Excited to see Fluent announce their $7.5m raise today and proud to have backed them at Entrepreneurs First since the beginning. Great team working on a painful and important problem👇

Philosophical questions to ponder: - Is SQL popular because it's been around forever or because it's easy/intuitive? - Many have tried to replace SQL with other constructs and failed, why?

2 yrs ago, we posted a demo of a super-flaky Fluent prototype on Reddit—no real plan, just a shot in the dark. The post exploded, and we had 20k+ join our waitlist - I was stunned by the response. I'm yet to go viral on Reddit since then - anyone found any similar hacks?

3 biggest mistakes/lessons building Fluent: Undervaluing control: Early models lacked constraints. Now we’re ‘metric-first’ for consistency. Targeting everyone: Segmenting our audience helped us improve. Over-engineering: Focus on core functionality > unnecessary features.

An early iteration of Fluent's AI. When asked to explain a visualisation for basic exercise data, it began dishing out blunt lifestyle advice like a jaded gym instructor. Lesson learned. LLMs need guardrails—or they run wild.

“I can't answer this” is Fluent’s most popular response. In our early days, we lost a 9-month deal in 15 minutes, after a senior stakeholder got a few wrong answers. Now, Fluent flags missing info so admins can intervene. Sometimes, “no” is the smartest answer AI can give.

Late to the party, but a masterclass