Hal9 Weekly Roundup: Why we turned down a $200K MVP, and Greeny's Carbon Credit Demo


At Hal9, we help Startup Founders turn AI ideas into products—fast. Each week, we’ll share insights from our founder Javier, spotlight real customer stories, and keep you updated on what’s happening at Hal9 and beyond.

Javier's Insights of the Week

Javier shared some great insights on LinkedIn this week, including:

Scaling Beyond Bottlenecks
Growth stalls when people—not platforms—become the constraint. Javier highlighted how Hal9 is tackling its own delivery bottlenecks, measuring success by how many new customers the team can serve each month while keeping churn low.

Why MVPs Should Feel Uncomfortable
A founder offered $200k for a “perfect” MVP. Javier’s advice? Don’t do it. An MVP is supposed to feel raw and a little scary to ship. It’s better to invest in many small iterations than to blow the budget on one big bet.

The $50K Rule of Thumb
If he had to start over with just $50k, Javier would split it evenly: half to go-to-market, half to product. That balance keeps founders from over-investing in either tech or marketing. At Hal9, the focus is on stretching that product budget into a scalable MVP—fast.


Founder Spotlight: Greeny

🌍 Building a carbon credit demo in just two weeks

Greeny, a startup reshaping carbon credit markets, needed to impress customers and investors—fast. Their challenge: deliver a functional, scalable AI solution to compute carbon credits with speed and accuracy.

Hal9 helped Greeny:

  • 🚀 Develop an AI-powered carbon credit demo in just two weeks
  • 🔗 Integrate emissions and offset data into a tailored AI model
  • ☁️ Deploy as a cloud-based API with an interactive demo interface

The result? Greeny went from concept to investor-ready product faster than ever, accelerating fundraising and customer acquisition while positioning themselves as a leader in sustainable tech.

👉 Read the full story


Event Spotlight

Let's Talk

We love talking with founders—whether you’re refining your idea or scaling your product. If you’d like to brainstorm your next AI feature, grab a time with Javier here, or just hit reply and share your biggest AI product challenge—we’ll feature answers in future issues.

Talk soon,

—The Hal9 Team

Hi from Hal9!

Each week we share insights from our founder Javier, spotlight real customer stories, and keep you updated on what’s happening at Hal9 and beyond. Looking forward to staying in touch.

Read more from Hi from Hal9!

Hi Reader, Welcome to Hal9 Weekly — insights from our founder Javier on turning AI ideas into real products. Javier's Insights: Got a Vibe Coded MVP? Here's How to Actually Get It Live Vibe coding is great for getting started fast. But launching to real users is a different game entirely. If I was dropped into a startup team that had vibe coded their MVP and was asked to get it live, here are the three things I'd focus on immediately. 1. Figure out the business side first. Before worrying...

Hi Reader, Welcome to Hal9 Weekly — insights from our founder Javier on turning AI ideas into real products. Javier's Insights: The ChatGPT Wrapper Comeback "ChatGPT wrappers" got clowned on all last year. Everyone said they weren't real businesses. Just lazy founders slapping an interface on top of OpenAI's API. But here's what I'm seeing in 2026: ChatGPT wrappers are making a comeback, and they're actually viable businesses. Let me explain why. The Problem Everyone Missed Most people don't...

Hi Reader, Welcome to Hal9 Weekly — insights from our founder Javier on turning AI ideas into real products. Javier's Insights: When Vibe Coding Becomes Automated Customer Support A founder told me something yesterday that's been stuck in my head: "I'm so fed up with working with robots." He'd spent two months vibe coding—building, iterating, hitting the same walls over and over. When I explained how Hal9 works (platform + expert hours, essentially a technical co-founder package), his...