Michael Ruescher

I'm building BitterClip and running SheetGenius, Inc., the company behind it and a few dozen other small software products.

In May 2026, after twelve years helping build one software company, I left to do this work full time.

Building software someone can use turned out to be a different job from getting anyone to know it exists. I made one video, learned how much sits between a recording and something a person would watch, and built BitterClip out of that. It turns long recordings into clips that stay linked to the exact moment they came from.

After a lot of building with AI agents, my read is simple: the demo comes together quickly now. The real work is everything around it.

The model needs a repo, credentials, logs, deploys, memory, and permissions. Bitter puts those pieces in one place. It is what the products run on, including BitterClip.

The name comes from Richard Sutton's “Bitter Lesson.” General methods that scale with compute keep winning. My bet is that as the models get stronger, what matters more is everything around them: a real place to work, and a person responsible for the result.

If you're working through the same problem, I'd like to compare notes.