What 27 Ventures In 30 Days Actually Proved

Todd Merrill

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What 27 Ventures In 30 Days Actually Proved<br>The retrospective. The numbers. The companies I’m taking forward, the ones I’m not, and what the Silverback Ventures studio actually is.

Todd Merrill<br>Jun 28, 2026

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I threw down a Audacious Goal: “Launch One Company a Day in May”<br>“Ten of the 27 companies I launched in 30 days already have paying customers — a county government, a chamber of commerce, a junk-hauling crew in South Florida. Here’s what that run actually proved, and what it didn’t.”

Thirty days. Twenty-seven ventures launched. Quotas hit multiple times and lots of lessons learned.<br>I want to use this article to do four things: walk you through the actual numbers from the run, name the ventures that are graduating into Silverback Ventures and the ones that aren’t, explain what the Velocity Process actually proved (and what it didn’t), and tell you what Silverback Ventures is now that the studio is open for business.<br>If you’re new to this Substack, the essays before this one tell the story of how we got here.<br>“Why I Left Management Consulting And What’s Actually Changed” (May 2) explained the decision and the toolchain shift that made the bet possible.<br>“The Channel-Motion Thesis” (May 9) went deep on the buyer underneath the cybersecurity cluster.<br>“Service Led, Software Leave Behind: Sequoia’s Autopilot Map” (May 17) was the halftime essay against Sequoia’s frame.<br>Along the way, “When the Bot Disappears from Scrutiny,” “Crossing the Chasm to the Dark Factory,” and “Post-GEO: When Agents Pick Their Vendors” carried the regulated-AI, production-method, and agentic-economy threads. This article closes the run.

The numbers

27 ventures shipped across 30 days. There were more than a few Entrepreneurs that we built code for that weren’t ready to launch or who aren’t going to launch with us so they don’t show up on the board. Burnout is also a very real thing I took the last two weekends off to reflect and write.

Fastest build: ~3.5 hours. PartFoundry — three Claude Code commits between 9:45am and 1:12pm ET on a Sunday, a single quota window, a public repo and business plan published alongside it. The Day 3 game-day bench swap that proved a venture could go from cold start to live, in public, before lunch. SundaySync didn’t launch, but we coded that up over a long lunch…

62 Repositories locked into github which creates governance problems that I had to create systems to manage.

Hardest build: PlanCheckers. Working with Quality Minded end users pushed this product to be very good, but there were a lot of new learnings about Token Optimization strategies, scaling calls to Bedrock, marshalling data in/out of the pipeline and all the warts on Bedrock. (This is still a very young technology that has cracks).

Commercial Traction: Ten of the launched companies are already in revenue! Another 10 are clearly going to be income producers in the next quarter. Some are probably not going to make it, and many of the best projects haven’t been announced yet…

Several dozen inbound conversations from MSP, PE/VC, and domain-expert operators reaching out to compare notes or evaluate partnership

Roughly 10 ventures in active partnership conversations with a co-founder or operator who has signaled they want to take the build forward — including signed or pending terms.

Newsletter list: Many new subscribers on the “venture portfolio newsletter” list. We will be doing a better job at throwing off status updates on the portfolio as we have companies launching and learnings from the trenches.

Substack: eleven essays published across the run, averaging a ~50% open rate (range 44–83%). The top post — “Why I Left Management Consulting And What’s Actually Changed” (May 2) — the most views and added several subscribers; “Crossing the Chasm to the Dark Factory” (May 19) added the next most.

9,674 LinkedIn impressions across the run (28-day window, May 1–28, up 343% over the prior 28 days), with 157 social engagements — 119 reactions, 27 comments, 5 reposts. Top-performing post: the launch/departure post — “This week I left a great Management Consulting Firm… 30 Companies in 30 Days” — at roughly 6,000 impressions .

Those are the headline numbers. They tell you the run worked at the headline level. What they don’t tell you is which of these ventures is actually a company.

The ventures, sorted

There are a few buckets that I’m mentally sorting companies into. My general pipeline is: Interview → Business Plan → Code→ Revenue and that’s a useful metric for how companies progress through the Venture Studio Pipeline.<br>Commercial Traction: Sales and Customer Acquisition is the milestone that matters.<br>The Revenue list:<br>CompliancePulse — cybersecurity / MSP channel — already in revenue, MCP-native compliance engine with paying customers, operated by Kirby Winters.

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