Every founder has a graveyard. Half-finished apps, abandoned prototypes, that "killer tool" you vibe-coded over a weekend and never touched again. Mariam Hakobyan, Co-Founder and CEO of Softr, thinks she knows exactly why those projects keep dying, and it is not your discipline. It is the chains. AI handed everyone a hammer and called them a carpenter, but it never removed the hard part. It just moved the complexity onto you: the authentication, the permissions, the security, the thousand boring edge cases that make a toy into a tool people can actually log into.

Mariam is an engineer turned entrepreneur who led product and engineering teams of forty-plus people before walking away from a six-figure job to build something of her own. She and her husband Artur Mkrtchyan started Softr in 2019 with one stubborn belief: 80% of every business app is the same repetitive plumbing, and nobody should have to rebuild it from scratch ever again. They call it Lego for software. Connect your data, snap the blocks together, and a non-technical operator ships a full, secure, working app in about five minutes.

The numbers tell a quiet, brutal story. A $2.2M seed they did not even plan to raise. A $13.5M Series A from FirstMark. Then a hard stop on fundraising, because the thing was already profitable. Today Softr runs eight-figure revenue with a lean team of fifty across fifteen countries, no traditional sales team, and growth that came almost entirely from a Product Hunt launch and word of mouth. Oh, and investors told a husband-and-wife founding team it would never work. Mariam's reply: they had a decade of conflict-resolution experience before they ever incorporated.

This episode is for the founder who keeps starting and never shipping, the operator drowning in spreadsheets, and anyone trying to figure out when to reach for Claude Code and when to put the terminal down.

https://www.softr.io/pricing

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariamhakobyan/

⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠

⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠

https://trynina.co/