The Startup That Wouldn’t Die

How Years of Failure, Reinvention, and Stubbornness Turned Into a Water-Quality Movement

Most people only see the headline: “Launching a startup!”
What they don’t see is the mess underneath — the abandoned experiments and initiatives, the dissolutions, the dead ends, the arguments, the pitches that went nowhere, and the nights spent duct-taping ideas together because giving up wasn’t an option.

This is the real story — not fame or fortune.
Not the polished one for movie screens.

Where It Started

JAM — the joint investment vehicle I created with my sisters — was born before my parents’ divorce, which I’d mark as the dissolution of my family. JAM was ambitious, messy, and way ahead of its time for all those involved. We didn’t have clear roles. We didn’t have a defined mission. We didn’t know how to build a portfolio, a product, or a team. But we believed we were onto something real, beyond our capital investments: water-quality trading on the blockchain.

We built concepts few others were exploring:

• credit registries

• nutrient trading primitives

• smart contracts

• watershed-based accounting

• modeling tools

• attempts at tokenizing environmental credits

We tried NFTs.
They failed — spectacularly.

But the failure wasn’t final — it was foundational.

Because even when we failed, the insight stayed true:
The world needs a way to measure, verify, and trade water-quality improvements.

And no one else was building it.

When It Fell Apart — and Why I Didn’t

Family businesses may work.
But only when the mission is defined, the work is clear, and everyone has the same appetite for sacrifice.

We didn’t.

Eventually, JAM dissolved. Then NeptuneChain dissolved.
And I ended up carrying the mission forward alone because the mission mattered more than the structure that failed around it.

The Things No One Saw

I pitched in Silicon Valley.
I participated in the world’s largest and oldest cleantech accelerator.
I took punches from VCs and angels who said water quality was “too early,” “too academic,” or “not a venture-scale market.”
I fought through misalignment, burnout, bad assumptions, and every flavor of “you should quit.”

But I didn’t stop.

I built:

• real-time nutrient modeling engines

• stormwater, brine, and thermal load estimators

• early marketplace logic

• a blackbox environmental analytics system

• CAN/MODBUS integrations

• smart buoy firmware

• LoRaWAN soil sensor networks

• ultrasonic algae-control devices

Piece by piece, everything the EPA, state DEQs, and environmental consultancies should have built — but didn’t — started taking shape.

This wasn’t venture-backed.
This wasn’t a research grant.
This was built in the cracks of time between jobs, responsibilities, and life.

The Surprise: Traffic Just Doesn’t Lie

Before launching the full platform or any product, I released nutrient.trading in demo mode.

No ads.
No PR.
No outreach.
No paid anything… other than Cloudflare and Firebase.

If nobody cared, I’d know immediately.

Instead, the opposite happened.

What the data showed:

• 40–150 unique visitors per day (~14,400–54,000 visitors across 12 months)

• hundreds to thousands of tool requests daily

• strong return-user patterns

• MB to GB of data served every day

• 85–99% caching efficiency

• zero signs of bot activity

This wasn’t “traffic.”
This was usage — people returning to the tools for real modeling and real work.

A tiny startup — now just one person — built something the World Resources Institute tried and failed to do with nutrientnet.org.

And that’s when the signal became impossible to ignore:

The demand is real.
The problem is real.
And nobody else is moving fast enough to solve it.

The Platform Water Should Have Had

Everything now converges into two pillars:

BlueSignal

The hardware ecosystem:
smart buoys, soil probes, water-quality controllers, gateways, ultrasonic algae emitters, and sensor-agnostic data streams.

waterquality.trading

The unified marketplace for:

• nutrient credits

• stormwater credits

• brine/saltwater discharge offsets

• thermal pollution trading

• real-time environmental intelligence

• credit verification + modeling

• cross-sector pollution accounting

It ties together years of fragmented work, failures, rebrands, and prototypes into one coherent system that solves a problem regulators still haven’t cracked.

This is not a concept.
This is not a whitepaper.
This is not a grant-funded academic exercise.

This is software, hardware, data pipelines, analytics engines, and a functioning marketplace — built in the real world, for real users, solving real problems.

Why I’m Saying This Now

Because the water sector is about to go through the same transformation energy did:

measurement →
transparency →
markets →
operational intelligence →
local independence →
infrastructure modernization

VPPs reshaped energy.
WQPs — Water Quality Programs and Water Purchase Agreements — will reshape water.

Meanwhile:

Federal agencies are slow.
State regulators are overwhelmed.
DEQs are understaffed.
Consultants are still using Excel files from 1998.

Going Forward

Communities deserve visibility.
Farmers deserve practical tools.
Utilities deserve real intelligence.
Regulators deserve modern infrastructure.
The public deserves water that is actually clean — not theoretically clean on outdated spreadsheets.

Everything I’ve built — the buoy systems, the sensors, the gateways, the analytics, the marketplaces — exists for one purpose:

to make water quality measurable, accountable, tradable, and improvable at scale.

If you want in — as a partner, a pilot site, a utility, a municipality, or a regulator — reach out.

This time, there are no fallback plans.
No escape routes.
No more dissolutions.
No boats left to burn.