One Year of Lunar Moth Studios

I built a business. I made mistakes. I learned a hell of a lot. Here’s what I’m taking into year two.

Mike Van Amburg · October 2026

On October 9, Lunar Moth Studios turned one. I was so busy running it that I almost forgot to celebrate.

So, before I turn this into another thing on the to-do list: fuck yeah. I made it a year.

A year earlier, on October 9, I started this business excited. Really excited. I had ideas, I knew how to build, and I finally had a studio where I could do something with all of that. I’d worked hard in corporate America. I’d helped build businesses with other people’s money. I’d read the books, watched the videos, and spent plenty of time thinking about what I would do when the decisions were mine.

Then the decisions were mine. All of them. Including the ones I got spectacularly wrong.

Looking back, one of the funniest things about this year is how often I thought I should have already made it. Every month or two, I’d be working my ass off and wondering why I wasn’t farther along. I had built more. I had tried more. Surely this was the point where the whole thing was supposed to click.

Apparently, the business did not receive my schedule.

We built 11 different products and five AI agents over this last year. There was client work, experimenting, selling, trying to find customers, trying to figure out how to talk about the work, and occasionally remembering that I was a person who needed to stop working. Some things worked. Some didn’t. Some taught me something I needed for the next thing.

And there were a few moments when the next thing almost didn’t happen.

I’m proud of this year. I’m also still sorting through parts of it. I don’t have a neat formula to hand you. But I can tell you what it actually felt like to build this business, get things wrong, keep it open, and come out of the first year wanting to do it again.

That first fall, I was going to make it happen

I wanted the freedom to build the things that interested me. Useful software, weird ideas, apps with personality. A personal studio where I could solve problems and enjoy making the solution. That was the business I wanted from the beginning.

Building, testing, revising. Doing the work.

What I hadn’t figured out was how many other versions of that business I would try to run at the same time.

AI agents seemed like an obvious place to start. There were problems everywhere, and suddenly there were tools that made it possible to approach those problems differently. I could see workflows that were frustrating or repetitive and think, okay, we can do something about that.

One of those ideas was an agent to handle paperwork for dispensaries. I built around a problem I thought was worth solving, with a price I thought made sense. What I hadn’t done was talk to enough of the people who would actually have to pay for it.

That turned out to be a pretty important fucking detail.

I hadn’t properly understood the margins an average dispensary was working with. I was evaluating the product from my side: the work involved, the capabilities, what I thought it should be worth. The customer was operating inside a business with its own constraints. My confidence in the software did not make my price fit their reality.

That one didn’t work. I could have kept building features and still missed the same problem. I needed to understand the buyer before I built a whole argument about what they should want.

I also built a marketing agent that looked at the market. Then the models kept getting better, and the question became harder to answer: why would someone pay for this instead of doing it themselves with tools they already had? I had built something useful, but usefulness by itself didn’t give me a strong reason someone would choose my product.

Those misses changed the conversations I needed to have. Could I make the thing work? Usually, I could figure that part out. Who needed it enough to buy it? What were they already doing instead? Why would they change? Those questions were a lot less comfortable because I couldn’t answer them by staying in the code.

Real work, real misses, and lessons I carried forward.

So I went looking for customers. I talked with CEOs in healthcare, finance, cannabis, and fitness. I had sales calls and interviews. I tried to explain the products, explain the price, explain why any of this would matter to someone else’s business.

I was also trying to be whoever I thought would make the conversation work.

The problem was that I was reaching into all these different markets while wanting to keep the creative freedom of a personal studio. The people I was talking to had specific problems. They needed to understand how something would fit their team, their work, their priorities. I was often showing up with a much broader collection of things I could build.

There’s nothing wrong with a focused B2B company. I just kept resisting the focus that would have made that version of my company make sense. I wanted room to make different kinds of things, then wondered why a business buyer wasn’t excited about all that range.

It took me a while to recognize that mismatch. I thought I needed a better pitch. Sometimes I needed to admit that I was trying to sell a version of the studio I didn’t actually want to spend my life running.

The contract that meant I could keep going

Earlier in the year, my savings ran out. The pressure changed. I wanted this business to work, but wanting it wasn’t going to cover the gap.

I had a bad sales month, LLC and licensing fees coming due, and not enough money lining up. I was short on rent. I was looking at having to shutter the company and start searching for a job.

That felt fucking awful. I’d put so much into this, and I felt defeated. I wasn’t ready to be done. I also couldn’t just decide that the financial reality didn’t apply to me because I cared about what I was building.

Then an incredible woman running a cannabis agency contracted with me for $700 of services. We delivered our services. That contract kept me in business.

It was both the money and the feeling that came with it. I had paid work to do. I could keep going. I didn’t have to shut down the thing I was trying so hard to build.

There was joy in that. Real relief. After spending so much time wondering whether this would work, here was something concrete that let me continue.

