HA7CH Is a FDE Accelerator

Over the last couple of days a lot of people have been asking us what HA7CH actually does. The answer is simple: HA7CH is a FDE accelerator.

YC helps founders become companies. HA7CH helps people become founders.

YC takes people who already stand out and gives them resources. HA7CH finds people before they stand out, on campuses and in build in public, and puts them in front of real problems, real users, and real deliveries.

YC asks: "Who is worth investing in?" HA7CH asks: "Who can be ha7ch'd?"

In a world where products are easy to copy, the moat is no longer the product itself. The moat is the people you can gather, ignite, and move forward together.

So what are we actually doing right now?

On one side, we're running a RedNote group of around 1000 people who really love Raily, which, to be fair, has turned out pretty well. They drop feedback in there all day long.

On the other side, we're running a WeChat builder group, made up of people who like vibe coding, with their heads on right. People who want to build things together, and who align with some of what HA7CH thinks.

Let's start with Raily. A lot of people want us to charge. We don't want to. We'll ship it, list it on the store, and at peak popularity we'll just open source the whole thing.

Raily didn't cost us much. A few sleepless nights and some dev. But what did we get? A user base. Feedback. Affection. These matter way more than the few bucks of subscription money we could have collected.

What we're after is momentum, pulling more users and more attention onto our products. There's a second use too: when we want to break out and push the next product, if someone in the builder group has an idea, they don't have to cold start. We drop what they build straight into the user group and let real users react. If they like it, we keep going. If they don't, we drop it and start the next one.

So Raily is really our first branding move. Lawted's branding, HA7CH's branding. Which is fucking important.

This is how we attract a certain kind of builder: people with serious AI and coding skill, with belief, with ideas, with execution.

What are these people good for? They're good for FDE.

FDE is Forward Deployed Engineer. You walk straight into a traditional-industry company and rewrite their workflow with AI.

Why Shenzhen? Because Shenzhen is crawling with bosses of old-school industries, and every one of them sits on a workflow built up over decades of human labor. Employees who've been there for decades have all the implicit knowledge in their heads: how to talk to clients, how to price, how the flow goes, who to call when shit breaks, what each field means, what each piece of jargon decodes to. None of it is documented. None of it lives in a system. It's all in heads, or in Excel. Their systems are mostly Excel, PDF, and Word.

AI can obviously replace this. We all believe a lot of people in these companies will be laid off in two years.

So why do those people get laid off? Because the boss suddenly learned to vibe code and built a system himself? I don't think so.

It's because one fucking person walked into the company, came in every day with a Mac, and over two or three months distilled them, sorted them out, raised efficiency, and replaced a chunk of headcount.

This is how we let this group of people earn their first real fucking money. A first bucket of gold. Not a salary. Something they made themselves.

So how do our people get to Shenzhen to do FDE?

We want to set up a Hatch House in Shenzhen. You'd be surprised how much office space is sitting around. Sponsors, borrowed rooms, or just renting somewhere for parties, any of it works. Pull these builders into one place, then connect them to companies. Every day they head out from the house to wherever they're embedded.

A summer might be enough.

These builders were probably students, or programmers at big tech. I believe that if they can come through and survive our 2C filter, they can do this.

If you haven't been through that filter, I don't think you can be a real FDE. The FDE working environment can be brutal: the boss might pour you tea, might want you out drinking with him, no workstation, no proper workspace, the office might be full of smoke. But that's where you have to find your first bucket of gold.

What these builders are actually doing is distilling the first workflow out of a company.

And we have a bold claim: this is going to be a massive wave. Because every traditional company can be distilled exactly once. After that, all the knowledge lives inside that AI system. Even if the industry keeps evolving, all the thinking, all the business knowledge ends up inside the same system. Trying to re-distill later becomes very hard.

And the bosses won't want to switch vendors. On the labor cost question, what's cheaper than a builder walking in barefoot?

Once you've done the first company, you can almost always keep going in that industry. Workflows in a given industry are roughly the same.

So HA7CH helps these bosses sell the same AI system to competitor #2 and #3. With those workflows in hand, the boss can turn his company into an AI company. Costs drop hard, competitors can't survive.

It's the same play as Raily: we can be free because we used AI to write the code, far more powerful than the older apps, so we can just give it away.

We're aiming for the first FDE delivery in May–June, then start pushing people through Hatch House, then horizontal replication and operations and so on.

We might pull it off. We might not. Maybe in June I realize the path doesn't work. Maybe Hatch House is a false premise. All of it might be wrong.

But what HA7CH is, we know. HA7CH is a FDE accelerator.

P.S. The term 'old-school bosses' in this piece doesn't refer to any specific person and isn't pejorative. Huge thanks for the opportunities Reform and Opening Up created.