I've been the client.
Twenty-five years building software, ten of them running the kinds of businesses we now build for. A million dollars in month one, and two companies I lost.
How I got here.
I taught myself to build when the yellow pages still mattered more than the internet.
My first company — building ecommerce platforms on osCommerce, back when putting a shop online was still a project rather than a signup.
Running projects for companies whose names are on buildings.
- AT&T
- JPMorgan Chase
- Bank of America
Restaurants, a nail salon, three online businesses. I built the software for all of them.
One company, all of my focus, and the first time everything I've learned points in the same direction.
What I built, and what happened to it.
Five ventures. Two of them I still have. The rest taught me more.
Over $1,000,000 in our first month. Hoverboards were catching fire, so instead of advertising we built a PR campaign explaining why — cheap batteries — and what to look for when buying one. It ran on more than thirty outlets: ABC, Fox, national radio, Inside Edition, and Good Morning America, where we sold $400,000 in a day. All of it went through a Shopify store I built myself.
Zero to over 20,000 international members. Where I learned to run advertising across borders, in currencies and languages that weren't mine.
A platform to buy or rent pre-owned Gucci and Chanel, with a monthly plan for a different handbag every month. Before Rent the Runway existed. Nobody had built the category yet, so there was nothing to copy.
Grew to five locations. Still running today.
Modern Asian fusion, and a bubble tea franchise. I turned off the ovens in late 2025 and walked away, which is one of the hardest things I've done. Going back through those numbers line by line is what started We Know Restaurants.
The campaign that worked.
We never bought an ad. We answered the question the whole market was asking, and thirty newsrooms carried it for us.
Every hoverboard story in December 2015 was about batteries catching fire. So we stopped talking about our product and started explaining the problem — which cells were failing, why, and what a buyer should check before handing over any money.
Every newsroom covering it needed a manufacturer who could explain it. That turned into more than thirty appearances across television and radio — Good Morning America, Inside Edition, ABC and Fox stations, national talk radio. On the GMA day alone we sold $400,000.
One idea, told once, distributed thirty times. No media buy could have done that.
Ten years later that's still the whole method. Don't build a better version of the thing everyone sells — work out what the question actually is, answer it properly, and let that do the work an advertising budget can't.
And then I lost three of them.
Glitek ended for reasons outside my control. Segway brought a patent dispute, and new UL rules reset how a hoverboard had to be built — the category I'd been selling into effectively stopped existing.
Parcel Zoom and Fiona's Find ended because of me. I was running too many things at once, none of them getting what it needed, and when one went down it pulled the others with it. That isn't bad luck. That's a founder who mistook activity for progress.
Some of it I couldn't control. Some of it was my fault. I can tell you which was which.
I sat with that for a long time. What I took from it is the thing I'd have paid real money to know ten years earlier: nothing compounds unless you stay with it.
Now there's one.
Why any of that matters to you.
I've signed the lease. I've made the payroll and missed the payroll. I've paid the processor, the delivery app, the booking platform and the SEO retainer, and I've gone back through the statements line by line to find out where it all went.
And I built the software for every one of those businesses myself — while running them. That combination is the entire reason LFG works the way it does. I am not learning your business from a brief. I have been sitting where you are sitting.
Everything is buildable now, which means the only thing that still matters is knowing what to build. That part I learned the expensive way.
Tony LeFounder · LFG VenturesBring me your numbers.
Thirty minutes, with me. Tell me how the business actually runs.
“I've been building since the yellow pages mattered more than the internet.”Tony · Founder, LFG Ventures