At Curious, we don't just acquire and invest in companies—we roll up our sleeves and transform them alongside their teams. Every acquisition is an opportunity to dig into the details, solve real problems, and build something better than what existed before.

This month, we're pulling back the curtain on some recent work with our portfolio companies. These aren't just success stories—they're glimpses into the daily challenges, strategic decisions, and collaborative problem-solving that define what we do at Curious.

Avenue: The Acquisition That Surprised Us

Avenue might be our favorite transformation story this year. When we acquired them, we inherited two products: a solid growth service for real estate agents and a newly-built but poorly positioned AI website builder sitting on a separate domain.

Our initial instinct was conservative—stabilize the core business, shelf the AI builder until 2026. But as we dug deeper with the Avenue team, we realized we were sitting on untapped potential. The AI builder wasn't a distraction; it was the key to Avenue's next chapter.

Over the past few months, we've worked with the team to completely rebrand and reposition the AI builder as Avenue's entry point—a freemium, self-service offering that creates a natural upgrade path to their full service—which you can use here. This wasn't just a product decision; it was a complete rethinking of their business model.

The integration hasn't been without challenges. There have been late nights debugging, heated debates about feature priorities, and the usual hiccups that come with any major product shift. But watching the Avenue team rally around this vision and execute it in just a few months has been incredible.

What makes us proud: Instead of playing it safe with a proven business model, we worked with Avenue to make a bold move that positions them for long-term growth. The AI builder is now collecting usage data that will inform the entire product roadmap, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement.

Polymer: Growing Without Growing Pains

Working with Polymer has been a masterclass in thoughtful product development. The team came to us with a clear vision: create a hiring platform that grows with companies without overwhelming them.

We've watched them carefully add each feature—instant branded careers pages, real-time activity feeds, role-based permissions, bulk actions, stage-based automations—always through the lens of "How do we add power without adding complexity?"

The magic is in the execution. A five-person startup posting their first role experiences the same clean, intuitive interface as a fifty-person company managing multiple departments. The tool literally grows with you, revealing capabilities as you need them rather than overwhelming you from day one.

What excites us most: Polymer isn't trying to be everything to everyone. They're laser-focused on that critical growth phase where spreadsheets stop working but enterprise software feels like overkill.

Convox: When Off-the-Shelf Just Won't Work

When we started working with Convox, their documentation challenge immediately resonated with us. As a developer tools company, their documentation is their product experience, and the standard frameworks weren't cutting it.

The Convox team had already tried everything—Docusaurus, VuePress, Nextra—but kept hitting roadblocks. They needed dynamic sidebars that actually updated with content, search that understood terms like "rack" and "deploy" in their specific context, and the ability to maintain their brand identity without fighting the framework at every turn.

We supported their decision to build a custom solution with Next.js + MDX. Yes, it meant more upfront work, but watching them replace their complex Hugo setup (which required multiple repositories and Byzantine GitHub Actions) with a single, elegant application was worth it. The new docs run on Convox itself, load faster, cost less, and most importantly—actually help users find what they need.

What we love about this project: It shows the Convox team's commitment to their users. They could have settled for "good enough," but instead chose to invest in building exactly what their developer community needed.

Buildfire: Making AI Actually Useful

Buildfire's exploration of AI has been refreshing to watch. Instead of chasing AI buzzwords, they identified a specific pain point—the gap between having an app idea and getting started—and built an AI onboarding agent to bridge it.

Users describe their app idea in plain language, and the AI generates a working framework complete with relevant features and design elements. It's not about replacing human creativity; it's about eliminating the blank canvas problem that stops so many good ideas before they start.

We've been closely monitoring the metrics, and the early results are promising: significantly higher engagement rates post-signup and more users reaching their first "aha" moment with the product.

What we appreciate: BuildFire didn't bolt AI onto their product because it's trendy. They found a genuine use case where AI makes the user experience demonstrably better.

The Work We Love

These stories capture why we do what we do at Curious. We're not passive investors waiting. We're in the trenches with our teams, debating product decisions, analyzing user feedback, and sometimes completely rethinking the business model.

Every company we work with teaches us something new. Convox reminded us that sometimes you need to build rather than buy. Polymer showed us the elegance of incremental complexity. Buildfire demonstrated how AI can solve real problems rather than create new ones. And Avenue proved that sometimes the biggest risk is not taking the risk at all.

This is the work we love—not just identifying potential, but actively unlocking it. Each transformation is different, but they all share our commitment to building products that genuinely serve their users and businesses that can scale sustainably.