I also had luck with our first client. They stayed with us through the year, and they’re still with us. I want to acknowledge that because I could write a version of this story where every good thing happened because I made an excellent decision, and that would be bullshit. People gave me opportunities. People stayed. That mattered.

The trouble was what I did with the relief.

I saw that we could keep going, and it motivated me to do everything. More B2C. More B2B. More looking for clients. More services. More things on my plate. Instead of taking the breathing room as a chance to simplify, I treated it as encouragement to keep expanding the number of things I was trying to make work.

I understand why I did it. A way forward had appeared, and I wanted more ways forward. But every new direction needed attention from the same person. I was adding work much faster than I was deciding what deserved to stay.

That was an expensive lesson in a way that doesn’t fit neatly on a spreadsheet. The company got to continue, and I responded by making it harder to run.

By summer, I was trying on every version of myself

When I say I tried marketing, I mean I tried a lot of it. My rough estimate is that we sent something like 30,000 cold emails over the year. I spent money experimenting. I tried different approaches, different ways of presenting the work, different ways of getting in front of people.

That number sounds impressive until you ask what it accomplished.

In conversations, I started hearing that the people I wanted to reach weren’t necessarily reading those messages. Some were filtering that stuff out. I had put an enormous amount of effort into reaching people through inboxes, then discovered that, for the people I was talking to, being in the inbox and being seen were very different things.

It’s easy to keep doing something when you can count the activity. Another email sent. Another post. Another tool set up. It feels like progress because you did work, and you can point to the work. I had to get more honest about whether the work was getting me closer to a customer.

By summer, I was doing podcasts and trying the thought-leadership thing. I tried videos on TikTok and YouTube. I tried X. I tried being more of an influencer, then not being an influencer. There was a lot of experimenting with how I should show up, and I never really found a comfortable voice in the performance of it.

The strange part is that the moments that felt most natural were also the ones people responded to: being myself, showing something I was excited about, talking about the work I was actually doing.

I didn’t need to invent a more business-looking version of Mike to explain why I liked making software. I already liked making software. I could just talk about that.

I’m not going to pretend I immediately understood this and became wonderfully consistent. I didn’t. I kept getting pulled back into building. When I put real attention into LinkedIn and posting, I saw more impressions. When I stopped giving marketing that attention, people had fewer chances to see what I was doing. Then I’d look at the lack of customers and wonder whether I needed to build something better.

That loop has been a big part of this year: build, worry, build more. Somewhere in there, I was treating visibility as something that would happen after I had made enough good stuff.

And through all of that experimenting, I kept adding more work.

The opportunity I wanted and the terms I couldn’t take

A few months later, I had the opportunity to take on a six-figure contract with a financial institution.

The project excited me. It felt like the kind of opportunity arriving at the right time, and I wanted to do the work. After everything it had taken to keep going, that amount of money was difficult to look away from.

I was also exhausted. I had been working constantly, trying to carry all these different directions at once. I almost signed.

As I understood the terms, taking the contract would have compromised my ability to keep running the studio independently. I saw restrictions and potential exposure that I wasn’t comfortable accepting. The arrangement looked to me like it could take over my time and control of the business in ways I couldn’t reconcile with the company I was trying to build.

That was the decision: take work I genuinely wanted, with money that would matter enormously, or protect the studio and figure out how to keep it going without that contract.

So I said no.

Protecting the studio meant making difficult decisions.

And it felt like the dumbest fucking decision. Who says no to money? Especially after coming that close to not having a business anymore?

I don’t want to dress that up as a moment where I suddenly became fearless. I wanted the opportunity. I could see what the money would do. I also couldn’t make the terms fit the life and business I wanted to keep. Saying no didn’t make the pressure disappear. It meant I still had to deal with it.

We buckled down on finances. I simplified what I was working on and stopped working on some apps. I stopped pursuing every possible client. I looked at the income from the clients and ventures I already had and realized there was room to make this work if I actually focused.

The answer wasn’t to get rid of all client work. I enjoy it. The answer was to be selective about new work and stop assuming every possible source of revenue needed to become another part of the company.

Around this wider process of figuring out what belonged in the business, an investment firm approached me about potential eight-figure funding for Rosyn. I didn’t finish the process. I walked away before the final stage.

I couldn’t give myself a good enough answer for what I would use that funding for. Rosyn was already up. I could work on marketing it. I hadn’t established product-market fit. Taking someone else’s money when I couldn’t justify the need felt wrong, and I worried about the pressure it would put on the product and on my decisions.

It’s a hell of a number to have in a conversation. But I needed a better reason to keep pursuing it than being able to say I had a conversation about that number.

I had to start separating opportunities I wanted from opportunities I wanted to be the sort of person who could talk about having.

There was a person underneath all that work

The burnout caught up with me. There was a stretch when I could barely build for a couple of weeks. For someone who had been trying to solve almost every problem by doing more work, that was a pretty direct indication that something needed to change.

I’d brought bad habits with me from corporate America. I knew how to work hard and push myself. I had much less practice deciding that pushing harder was making my decisions worse.

