My son Finn died in April 2023. He was 20.
I'm not opening with that to be provocative. I'm opening with it because it's the reason this project exists, and I'd rather say it plainly than let it come out sideways somewhere in paragraph six.
After he died I stopped working. Not slowed down — stopped. I let a seven-figure software agency die on the vine. Spent most of what I'd built over 20 years just surviving. I didn't start coming out of the fog until January 2024, and when I did, I tried to go back to the person I was before.
That person is gone. What's here instead is someone building something new.
Today is Day 0. Here's what I'm building, and what I'm going to document publicly for the next 365 days.
The business: fractional AI ops for startup founders
The offer is simple. Founders have an ops list. Things that have been sitting there for six weeks — the onboarding process that lives in their head, the reporting nobody does consistently, the systems their team should be running but aren't. They know they should fix these things. They won't. Not this month.
I take the list. I clear it. They breathe again.
Twenty years of software entrepreneurship, run through everything I've learned building AI-first since 2023. The tools exist. The workflows exist. Most founders just haven't had a focused week to wire them up. I have. Many times. And I can do it in their company in 48 hours where it would take them two months if they did it themselves.
This is what testventures.net is.
Why build in public
Three honest reasons.
The first is accountability. I'm starting from zero on @poweredbyfinn on X and Threads — zero followers, zero revenue from this business — and I need the public commitment to keep showing up.
The second is that the work itself is the marketing. If I'm writing about how I use AI to build an onboarding system for a B2B SaaS founder, and that post ranks for "ai ops for startups," that's a better client acquisition strategy than cold outreach. The content compounds. The cold emails don't.
The third is simpler. Finn was 20. He didn't get to build the thing he wanted to build. I'm going to build this one in front of everyone, messily and honestly, partly because that's just how it should be done.
What I'll cover over the next 365 days
Every week will mix shorter daily updates with one longer post that goes deeper. The topics will cover everything I actually do:
How I use Claude to run operations. Not prompts for content — actual workflows for running a business. SOPs built from voice recordings. Client onboarding systems that work without the founder. Reporting that happens automatically.
What it looks like to be a fractional AI COO. The diagnostic calls, the scope decisions, the client relationships. What founders actually need versus what they think they need.
The real numbers. Revenue, followers, client pipeline, conversion rates. Every week, no rounding.
How to automate the back office with AI. The Zapier and Make.com flows I build. What to automate first, what to leave human.
The AI tools stack for startups. What I actually use and why, not a sponsored roundup.
And occasionally, when it's appropriate: Finn. The foundation. What it means to build a business powered by grief and to have it work.
The mission underneath
The reason this business exists is the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund — youth adventure grants of up to $10,000 in his name, for young people who want to go see the world the way he did. The revenue from TestVentures funds the grants. Every client I take on is a grant closer to being awarded.
That's the whole thing.
Day 0 numbers
Prospects: 0. Clients: 0. Revenue: $0.
I posted the announcement on LinkedIn this morning. Everything else starts now.
Day 1 tomorrow.