From idea to three million users.

In 2022 Diana Babaeva left a corporate career with an idea, no engineering team and no intention of raising outside money. In the company's own telling it started as a weekend prototype built around a campfire.

The gap was the ordinary one. The thing she wanted to exist required software, and everything involved in getting software built, finding engineers, managing them, paying them across borders, making architecture decisions she was not equipped to make, amounted to a second business she had no interest in starting.

The technical side arrived as one arrangement

Rather than solving the engineering problem before she could get to the product problem, both were handled at once. A technical co-founder, the hiring, the employment and payroll across borders, and senior architecture judgment came together as a single arrangement.

Every employee was hired, employed and equipped through Truss. Senior capability across engineering management, security, DevOps and architecture was provided fractionally, so the company had all four functions without carrying four salaries.

The company shipped its first AI add ins across the Microsoft Office suite in 2023, a year it would otherwise have spent recruiting. It has stayed bootstrapped throughout, with no external venture funding.

What changed

From a bootstrapped launch in 2022, to the full Office suite in 2023, to a million active users and the top AppSource ranking in 2024, to three million users across more than a hundred countries today.

If this sounds familiar

Not having a technical co-founder is a solvable problem, and solving it does not mean handing half the company to the first engineer who says yes. The team can be built, employed and run for you while the company stays yours.

Twistly.ai is a Lincoln Labs portfolio company. Our co-founder and CTO, Farrukh Umarov, is Twistly's technical co-founder. Engineering hiring and employment were provided through Truss, also a Lincoln Labs company.

How other engagements were run.