I Accidentally Started a Small Business Three Weeks Ago
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I Accidentally Started a Small Business Three Weeks Ago<br>My Happiest, Most Grounded Distraction
Some Guy<br>Jun 06, 2026
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Three weeks ago, I accidentally found product market fit. I’ll phrase it that way because saying it in a more earnest and sincere way makes me too emotional. So, anyway, I built a communication app for non-verbal children that makes 100% of mothers with non-verbal children start sobbing uncontrollably. My son and I discovered this the first day we brought it to speech therapy and some moms saw it in the waiting room. Then it made his speech therapist sob for like five minutes straight, which ironically made her unable to speak. All of this also made me stare at the ceiling and swallow several times because I don’t think it’s good for my son to see me get emotional about his autism.<br>The thing is: It worked. Or, at least, it worked much better for my son, in particular, than anything else has ever done. And when all the moms in the waiting room saw that it worked, I realized, and I promise I hadn’t thought of it until just that moment, there was absolutely no way I could just shrug and say that my son is the only kid that gets one. I have way too much going on, but I had to make the time to do this specific thing even if it meant less sleep for several weeks.<br>I need to make several digressions at this point, but I promise I’ll get back to the happy/sappy Hallmark part of this shortly.<br>What Happens when Your Kid Can’t Talk
Firstly, it’s very unclear your child has speech problems because all children are born without the ability to speak. A year to two years will pass with you none the wiser. Then you and your wife will notice your child should be talking and isn’t, and the pediatrician will say it’s fine. Then you keep on noticing and your pediatrician starts to go over diagnostic questions with you and maybe frowns a little bit. Then you take some behavioral analysis surveys, and you convince yourself that actually you were just being overly dour and it’s fine because you filled the questions out wrong. It’s really bad evidence, you’ll say. Then you look into how clustered this data is at early stages of development and you laugh that it’s going to be totally fine.<br>One day you’ll see your kid around other kids their same age. All those kids will be having full on back and forth conversations, and you’ll accept that something is actually not fine.<br>There is a whole rabbit hole of what to do about it. A bunch of would-be wizards will show up to try to sell you things that are definitely not real. Your child, they will say, really just needs to see a pediatric chiropractor. And not even a battle-hardened chiropractor who works on loggers and has just learned to be a very good masseuse, like the one I see, but some piece of shit who cracks the necks of toddlers because he thinks he’s a spiritual healer from another realm. You’ll tell the person telling you to go to a pediatric chiropractor that you’re not interested, but sigh and accept that your wife is going to give your child a lot of “supplements” that you will then verify aren’t poisonous but also probably don’t do anything. Some of them will actually do something, or at least seem to, but they’ll also be the more standard stuff people take. Like iron, or ferritin, or some actual nutrient not in their normal diet.<br>Eventually, after you go knock on all the right doors, you go to a speech therapist. This is actually helpful, but the speech therapist will really only be able to do so much to help because a lot of this is dependent on your child’s natural ability. This is still worth doing because the speech therapist will know all kinds of techniques you don’t know. If your child is deaf, or mute, or something like that then the speech therapist will have you covered. If they have some sort of body problem, there are all kinds of solutions to help them communicate. If there’s a cognition problem, well… I’m sorry. You’ll do a lot of drills and hopefully you’ll see some progress but that’s about all there is to help you.<br>I’m not Slamming AAC Devices, They Just Weren’t What We Needed
One of the aid devices they’ll give to your child if they’re struggling to speak is called an AAC, which stands for Augmentative and Alternative Communication. Really, it’s just a tablet full of words and symbols. That’s all it is. Barely one step above a file directory. You combine the words and symbols together to make sentences. The device says those words out loud. This is really good if a child just can’t physically make words, but this is primarily a device for people who are physically impaired but understand language just fine. It’s not built specifically for children and it’s definitely not optimized for someone who is struggling to understand language in the first place. When I looked into the history of these devices they were first built for...