Why I am building HeyStax

A personal statement by Colm Byrne, founder of HeyStax.

We’ve all been building with AI for a while now. Like many of you, I’ve built my own harness for building software. I also built HeyStax to coordinate work with people and AI agents.

It has three simple primitives: Mission. Goal. Next Action.

Why? Because we’re doing hundreds of pull requests a month, sometimes thousands. Stories and tickets multiply too. They’re too fine-grained to tell me whether I am getting where I want to go.

I spent many years coding, and about ten years in product management. With AI, I found myself building things again. I love it.

But then I asked myself: What am I actually trying to do?

It’s not to be a better engineer. It’s not to be a better product manager.

I want to build useful things, make money building useful things, support my family and earn the freedom to keep doing it.

I realised I had been optimising the part that was getting easier: building.

The hardest part was still finding individuals and businesses who needed something, establishing commercial relationships, earning trust, and getting paid.

Engineering a bridge is important. But building the bridge isn’t the reason for the bridge.

Persistent AI agents have changed the possibilities. Agents can run in different environments, use different tools and work across different providers. Their mission shouldn’t disappear when their provider changes.

So I’ve started using HeyStax as an operational plane for continuous commercial pursuit.

Start with a product, find customers who need it, and pursue a sale. Or start with a customer problem, find a solution, deliver it and get paid. Or discover an underserved niche. Or exploit a short-lived opportunity.

Sunny day? Sell ice cream.

Whatever route we take, the question is: Did we achieve the outcome?

If not, what did we learn? What do we try next? Who is actually doing the work?

I don’t want AI manufacturing thousands of tasks for nobody to execute. I want a system relentlessly reducing the distance between intention and result.

And personally, I want to spend less time managing the machinery and more time thinking, creating, making decisions, and being with my family.

Not more work. More outcomes.

That is my mission. Yours could be entirely different: building a house, getting a medicine through regulatory review, finishing a film, transforming a community. The operating principle is the same.

This is a founder’s statement of purpose. The full outcome-pursuit product is still under development; it is not being represented here as entirely shipped.