One day. A different conversation: a solo founder's story

I make AwaCut, a desktop app that removes the background from photos. Not one photo at a time in a browser tab, but a whole folder at once, on your own computer. I built it in Romania, mostly alone, for people who have hundreds of product photos to clean up and no wish to upload them anywhere.

For a long time the conversation about AwaCut was the one you would expect for a small utility: a few downloads a day, a support email now and then, the occasional review. Useful, quiet, small.

I also make awa.games, free puzzle games in the browser: sudoku, minesweeper, nonogram, and twenty kinds of picture sudoku with animals, dinosaurs and fruit in place of numbers. I make other things too, but these are the two I took with me.

Then I spent one day in San Francisco showing them.

What happened

I will keep the details private. The people I spoke to did not sign up to appear on a website, and the rooms, the dates and the numbers belong to them as much as to me. What I can say is this: that single day produced more interest from investors and from people looking at the business as a whole than the previous months of building had.

Nothing about the app changed between the morning and the evening. The same binary, the same model, the same price. What changed was the conversation around it. In one day it moved from “a nice tool” to “a product someone might want to own”.

The games surprised me more. I had brought them as the small thing, the side project to mention in passing. Some of the most serious questions of the day were about them, and not from the people I expected. Who wanted the tool and who wanted the games, and which drew more interest from the business side, is the part I keep for the conversation.

Why that was worth a domain

I kept turning that over on the flight back. The temptation is to read it as a story about San Francisco, or about being in the room. There is some of that. But the lesson I actually took home is smaller and more useful:

The products were already good enough. The missing piece was showing them to the right people, in person, with the real thing open on the table.

A demo that runs offline, on a laptop, with no loading spinner and no “please wait for the upload” is a very different experience from a landing page. People could drop their own photos in. They could see the cutouts appear. Nobody had to trust a claim.

So the name is a reminder, to me first. One day of showing beats a month of describing. That is true of investors, and it is true of users.

What this site is

One Day in SF is a journal, not a pitch. It sits next to AwaCut and awa.games and it does three things:

1. It tells this story, at the level I am allowed to tell it.
2. It explains the product decisions. Why the tool runs locally, why there are no credits, why it is a desktop app in 2026 when everything else is a tab. And why a free sudoku gets the same care.
3. It opens a door. If you are curious about AwaCut or awa.games, as a user, an investor or someone looking at the business, there is an email address at the bottom of every page.

What you will not find here: names of people I met, screenshots of conversations, revenue, valuations, or anything that would make a private meeting public. If a detail would need someone else’s permission, it is not on this site.

What comes next

The notes that follow are about the software itself. One is about local-first software, and what it means for a tool to stay on your computer. One is about the free games, and why they get the same care as a paid tool. One is practical: how to evaluate software beyond its pitch, with AwaCut as the example on the table.

If you would rather skip the reading and open the products, that works too. It is what the day in San Francisco taught me.