A solo venture studio that builds, measures, and ships experiments with the rigor of a product engineering team.
Start with a falsifiable bet. What do we believe? What evidence would change our mind?
AI-generated content solves the "played it once" problem in party games.
One-page experiment brief: hypothesis, success criteria, time box, kill conditions.
2-week sprint, 5+ playtests, measure replay intent score.
Build the minimum artifact to test the hypothesis. Ship fast, cut scope ruthlessly.
AI Quiplash prototype: Claude prompts, WebSocket multiplayer, phone controllers.
Collect real data. Did users behave the way we predicted? What surprised us?
8/8 testers replayed. AI narrator commentary was the breakout feature.
Honest evaluation. Double down on what works, kill what doesn't. No sunk cost fallacy.
Ship: localhost-party continues. Kill conditions not met.
AI agents can keep enterprise docs alive and replace Confluence with repo-native living specs
Designing the spec format and building GitHub App for PR analysis and ticket sync.
AI-generated content solves the replayability problem in party games
8/8 testers replayed. AI narrator was the breakout feature.
A live leaderboard for playoff best ball fills an unmet niche in fantasy football
Validated core loop at zero cost. Revisiting for 2026-2027 season.
A read-only financial assistant can replace Mint for privacy-conscious users
Architecture complete. Core integrations unimplemented. On hold.
Ship in days, not quarters. Time-box everything. If it takes longer than two weeks, scope is wrong.
Write it down. If you can't explain the hypothesis in one sentence, you don't understand it yet.
Clean-room everything. No employer IP, no blurred lines. Every decision audit-ready.
Separate concerns. Day job and ventures never mix. Personal and business stay distinct.
“The goal is not to build things. The goal is to learn whether things should be built.”
Gerner Ventures is a solo venture studio run by Nick Gerner — a software engineer who believes the best way to learn is to build. Every experiment starts with a hypothesis, ships within weeks, and produces honest results.
Built with Next.js, Terraform, and Claude. Operated with discipline.