About

Creators are becoming builders. Coding tools have gotten good enough that someone with real expertise can make the thing they know should exist — and wants to find out whether it works at scale and can succeed in the market, starting from scratch, with no research budget and no engineering team to help them get it right.

SQUAT is one instance of that story. It exists because its own creator hit exactly that wall.

From the founder

I'm a creator who became a builder, because the tools I needed didn't exist.

The thing nobody tells you about building alone — and especially now with agents— is how fast the system gets complicated. You ship quickly, and then one day it's large enough that you can't keep it all up in your head, and the problems stop being visible.

So I created a tool to check. It began with the narrowest possible question: did I break it in the last build?

Then I wanted more. I wanted to be able to send in a tester with a goal and no instructions and watch what happened — can you figure out how to use this? — because that's how people really use software. That question turned out to be far more powerful than the first one, and no test harness can ask it.

And then the one underneath both: before I build anything, what do people make of the idea? That's the deepest reach, and it's the piece still being built, because it has to be right before it ships.

Every round of my product development right now runs through SQUAT. It's my QA, and it's the record that keeps me on track — including when my squad tells me I'm wrong. But then, I have the evidence to go find problems, fix them, and then launch with confidence.

— Eric Duell

Who this is for

Someone people are depending on, who feels both the pressure and the opportunity in their vision. A solo builder. The principal of a small agency. A director who has to bring a recommendation to peers and then to leadership. The person inside a company who can see the insight and needs a way to show it. Different-sized shops, same core challenges.

And they don't necessarily look like the founder mythology. Garage, dorm room, a few technically-minded friends — that story was always incomplete, and it's out of date now. When the constraint stops being can you write the code and becomes what do you imagine that's worth building, the population of people who can and do build changes shape.

SQUAT is for whoever has that calling and sets out on the journey, so that they don't have to go it alone.

SQUAT is a product of Elucidate Digital, part of Elucidate Ventures. Eric writes at ericduell.substack.com.

SQUAT is opening first in the United States. Join the waitlist and we'll tell you when ordering opens.