throw-away-5000

Thanks for asking, I'm alright. I used to have this thought process which was 'if I didn't make X metric by Y date, I'd give this all up and go back to BigCo', well sure enough I've never ever made it but I'm still kicking around. I had to read a bunch of philosophy particularly on stoicism to get me through some of the tougher times a couple of years ago.

There's no point in focusing on the money/wealth that I didn't earn over the years because I took this path and I made a choice to. What matters is the here and now. That's not to say I don't plan for the future but I boiled it down to a simple trick to keep me going - is there progress? Is your trajectory up or down? If up, no matter how small or slow the progress is, keep grinding away another day/week/month. We're slowly adding customers, slowly improving our product to be indispensible to our current customers and getting paid on a monthly basis for it so there's a pin-hole of light at the end of the tunnel. I've already paddled half way across the ocean, I just have to keep going on.

I think they're completely miserable because they don't know how good they actually have it. If they can unwrap their ego from the rat race then they would be much happier.

If your motivation is making multi-millions one day, you're better off buying a lottery ticket or staying at your FAANG-equivalent job.

I left my large company job 7 years ago to found my own company with a friend. We initially tried our hand at a saas product then figured out we were too green at the business side of things to make it work (read we had no idea how to sell) so moved on to web-dev consulting.

Consulting has been a huge slog, we made every mistake in the book we could (and learnt from them) so we were making meagre salaries for a number of years. However we (lucked out and) met some great people who wanted to start new Saas products with us and could take care of selling and marketing while we build and product manage.

Now we've made our way back to boostrapped-saas-product-land much wiser than before. Been at it for a year now so not quite ramen profitable yet. I am poor AF, my cofounder is poor AF, we are late 30s/early 40s now.

The only reason why we come to work each day is because we have products we believe in, customers who we want to help and employees who we love (and wish we could pay more).

This has been made possible by understanding wives and families too who are happy to scrimp now for a shot at a future they believe in too.