The harder question was whether enough developers encountered this problem often enough to pay for a dedicated tool.

An occasional investigation could justify using Wireplain. It was harder to see that becoming the recurring revenue the lab needed.

We built the extension, but did not take it further as a standalone business.

View the original Chrome extension

Another problem kept coming back:
what were our users actually doing?

03CIRCUITProduct analytics · Event catalog + AI analyst

We had the data.
We still had to find the story.

We spent hours watching sessions, reviewing events and searching logs to understand our users. The clues were scattered across tools. Connecting them took time away from improving the product.

We built an internal AI analyst to bring those signals together and help us decide what to investigate. That grew into Circuit: a launched event catalog and an exploration of a broader analyst for other product teams.

FROM SIGNALS TO A QUESTION WORTH ASKING
▷Sessions
⋮Events
!Errors
⌘Product context
c.AI analyst
A STARTING POINTWhere did users get stuck?

Follow the journey. Find the drop-off.

Original product prototype · select an image to enlarge
✓Event catalog launchedRead the launch
WHERE OUR CONFIDENCE CHANGED

It helped us.
Would another team make room for it?

Inside our own business, we could connect the data and change the workflow ourselves. Selling Circuit meant asking another team to do that work. They already had tools, habits and substantial investments in their stack. Established vendors were moving toward similar AI capabilities.

01Existing tools

Teams had invested in their stack.

02Integration work

A useful trial needed data and permissions.

03Longer sales cycles

More investment before commitment.

We could keep improving the analyst. We were less convinced that a small team could turn it into the sustainable business we had set out to build.

THE CONDITIONS AROUND US CHANGED

Then the business behind
the experiments lost its future.

In 2025, India enacted legislation prohibiting online money games. BeatFantasy depended on that ecosystem. The opportunity we had been building toward was cut short, and we shut down the business.

Our other products were at different stages. We had working technology and ideas we could pursue. We no longer had the same foundation beneath them.

2023

The economics tightened.

GST changes put pressure on the real-money gaming ecosystem around BeatFantasy.

The GST changes

Alongside the business

We explored the next ideas.

Wireplain and Circuit grew alongside BeatFantasy, from problems we encountered while building it.

{ }c.

2025

The market closed.

Legislation prohibiting online money games cut short BeatFantasy’s opportunity.

The legislation
THREE FOUNDERS. ONE LAST DECISION.

What did we still
believe enough to pursue?

There were more things we could build. Choosing one meant committing our time to a new business whose commercial case was still uncertain.

We came back to the reason we had started: software businesses that could pay their own way and give us the freedom to keep going. We couldn’t see a sufficiently clear route to that with the opportunities in front of us.

We decided to close the lab.

The difficult part was having more ideas,
and deciding that none was a good enough reason to keep going.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE WORK

There were three of us.

Anirudh Agarwal

Anirudh Agarwal

Product & AI

Product, data engineering and technical leadership. Previously at Postman.

Meet Anirudh
Maharshi Chattopadhyay

Maharshi Chattopadhyay

Engineering

Data systems at Zluri. Computer vision at Postman.

Meet Maharshi
Harsh Jain

Harsh Jain

Business & growth

Growth and partnerships at CRED. Co-founder of Numans.

Meet Harsh
WHAT WE TAKE INTO THE NEXT THING

We got part of
the answer.

A small team could build a revenue-generating business and explore several more products. We had done that.

Each new idea still needed people who would adopt it, pay for it and keep using it. That is where we start now.

The lab is closed. The work shapes what we build next.
FROM BEATFANTASY

Can the customer
finish the job?

FROM WIREPLAIN

Will they need it
often enough to pay?

FROM CIRCUIT

What does adopting it
ask them to change?

Continue the conversation with Anirudh