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After two pivots and $10M, Buildspace landed on its most honest model – a gathering for people shipping ideas they genuinely care about.
BUILDSPACE FOUNDER
“a place where people build cool things.”
Buildspace was first [reviewed here](/review/upakujte-svoju-ideju-krasivo) in fall 2022, when it raised $10M from Andreessen Horowitz for an educational platform around Web3 and AI. The key insight behind its courses was that students weren't just learning – they were building something real and working over a single weekend.
A couple of subsequent reviews mentioned the startup in passing as it pivoted into a 6-week accelerator for people who wanted to ship a personal idea.
Now another pivot has arrived: Buildspace is positioning itself as "a place where people build cool things."
The new product hasn't launched yet, but the founder laid out the full story – what led them here and why – in a post with the candid headline "Honesty Is the Best F***ing Policy." It's a good enough read to break down here.
The 2022 version of Buildspace was itself already a pivot. Before that, the founder had built an online school for kids aged 4–11 where they could explore whatever subjects interested them, however they wanted.
In 2021, he stepped away from kids' education to focus on learning more broadly with a new project called Buildspace.
His diagnosis of modern education: it had become a credential rat race. He wanted to prove that people can learn what they want and do what they want – and still succeed, while actually enjoying the process.
The instrument was short weekend courses where participants built something they cared about, surrounded by others doing the same, with Buildspace instructors and mentors in the room. By 2022 the startup was generating $1.5M in annual revenue.
The unexpected discovery: a small percentage of students managed to turn their weekend side projects into real revenue-generating businesses – or compelling portfolio pieces that landed them more meaningful work. This became visible in 2023.
Meanwhile, the "weekend side project" concept was drifting toward a conventional course platform. That path led to a small or medium business that would earn most of its money selling courses to companies – useful, perhaps, but far from solving the education problem the founder actually cared about. So he killed the $1.5M-a-year revenue stream and said goodbye to that business.
Some students, though, had genuinely used the courses as a launchpad for turning ideas into real projects.
That's when he spotted the gap. Universities serve people who want credentials that translate to stable jobs. Accelerators like Y Combinator serve people who want to build billion-dollar companies.
But what about everyone in between? The person who wants to record a hip-hop album, launch a YouTube channel, make a short film, or write a piece of software that's genuinely useful to others and generates a modest income?
His answer was an accelerator for exactly those people: Nights & Weekends.
Nights & Weekends became a 6-week program modeled on a standard startup accelerator – except participants could work on anything, in any field, toward any goal they chose.
At the end came something like a demo day – but not for investors. It was a three-day in-person meetup where graduates met, mixed, and shared what they'd built.
In 2023, Nights & Weekends became, by the founder's own count, "the largest accelerator in the world." 12 million people watched what 30,000 participants were building. 3,000 of those 30,000 shipped something real. 1,000 made it to the graduation meetups in San Francisco and Dubai.
Those are impressive numbers – and yet, measured against the billion-plus people who interact with Meta's products every day, they barely register as a rounding error.
Monetization was also a struggle. Three options were on the table:
- Sponsor revenue: companies paying for access to the accelerator's audience. Ceiling: maybe $2–3M per year.
- Government contracts: reformatting the accelerator as a workforce training program. One Asian government was ready to pay $2M for programs, with $1M as net profit – but that would have meant bending the mission toward job placement outcomes.
- Venture fund: taking equity in the most promising graduates. But that would have forced the entire program to focus only on billion-dollar-potential ideas – abandoning the 14-year-old kid who just wants to film funny videos in his bedroom.
None of these worked at the scale or in the spirit the founder wanted.
At the same time, a new structural problem emerged as enrollment grew. Cohort sizes were accelerating: 5,000 in the first cycle, 30,000 in the second, 7,500 in the third, 18,000 in the fourth.
An accelerator's value depends on participants being able to connect – with mentors, with each other, with an audience watching their progress. Buildspace had stitched all of this together with Discord, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and simple landing page builders. It worked at small scale. By the fourth cohort, it had completely broken down. Mentors couldn't surface interesting projects because there were too many. Participants couldn't build an audience because the startup's channels couldn't drive enough traffic to thousands of individual projects. Participants couldn't follow or support each other because, scattered across Twitter, Discord, and YouTube, most of them were effectively invisible to one another.
To the outside world, 18,000 participants looked like a stunning success. Internally, everyone knew the thing had stopped working.
Yet the founder still wanted to work in education – just not build another conventional education platform. Not another course marketplace, not another homework-helper.
The deeper issue: "education" has come to mean "instruction." But instruction has stopped being the hard part. Anyone can learn almost anything for free from the abundance of tutorials and content on the internet.
Learning is just a tool – the pitons you hammer into the rock face as you climb toward a summit. What matters equally is the people you find along the way: the ones who push you, hold the rope, and pull you up when you slip.
That system of collaboration, mutual support, and accountability in pursuit of any goal you choose – that's what modern education is missing. And it turned out to be exactly what had gone missing from Nights & Weekends at scale.
So the founder decided to build precisely that: a system for people who want to explore the world by doing what they want to do.
He believes that over the next decade, more and more people will choose this path – pursuing the things they actually care about. And that it should get progressively easier to do so, with the right infrastructure underneath.
"Doing what you want" doesn't mean everyone has to start a company. Someone who loves robotics might use Nights & Weekends to build a side project that lands them a job at a company building robots. That's a win – one that shouldn't count as lesser than founding a startup.
A working version of the new product is already in testing, with a public launch planned for summer alongside the next Nights & Weekends cohort.
2023 was about "content and experience." 2024 is the year of the product that supports that content and experience. Put another way: a community can't be a business; only the product that sustains that community can.
The new product's guiding principle: "find and be found." It will combine a) a platform to upload videos showing what you're working on, b) an AI layer to surface other people doing things that are relevant to you, and c) a space to connect with whoever you find – or who finds you.
A few lessons from Buildspace's journey:
- A startup pivot isn't a random leap to a different idea. It's the patient, iterative pursuit of one big idea through a series of different implementations.
- Each implementation may generate both real wins and newly visible problems. That's normal – no one figures out something genuinely great all at once.
- The challenge is to not get comfortable sitting on achieved success, but to keep solving the next problem on the road to the real goal.
- That means being willing to walk away from what you've already built – $1.5M in annual revenue, a promising government contract. Without that willingness, you plateau at a small or medium business and never build anything remotely at the scale of what Facebook became.
- The goal has to be large enough and abstract enough. Not "build a product that does X in this particular way." Something more like: "people are already doing Y, more will do it in the next 10 years, and we should be the infrastructure that makes it easier."
Looked at from another angle, Buildspace's big idea is a direct reframe of Y Combinator's famous motto: "Make something people want."
The problem with that framing is that optimizing for what others want can lead you somewhere you don't want to be – selling mass-market junk, lending your name to content you don't believe in, or slowly drifting from meaningful work toward whatever gets the most likes.
A better motto for what Buildspace is building might be: "Do what you want. And make enough doing it to keep doing it."
That framing is big enough to contain many different things. Which makes it a genuinely interesting strategic direction – one with a lot of different possible first moves.
The most defensible entry point is probably the one Buildspace hasn't occupied yet: a specific community with a specific type of output – music, writing, indie software – where the "find and be found" mechanic is most acutely missing and the audience is dense enough to create real network effects from day one.