From PoC to Start: a few weeks with our first beta testers

A quiet kind of milestone

For the past few weeks I’ve been helping our first beta testers — Ruud, Wouter, Jeroen, Mike, and Patrick — install Aurono Start on their Raspberry Pis and Mac Minis and migrate the strategies they’d been running on the PoC.

It’s a quiet moment, the kind you don’t see coming. You spend months building software in your own head, and then one afternoon you’re watching it install on someone else’s machine, wondering whether the thing you imagined matches the thing that actually runs.

For each tester the install followed the same shape. Download the new software. Walk through the setup. Wait for the dashboard to come online. The first time you see the Dashboard load on someone else’s machine — with their portfolio, their strategies, their numbers — it lands differently than seeing it on your own.

Migrating, not just installing

The migration was the part I was most curious about. Each tester had strategies that had been running on the PoC version for weeks or months. Real positions. Real history. We didn’t want them to start over; we wanted those strategies to keep running, in the new system.

So we used the migration as an opportunity to actually look at the strategies, in a way the PoC never made easy. We pulled each one open in Aurono Lab and ran Simulate against recent market data — not to replace the existing triggers, but to see whether the rules they’d been quietly running still fit the market they were trading in.

A few of them got small adjustments. A tighter buy threshold here. A slightly higher sell trigger there. Others were left exactly as they were. The point wasn’t to optimize; it was to ask the question. That’s the kind of pause that wasn’t possible on the PoC. The PoC was a script that traded. Start lets you stop and look at what your strategy is doing, before you commit to it for another month.

What changed underneath

I won’t list features. The thing that actually matters, in everyday use, is that Start explains itself. The Activity feed reads in sentences. Trades come with reasons. When the system skips a buy or holds steady, you can see why. That sounds small until you’ve spent any time staring at the kind of dashboard that just shows you numbers and asks you to trust them.

Sitting with five different testers’ machines and watching the same software behave the same way each time, on hardware I’d never seen before, was the first moment the work really started to feel real.

Strategies that were actually trading

Here’s the part that energized me to keep going.

At more than one tester’s dashboard, I watched strategies that were actively buying and selling — not in a backtest, not in a simulation — live, against the market, with real capital. And some of them were performing genuinely well. Buy triggers firing in the dips. Sell triggers locking in gains. The Activity feed quietly logging it all, sentence by sentence.

Months of building infrastructure can feel abstract. You ship release after release of plumbing — the unglamorous bits nobody’s supposed to notice — and you trust that one day all of it turns into something tangible. Watching the dashboard tick on the testers’ machines, with their own strategies, made it tangible.

What’s next

A few more testers in the coming weeks. Then early access. Each install teaches us something — about the install path, about the migration, about which numbers people look at first when the dashboard opens. Those lessons feed straight back into the next release.

Thank you, Ruud, Wouter, Jeroen, Mike, and Patrick. You’re not just running the software; you’re shaping it. The beta wouldn’t be a beta without you.