I Need Help
The thing founders aren't supposed to say
I have spent nineteen essays proving I know what I'm talking about.
Now I need to say the thing founders aren't supposed to say.
I need help.
Not as a rhetorical flourish. Not as a humble-brag. Not as a growth-hack dressed up in vulnerability.
I mean it literally. The weight of holding this whole framework in my head, alone, for months, is crushing me. I have been doing what connectors do — maintaining every thread, tracking every dependency, holding the whole shape simultaneously — but without the mesh I'm describing. Still running it manually. Still a single point of failure.
I am the bottleneck I've been writing about.
And I'm writing this essay because the honest move — the on-brand move, the imajin move — is to say that out loud instead of performing certainty until the money shows up.
The Myth I'm Not Playing
The founding myth of the current moment goes like this: one founder, one AI, one laptop, world domination. The tools are so good now that you don't need a team. You're the team.
There's truth in it. I have shipped more in the last several months, alone, than teams of ten managed in years I've worked in. The AI collaboration bottleneck dissolved and I became genuinely dangerous. I built imajin-cli in three weeks at fourteen hours a day. The code is there. The architecture is there. The arguments are laid out across nineteen essays, in sequence, with receipts.
But here's what the myth leaves out: even the mythological one-person founder has a support structure. They have investors who believe in them. They have an early community who shows up. They have at least one other person who can hold the whole vision when the founder's brain is offline.
I have been trying to be the node and the network simultaneously.
That's not sustainable. And more importantly — it's not the argument I've been making. The argument is that no single node should be the single point of failure. The argument is that the load should be distributed. The argument is that the people who are always load-bearing should finally have infrastructure that sees and compensates that.
I am about to fail my own thesis.
So I'm asking.
What I Actually Need
Financial help. Not venture capital with control strings attached. The 37 weeks of severance have funded a remarkable amount of thinking and building, but I am not independently wealthy and runway is finite. I need people who believe in what they've just read across nineteen essays to become patrons, angels, early backers — whatever shape makes sense for where they are. I'm not asking for millions. I'm asking for enough runway to get Jin's party running and the first real operator nodes live.
But here's what's different about this ask: you're not donating to a company. You're entering the attribution chain as a micro-founder. Your financial contribution is logged the same way a code contribution is logged — weighted by when you arrived and what the network was worth at that moment. Early is riskier. Early is weighted accordingly. When the network starts generating value through inference fees and micro-transactions, the chain pays back through the same distribution contract logic the whole system runs on.
And then it gets interesting. You decide where your returns flow. To causes you care about. To infrastructure. To your own pocket. The same sovereignty the network offers creators, it offers you — a signed, versioned, auditable declaration of your values, running automatically, every time value touches your node.
The people showing up right now — before the network exists, before the returns are real — are the most altruistic contributors this system will ever see. They're not here for the yield. They're here because they believe the architecture is right. And the architecture gives them something no traditional investment ever has: the ability to watch their stake flow to the things they care about, in real time, permanently, on a ledger anyone can read.
That's not a financial instrument. That's a values instrument.
The RFC for how this works is live on GitHub: RFC: Programmable Distribution Contracts — the full mechanic, the open questions, the bounty for building it. Read it. If it resonates, come in through coffee.imajin.ai. Both put you in the chain.
Dev help. I am a strong developer. I am not a team. There are specific layers of this stack — the federation protocol, the DID implementation, the payment rail integration, the mobile presence layer — that need builders who are not me. Not just coders for hire. People who read The Utility and felt something click. People who have been trying to build something like this from a different angle and want to work on it together. If you are that person, I want to talk to you yesterday.
Other brains. The trust graph argument, the .fair protocol, the operator network model, the economics of inference fees circulating through human infrastructure — I have been thinking about these things mostly alone, with an AI as my sounding board. That's been extraordinary and insufficient. I need people who can punch holes in the architecture. Who can see what I'm missing from their angle. Economists. Cryptographers. Protocol designers. Community builders who have been running nodes of their own and know where the problems actually live.
Community. People who read these essays and recognized something. People who were on the BBSes and felt the loss. People who have been building events and communities and creative infrastructure for years and kept hitting the same extractive ceiling. People who looked at the current internet and thought: this is not what it was supposed to be. People who want to be early in something that is trying to fix that at the architecture level, not the feature level.
If you are any of these people — I am not hard to find. I am at the links at the bottom of every essay. I am building in public. I am, apparently, writing manifestos.
Why This Is the Right Essay to End On
Because the whole argument is that the internet should be a place where you can ask for what you need and have it find the right people.
Not through an algorithm that serves your request to whoever paid for placement. Through a trust graph that routes it to the people who are genuinely the right fit.
I don't have that infrastructure yet. That's the thing I'm building. But I can model the behavior in the meantime.
So here is the ask, signed, attributed, with a return address:
I am Ryan VETEZE, known as b0b. I have been building connective infrastructure since 1988. I ran a BBS called b0bby's World. I have organized fourteen summers of a community called Summer Camp. I have thirty years of pattern library in my head and finally the tools to make it legible and the architecture to make it buildable. I spent three weeks burning out my brain writing imajin-cli on severance pay and five events on two continents making sure I understood what I was trying to build before I tried to build it.
I am not a first-time founder with a pitch deck.
I am someone who has been right about this for thirty years and finally has the tools to prove it.
And I can't do it alone.
If you've read all of this — all twenty of these essays, or even five of them, or even this one — you have enough context to know whether you're the kind of person who belongs in this.
Come in.
— Ryan VETEZE, Founder, imajin.ai aka b0b
The code: github.com/ima-jin/imajin-ai
The network: imajin.ai
Become a micro-founder: coffee.imajin.ai
RFC: Distribution Contracts + Micro-Founder Attribution: github.com/ima-jin/imajin-ai/discussions
Jin's party: April 1st, 2026
The history of this document: github.com/ima-jin/imajin-ai/blob/main/apps/www/articles/essay-20-i-need-help.md
This article was originally published on imajin.ai (https://www.imajin.ai/articles/essay-20-i-need-help) on February 22, 2026. Imajin is building sovereign technology infrastructure — identity, payments, and presence without platform lock-in. Learn more → (https://www.imajin.ai/)