# Goodbye YBI MVP Development Program
Three years and seven projects later, the YBI MVP Development Program is officially shutting down.
Our final two projects, for Rapt and Gizmo and Trinket are about to wrap up. Legacy projects have begun working directly with program alumni. It’s the end of an era.
If you’ve been following my work, you’ll recall that just a year ago I documented how the YBI’s MVP Development Program - and my consulting arm, Dev Youngstown, LLC - started. So, you might be wondering: what happened?
The short story is that I ran out of cognitive bandwidth.
Cognitive Load
The original intention of the MVP Development Program was that once an MVP was built, it would transfer to either an internal dev team or a better-equipped consulting firm.
This basically never happened.
Instead, most projects would set aside a portion of their MVP budget to offset maintence work and hosting costs - which made sense. Software is never “done” after all. And once that budget ran out, many founders were willing to pay out of pocket.
At first, I was all for this. The students got more work, the startups got low-cost software development, and the goals of the program were being met.
But it also meant that every new MVP added another project I had to keep in my head. And the number wasn’t going down nearly as fast as it was going up.
This wasn’t a problem early on. But after my promotion to Director of Platform Engineering at BlastPoint in early 2025, I suddenly had far more projects to keep track of during the day, too.
About three months ago, everything came to a head. Between the increasing demands of my day job and the long tail of MVP projects, I realized I’d hit my cognitive ceiling.
I asked for help - and thankfully my team was understanding. But it was clear something had to change.
Timing
Frankly, it’s a good time to end the YBI MVP Development Program.
Most of my students are graduating or moving on - working directly with startups, taking on higher-paying contract work, and finding new opportunities. I’d have needed to interview and hire more students to keep the program going.
The Ohio entrepreneurship ecosystem also recently changed how funding works, and every partner is being asked to specialize. The YBI’s specialization is additive manufacturing, not software - so keeping the program alive would have gone against the grain.
We also don’t currently have a Youngstown-based B2B SaaS startup well positioned for additional funding. It’s been hard to find strong candidates. A bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Thank yous
I’m incredibly thankful to the YBI - especially Chandler Fiffick - for the opportunity to run this program. It gave me space to sharpen project and product management skills that have set me up for success elsewhere (especially at BlastPoint), and it introduced me to a lot of great people.
I’m also thankful to all the students who made this program such a massive success - especially Garrett Huggins, who took ownership of the processes and templates that set our projects up for success. Also: Nick Ott, Nick Winsen, Breydan Rittner, Jenna DeLuca, Noah Diana, and Austin Winger-Kailer - each of whom took ownership when the moment called for it.
Lastly, I’m thankful to the founders who were such patient, enthusiastic partners over the last three years - especially Reid Polis of Truk-Em, the first entrepreneur I worked with through the YBI.
Conclusion
I’ll still be an Entrepreneur in Residence at the YBI, with a focus on advising founders on building teams, building software, and connecting them with the right people.
Looking forward to starting 2026 with a refreshed focus.
