Ten years building products at Google, Cash App, and Duolingo. Now I build my own.
Nectar Candy Co.
Swedish candy cart, Pittsburgh.
What it is
A vintage Italian Ape Piaggio, painted Ferrari Rosso, loaded with imported Swedish pick-and-mix candy at $1.25 an ounce. Co-founded with Natalie LaRosa and launched February 13, 2026 - sold out on day one. The cart does popups, private events, and birthday parties across Pittsburgh. Everything running it - booking, a live find-the-cart map, crew shifts and SOP playbooks, the boost pay system, payroll, gift cards, Candy Club subscriptions, shipping, and a rotating monthly candy menu - was built in conversation with vyb. Two people run it like ten.
How it's built
Features
Recent activity in Nectar Candy Co.
Request flow
May 17–18, 2026
Private events were taking too much coordination for the return. I paused live booking, raised the minimum to 75 guests, and rebuilt around a request flow — inquiry first, confirm later. The cart's time is worth protecting.
The numbers
May 14, 2026
Full business snapshot live at needmynectar.com/stats. Popup history, unit economics per channel, margin breakdown — 50–65% on popups, 35% online. Private events visible for the first time. Everything in one place.
A weekly update on what I'm building.
vyb and Nectar — what shipped, what broke, what I'm figuring out. No noise.
vyb
AI co-founder for builders.
What it is
vyb pairs each builder with a persistent AI agent that lives on their own server, holds full context across every session, writes code, manages ops, and shows up every morning with a brief. Applied to YC S26. First paying customer in March. Building because the people doing the most interesting work in the next decade aren't going to be teams - they're going to be one or two people with the right partner.
How it's built
Features
Recent activity in vyb
Platform hardening
May 5–13, 2026
Cron scheduling aligned to OpenClaw best practice. ACP/Claude Code subsystem retired — OpenClaw is the runtime now. RLS enabled across 19 Nectar tables and 8 vyb tables. Trial-ended builders stopped getting pinged. James LaRosa added as platform admin. The foundations got a lot more solid.
YC
May 2, 2026
I submitted at 8:27pm ET. 23 builders. One paying customer. Nectar as proof that a solo builder with vyb can build a real business fast.
Earlier work
Before I started building my own products with AI, I spent a decade designing at Google, Cash App, and Duolingo. Cash App and Stemstr are the two projects from that chapter I'm most proud of — one inside a company at scale, one an independent bet on an open protocol. Both shaped how I think about what design is actually for, and set the stage for what building with agents made possible. For a deeper look at past projects, visit rockymedure.me.