The contract brought that home. Exhaustion had been part of why I nearly accepted something I ultimately believed was wrong for the business. Taking care of myself stopped feeling like something separate from being a good owner. My ability to think clearly was involved in every choice the company made.

I want to keep doing this. I don’t want the business to become a machine that uses up every part of me until I can’t enjoy the work or make a sensible decision about it.

Taking care of myself is part of keeping the business going.

Saying no felt like saying no to the world for a while. There were so many possible things to do, and I was finally admitting that I couldn’t keep carrying all of them. Then, strangely, that was when I started to feel more free.

The freedom was found in the constraints.

At the end of the day, I needed to build a really cool app that people wanted, tell people about it, and make sales. A lot of the other things I had wrapped around that were making me feel important. Some of it was intellectual porn, honestly. More thinking, more positioning, more things that made it feel like I was running something impressive.

I had to ask myself whether I wanted to feel important or live the life I’d always dreamed of. Those weren’t automatically the same thing.

The creativity came back gradually. The Christmas apps helped. So did talking with customers and finding the fun in making something for an actual person again.

More recently, Little Wonders came out of reading stories to my son every night. That’s the kind of starting point I love: something in my own life makes me want to build. I get to care about how a page looks, how a character moves, whether the whole thing feels playful. There’s room for taste and imagination alongside the engineering.

Now I’m much more comfortable letting that be a real part of the business. I don’t need every idea to become another product, either. Sometimes I can experiment because I want to learn. Sometimes making a thing is enough without immediately building an entire business plan around it.

Sometimes making something is enough.

That has made the studio feel more like the place I wanted to work in when I started it.

Getting closer to the people using it

Talking to users has also been changing what I see in the products I’ve already built.

With Bram, I had been thinking broadly about confidence. At one point, I was looking at 40 downloads and two subscriptions. I could keep guessing about why people weren’t subscribing, or I could pay closer attention to what they were actually using it for.

In real-life conversations, I found people using Bram for self-advocacy. They wanted to figure out the right thing to say, how to say it, and then practice saying it with Bram.

That’s much more specific than the broad idea of becoming more confident. There’s a conversation someone needs to have. They’re looking for the words and a way to get comfortable saying them. The product and the messaging weren’t aligned around that.

That is the work ahead for Bram: making the message as specific as the help people are actually looking for. Those conversations gave me something far more useful to work with than another assumption about what people ought to want.

Rosyn has been teaching me something related about trust. In the cannabis market, I’ve been physically going into dispensaries, showing people the app, and having conversations. People have been enthusiastic, and there is still work to do to find product-market fit. What those visits have taught me is that trust isn’t something I can skip. I need to show people what Rosyn does, hear their questions, and earn that trust.

After all those inbox messages, there’s something useful about being able to show someone the thing and hear what they actually think.

I’m putting more weight on people who use and pay for the products. I also wish I’d listened more carefully to prospective customers before making some of those early bets. Both experiences have made me less interested in collecting general opinions and more interested in understanding a person’s actual problem.

The work gets better when I have that understanding. I still get to be creative. I just have a better chance of putting that creativity somewhere it helps.

Another October. Still my studio.

I expected to be farther along. I’m not going to rewrite that part because it makes a nicer anniversary post. There were bad calls, wasted money, things I wanted that didn’t happen, and times when I really didn’t know whether I could keep the studio open.

There was also a client who stayed. A $700 contract that let me continue. Products I’m proud of. Conversations that changed how I understood the work. Christmas apps that made building feel fun again. A storybook app growing out of time with my son.

I built a business. I’m still running it. That deserves a minute before I start measuring everything against where I thought I’d be.

What I’m taking into year two is a much clearer sense of what deserves my attention. Lunar Moth Studios is my personal studio. I make apps, solve problems that interest me, and put those products directly in front of customers. I can take client work that fits without turning every possible client into a new direction for the company.

The main focus for year two is visibility. My plan is to put roughly 75% of my time toward marketing and personal branding, and 25% toward building. I’ll have to get a lot more consistent to make that happen.

I want the website and blog to be the home for the work: what I’m making, what I’m trying, what I’ve learned. I want to improve how people find the apps and give them more chances to understand why they might want one. X, more considered LinkedIn posts, and the occasional video can help bring people into that world. I don’t need to turn myself into a business advice guy to do it.

So that’s what I’m doing more of. Showing up as myself, talking about the work, and giving visibility the time I kept reserving for another feature or another idea.

The work, the personality, and more people getting to see it.

I read a lot before starting this company. I had experience. I thought about it seriously. None of that removed the part where I had to actually run it, make the decisions, and live with what happened next. Some of the clarity only arrived because I went through the year.

I’m glad I did. Even with the expensive lessons and the moments I would very much prefer not to repeat, I still want this business. I still get excited about what I can make with it.

One year of Lunar Moth Studios. Fuck yeah.

Now I want more people to see what we’re building.