A reverse incubator flips the usual order: I build and validate small companies first, then recruit a founding team to take over once one has real traction. I’ll publish the whole process and the playbook here as I go.
Why?
Twelve years ago I published a blog post called Let’s make a hobby startup! where I set myself a public goal of making $250,000 a year building HTML5 games, working no more than 24 hours a week.
I failed spectacularly at working only 24 hours a week. But that simple idea grew into FRVR, which for the past decade has been one of the largest players in instant games, reaching over 1.5 billion players across platforms like Facebook, Samsung and YouTube, and raising over $100M to build a distribution platform that runs everywhere. Along the way I had the privilege of working with incredible people. Brian Meidell joined me as co-founder, and nearly 250 teammates made FRVR what it is today.
Over the past year, though, I’ve been stepping down from FRVR. The company is at a stage in its lifecycle where I’m simply not the right person to help drive it forward. My skills and my interests are in early stage building: what I think of as the 1 to 10 on a scale where founding a startup is 1 and IPO is 100.
I love finding the opening. Creating the first version. Building audiences. Getting to first revenue. Proving something works. The part that comes after - scaling teams, optimizing operations, managing processes - I’m not built for it. Not because that work isn’t valuable, but because I lose interest once the core question shifts from can this work? to how do we repeat this more efficiently?
The crazy part is that I knew that when I wrote that blog post twelve years ago, but I got caught up in the moment and suddenly twelve years had passed.
The plan
So here I am, twelve years older, a bit cleverer, and ready to try again!
The plan: build companies from scratch, get them to roughly $500K in annual recurring revenue, then hand them off to teams who raise capital and scale them. I start as the builder, then gradually step back: mentor, advisor, board member, and eventually shareholder.
The long-term goal is 10+ new companies a year, and I’ll likely need a small team around me to get there. But this is year one, and getting to that pace requires tools, processes, and momentum that don’t exist yet. A big part of what I’m doing right now is building that foundation. If I get five companies off the ground and running this year, I’ll call it a success
My bet
My bet is that I can build a repeatable process with tools, workflows, and habits that lets me build, test, and ship ideas fast. Most ideas won’t deserve more time. The point is to move quickly: release, measure, kill, and only keep pushing the ones that show real traction.
Why $500K? Because that’s roughly the point where a startup idea is genuinely validated. Below that, early revenue can be noise: a lucky break, a single customer, a one-off deal. At $500K ARR something real is happening. There’s a product people want, a business model that works, and crucially, enough runway for a founding team to take over and improve the business without immediately running out of money.
At handoff, I step out of the day-to-day and recruit a small founding team: people who get meaningful equity in the company they’re taking over. Enough to make it theirs, not just a job. I help position the company to raise a seed round.
Do that a few times a year, keep doing it for decades, and you end up with a portfolio of real businesses run by real teams.
What's different now
Two things have changed since the original blog.
AI is a game changer. I don’t want to turn this into an AI thinkpiece - I’ve written about it before, and I’ll write plenty about that later. But the short version is that AI has genuinely changed what one person can build. Things that would have required an entire team a few years ago, I can now do on my own. I’m using AI across every part of what I do, and I’ll share a lot more about how that works in the future.
I’ve done this before. I’ve been starting companies since 2004; FRVR was my seventh. Along the way I’ve learned things you can’t get from a book. Some of those lessons were expensive. I know what kind of builder I am now. I know where the value is. And I’ve learned, the hard way, that a $25M opportunity today is worth more than a $250M opportunity that might never materialise.
The reverse incubator is all of that experience turned into a system.
Where things stand
Right now I’m in the foundation phase. I’m exploring four ideas, but just as importantly, I’m building the tools and processes that make the whole reverse incubator possible. How do you manage multiple companies at once? How do you get AI to do the work of a team? How do you build a repeatable system for going from zero to revenue?
I’ll introduce each idea in its own post: two are B2B, one is a hybrid B2B/B2C play, and one is pure consumer. But the honest picture of where I am today is: building the machine and running the first batch through it at the same time.
Here’s the fun part: two of the four ideas are actually tools I need to build and scale companies. Where those tools turn out to be useful for other people too, they become products in their own right. Some of the first companies coming out of the reverse incubator are the ones that power it.
A few honest caveats
I want to be upfront.
I’m not raising money for this. I have the privilege of being able to self-fund the 1 to 10. When a company is ready for handoff, that’s when we raise, allowing the founding team to focus on executing and scaling.
This is one person, building a lot of things, with a lot of AI help, trying to see if a reverse incubator can actually work. If that sounds interesting, subscribe.
What you'll get if you subscribe
The original FRVR blog worked because I was honest. I published real numbers, including the embarrassing ones. The wins were exciting, but the failures were often the posts people actually read.
I’m going to do the same thing here. Every month I’ll publish a portfolio update with real numbers across every company: revenue, metrics, hours, what I’m doubling down on, what I’m cutting, and what I’m shutting down. No highlight reel. Between updates, expect company announcements as things launch, deep dives into how I pick what to build and why, and the occasional post about what I’m learning along the way.
Beyond the updates, I’ll also be making public predictions about where I think things are heading, and tracking whether I’m right. If I’m wrong, you’ll know. Accountability is the whole point.
Things I haven't figured out yet
Part of building in public means admitting what I don’t know. There are real questions about this model that I don’t have answers to, and I’d rather be honest about them than pretend I’ve got it all mapped out.
Kill criteria. I know I’ll need firm rules for when to shut something down: timeboxes, traction milestones, something objective. Right now I don’t have a fixed framework. Figuring that out is one of the most important things I’ll do this year.
How to find founding teams The whole model depends on handing off to great people. Where do they come from? How do you find someone willing to take over a company they didn’t start? I have ideas, but no playbook yet. If this resonates, I’d love to talk.
Whether one playbook works across different business types. I’ve got B2B, B2C, and hybrid ideas in the mix. Does the same build to $500K system work for all of them, or does each category need its own approach?
How to stay useful after handoff. One company as an advisor is easy. At 10, it’s a different story. How do you add value across a growing portfolio without becoming a bottleneck or just a name on a slide deck?
Whether $500K is always the right number. It’s the working threshold, but some businesses might validate at a different point. Is it always revenue, or could traction look different depending on the model? What happens when a company attracts investors before reaching the $500k threshold?
These are the questions I’ll be working through - and writing about - as I go.
What's next
I’ve got four ideas to introduce, a model to prove, and a lot of building ahead. The first company announcement is next, followed by regular portfolio updates.
If you want to follow along, or if you’re building something yourself and want to talk, I’d love to hear from you.
Let’s go.
- Chris
I'm doing some sudoku-related research with Clemson University using Astra. I should get in touch ;)