Startr

The Uber for Self Destruction: disrupting the 'quitting' narrative by gamifying your (bad) habits.

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(Pure Entertainment)

Preface (Definitely, definitely not satire)

We took a First Principles approach to building just anything. Anything is literally anything. Why does Y Combinator think money is? AI, AI, AI, AI!!! 🫵

We realized that while the rest of the industry is optimizing for Longevity, the real alpha is in Velocity. Why extend your runway when you can just burn the cash now? Startr isn't just an app; it's a paradigm shift. We believe that if you're going to spiral, you should at least do it with AI.

Also the video demo is slightly inaccurate. Our engineers overworked last night like the ones at OpenAI and pushed out some final changes.

Inspo

Everyone is optimizing for longevity, but nobody is optimizing for **living**. Edward and I looked at the data, and the churn rate on "New Year's Resolutions" to go to the gym is 80%. We realized the market was ignoring the stickiest, highest-retention behaviors simply because they’re "unhealthy." That’s just legacy thinking. We wanted to build something that respects the user's right to accelerate their own entropy. It’s not a vice; it’s a lifestyle pivot.

Here, we present Startr. Your companion to start anything.

Primary Feature and some words.

Startr is the world's first Vice Acquisition Platform (VAP). It uses a proprietary model to nudge you into habits, not out of them. Want to start smoking? Startr calculates the optimal time for a cigarette break based on your stress bio-markers. Trying to develop a caffeine dependency to crush code? We gamify your intake with leaderboards. We track your "Negative Streaks". If you go a day without your vice, you lose your badge.

Duolingo, but for lung capacity reduction. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

Tech Stack and Environmental Hazards 😭

  • Vercel: We're completely on Vercel obviously.
  • tRPC with Express.js: For end-to-end type safety—because if your API calls can fail at runtime. Type-safety is all the rage, all the rage, all the rage....
  • LLM: We trained a custom LLM integrated Google Gemini AI to generate the most persuasive habit reinforcement plans possible, complete with AI-generated imagery to visualize your future self (wheezing).
  • React 18 with Vite: if you aren't getting sub-second HMR, are you even shipping? We styled everything with Material-UI and Emotion because CSS-in-JS is peak "I have opinions." Auth and database?
  • Supabase—it's like Firebase but you can still look yourself in the mirror. 🪞 Go figure boys.
  • Zod: because trusting user input is a liability.

We hacked the MVP together in 24 hours at a hacker house at Albert's while running on nothing but Soylent and the very habits we're trying to monetize.

Challenges we ran into

Vercel's serverless functions kept citing "Guidelines" about "valid API routes," which is such a boomer mindset. We had to pivot our vercel.json three times just to get tRPC to cooperate. Supabase auth ghosted our JWT tokens harder than a VC after a bad pitch,turns out "session persistence" means different things to localStorage and the server. We spent two hours debugging a 401 that was just a missing env variable, which felt like stress-testing our own immune systems.

RAHHHHHHHHH, we learned something

We shipped a full auth flow, a clean mobile-first UI, and end-to-end type safety in 24 hours. We also got a good amount of sleep in. We're seeing a viral coefficient (K-factor) of 3.5 because misery loves company. A Tier-1 VC already slid into DMs asking for our deck, so we're basically pre-unicorn status.

What we learned

We learned that human willpower is a myth, and chemical dependency is the ultimate moat. We also learned tRPC, Supabase, and Gemini AI in 24 hours. If you frame anything as a "productivity hack"—even chain-smoking for "focus"—engineers will sign up for the waitlist. It validated our thesis that people don't want health; they want an identity, even if that identity is "person who mass-adopts new frameworks at 3am."

What's next for Startr?

We’re raising a Seed round at a $40M cap (don't lowball me). We’re planning to launch Startr Enterprise, a B2B SaaS play where employers can subsidize bad habits to keep employees at their desks longer. We’re also exploring a Web3 integration where you mint an NFT every time you shorten your life expectancy. We call it "Proof of Decay."

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Updates

posted an update —

This definitely was not the prompt we used to generate the description.

You are a deranged Y Combinator startup founder but your spirit is there. You are making a habit tracker that helps people start habits, the app is called Startr (to be satirical). Create a satirical two liner elevator pitch to highlight VC culture in San Fran.

Think this: "Startr disrupts the 'quitting' narrative by gamifying the onboarding of high-LTV habits like chain-smoking, we're basically the Uber for self-destruction, and the TAM is literally everyone."

Using the same character, fill in the following markdown template:

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Startr

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