1) I was sitting on a house that I thought was a fixer upper, that turned out needed to be torn down. Feeling very discouraged about it, and ready to walk away and eat a loss.
2) I (thought I) was in the market for a new job.
There is a YC company called BuildZoom. You may recognize them from their job postings here on HN. At the time, they posted a job for a Principal Engineer...which is roughly the title I was aiming for at the time. So I clicked it to check it out having no idea what BuildZoom was. I discovered that the job wasn't for me, but I also discovered that their product was basically helping people do real estate development.
So I signed up. Got the whole pitch from them. Agreed to pay extra $$ for their "premium tier" which they never delivered on and refunded entirely after acknowledging this. But what they did do was set up 3 interviews with builders to come see my dilapidated old house. Two of them were obvious no gos, and I almost cancelled with the 3rd because of that. But it turned out he was our goldilocks, and built us a beautiful house that we absolutely love on time and on budget during the height of Covid. It also turned out he had no idea who or what BuildZoom was, they had just found him on some builder directory and added him to their list and basically started marketing for him.
TLDR followed a link to a YC company looking for a job, ended up getting paired up with a homebuilder.