Built by a founder, for founders

I'm Eric Blue — founder of UpwardBit Ventures and a technologist with 30+ years of experience building software products. Over the past several years, I've been doing two things simultaneously: consulting with startups and global brands on AI strategy, and building my own products on the side.

Through that work — both advising others and building myself — I kept running into the same bottleneck: the planning phase takes too long and produces the wrong artifacts. Founders (including me) would spend weeks on research, strategy docs, and pitch decks, only to realize the plan wasn't actionable enough for a dev team to build from, or the business model hadn't been validated at all.

I've personally taken multiple product ideas through the full planning and MVP cycle — from initial concept through competitive analysis, Lean Canvas, user stories, wireframes, and working prototypes. That process taught me what actually matters in the planning phase and what's just busywork. The gap isn't ideas or ambition — it's a structured, fast path from idea to a spec your team can build and a model you can validate.

Beyond my own products, I've hosted and co-facilitated workshops with startups and global brands — hands-on ideation sessions covering product planning, Lean Canvas, and Business Model Canvas. Through consulting with early-stage founders, I've also spent significant time helping them build out their MVPs and get to market.

My belief is that AI has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to consolidate these processes — traditional product planning (used in Agile and Waterfall), Lean Canvas, Business Model Canvas — into a single, streamlined experience. Today, founders juggle multiple apps, templates, and disconnected workflows to do what should be one continuous process. UltraLeanPlan brings it all together, combining proven planning methodologies with AI to produce a buildable product spec and a validated business model in hours, not months.