# Astro

engineer, consultant · aug – sep 2026

Lost Astronaut is a venture studio in Vilnius that starts companies. Astro is its market-intelligence system: it pulls public market data into one database, looks for where money is moving, and puts the evidence in front of the partners for their weekly meeting. I took the job to see the other side: how a studio decides which companies to start, and what investors look for before they put money in.

## what i built

37 data gatherers (31 running): App Store and Google Play charts and reviews, Meta's ad library, Reddit, SEC filings, job boards and more. That's 2.26M observations on about 25,000 companies, 26,000 iOS apps, 39,500 Android apps and 800,000+ reviews.
An evidence layer. Agents decide what to claim, but the tools refuse to write a claim without evidence from the archive. When the system builds a signal itself, every number comes from the archive, never from the model.
Revenue estimates from chart rank and rating velocity, calibrated against verified revenue: the median miss went from 5.5× to 2.8×.
The web app the partners use, a CLI, a read-only MCP server, and deploys that roll back by themselves when the health check fails.

## what was hard

Measuring my own machine. The first version was 23 LLM agents running 17 analyst playbooks. When I measured it, it wasn't producing anything the partners could act on, so I rebuilt detection as statistics. Then I audited the replacement too: it was mostly detecting changes in our own data collection, with 2.7 false alarms per market-year against a budget of 1. The version that went live reads each week as it was known at the time, and a change-point detector (CUSUM) with thresholds calibrated by simulation flags real shifts. LLMs only read and judge what it flags.

## what i learned

Blank beats wrong. Scores should order things, never gate them. Measure on the production box before optimizing: a bigger server would have bought weeks, not a fix. Navigation should follow the questions people ask in the meeting, not the database tables.

## what happened

The studio's partners used it for their weekly meeting (8 accounts).

# this site is a shell: open it here