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  "description": "Our first public investor update",
  "path": "/2026-feb",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-17T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "Dear investors and friends,\n\nWelcome to the very first public Val Town Investor Update. I decided to start\npublishing these publicly,\nbecause I want to bring those of you who care about Val Town along for our journey.\n\nVal Town is a JavaScript developer platform. Our\nmission is spreading the joy of programming.\n\nWe’re still trying to find product-market fit. We have a small team, customers,\nand revenue, but we do not yet have the kind of product-market fit that makes\ngrowth feel inevitable. Right now, our focus is helping small technical teams build custom software and agents.\n\nOur goal this year is to grow revenue 20% month-over-month.\n\nFebruary 2026\n\nIn February, we grew revenue 2%. Most of the month went into supporting one\nlarge enterprise opportunity. If it closes, it could increase revenue by 40%.\n\nThe biggest lesson from February is how easy it is to drift from forward-deployed engineering into consulting, and how carefully we need to guard against that. Once\nyou’ve built custom software for a customer without them in the room, it’s hard\nfor them to take ownership of it, leaving our product company on the hook for\nongoing maintenance and feature work of their custom software.\n\nBy contrast, our best success story in Feb was with our existing Teams\ncustomer Kilo Code. They asked us to help them build a customer support agent.\nAfter just ninety minutes, we had an early prototype. They use it daily, and continue to add features and iterate on it on their own.\nWe wrote more about it on our blog, and\nKilo did too.\n\nSo we’re trying a new rule: we only code on behalf of customers with them in the\nroom. That helps ensure the work is valued, that someone on their team can own\nit afterward, and that we get product feedback at the same time.\n\nWe’re starting to see flickers of product-market fit around\ncustom agents, from\ncustomer support\nto recruiting\nto lead finding and\nlead qualifying.\nWe sit at an interesting point on the abstraction spectrum – much more flexible than\nno-code/low-code platforms (Retool, Zapier, Clay), but simpler than classic deployment platforms (Vercel, Render, Railway). Especially with Townie, our AI Agent, Val Town may be the right level of abstraction for business people\nand programmers to collaborate on fully custom agents connected to their real\ndata.\n\nMarch 2026\n\nFor March, we have two goals: close the enterprise customer, and add 11 net new\nTeams customers. The first would be a big win and validate all the hard work we\nput into February, but the second is the more important work of finding\nproduct-market fit for Teams.\n\nOur ideal customer profile (ICP) remains early-stage technical startups,\nespecially small YC-style teams. They move quickly, care about developer\nexperience, can justify paying for tools that save them time, and the people\nbuying the product are the same people using it.\n\nOur core growth strategy right now is talking to as many people in our ICP as possible, and seeing how we can solve their most pressing problems with a custom agent in Val Town. We're particularly focused on engaging existing Val Town users in our ICP that are not yet Teams customers, but we think should be.\n\nFrom a product perspective, our focus is ironing out the\nfrictions in our self-serve Teams motion, particularly around onboarding and pricing. \n\nKey numbers\n\nTeam: 5  \nHiring: 1\n(Product Engineer)   \nRevenue Growth Feb 2026: 2% (Goal: 20%)\n\n\n\nHighlights\n\n- Built a customer success bot with Kilo Code in 90 minutes\n- Built an analyst agent for a private equity firm (potential enterprise customer)\n\nLowlights\n\n- Got distracted with consulting work\n- 2% monthly revenue growth (Goal: 20%)\n- Fighting a new crop of spammers & phishers\n\nAsks\n\n- If you’d like to pair program a custom agent with me in 90 minutes, email steve@val.town.\n\nBest,  \nSteve",
  "title": "Investor Update – Feb 2026"
}