Left a great job with a wife and almost no money — how lucky am I?
That is a story of my mistakes, goals, and dreams that started to come true.
Why am I writing this?
The answer is dead simple — I want to! Writing has been something I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Several attempts have been made, but everything I’ve published seemed to be pointless, at least to me. I guess that at the time I did it for the wrong reasons. This time I want to write at least once a month and about things like productivity, life, work, and of course, design. Even if no one reads it, I am doing it for me.
Who the hell am I?
Well, my name is Stas — a husband of a lovely wife, a co-founder, and designer of a nifty little start-up. I always struggle to answer this question: “Where are you from?”. Hopefully, someday, I can say that I am a man of the world, not just by words, but also through a stamp in my passport.
But what I’ve always dreamed about was to work on my own ideas and with those provide value to others.
I failed successfully
When I was eighteen, I got excited about the freshly released iPhone, so me and a friend of mine co-created three apps. Even though they barely made us any money, I learned an important thing about myself — I understood that I want to design and create things. So thanks to those apps I got my first job as a designer, and I had to bust my butt off to keep it.
Fast forward to 2014 — a new attempt to build something simple but useful for the iPhone. We rented an office (because that’s what you do 🤦♂️), and a few months into it we had a final product in our hands. We send it very proudly over to Apple for approval. Days passed by and then the answer — “Your app is too simple, please increase the functionality”. I guess from there on the “spark” started to fade away, and at the same time, I made the decision to move from Germany to Russia.
The project had died, but it left me with an increased desire to create stuff on my own. So, later on, there was another attempt, another app, another miss.
With each of those attempts, I could actually feel that I am getting closer to my goal. Each time you learn something new, and then you reuse that knowledge to push yourself forward.
A new attempt
It was 2017, my brother approaches me, to pick my brain about one of his older projects — a time-tracker for iPhone. In that discussion we got to the conclusion — let’s ditch almost everything if we want to create something that solves an actual problem for people.
Long nights ahead
Both of us had jobs at that time, so the only way to work on the project was in the evenings and on weekends. The first few months were fun, we were full of motivation, striving for that wonderful goal. But, as humans are, they tend to lose interest if something takes too long to achieve. So the work kept slowing down, and at some point, it felt like a never-ending project.
At such a low point you have to decide for yourself, are you willing to continue to push forward or are you done.
I believe that if you find the willingness and power not to give up, you will get another push. And as soon as we saw things come together, we just couldn’t stop — we had to make it work.
Quitting a great job
August 2018 I am faced with a hard decision to quit a great job, with incredible people and a lot of great opportunities coming at me. I knew that if I wanted to make it work this time, I needed to give it my complete focus.
In September I’ve started to work full time on our project. Thankfully, my wife and I, saved up a bit of money that should keep us afloat for maybe a year, given, if we lower our expenses to a minimum — no rent, no car, no fancy clothes or dinners, just the minimum.
Funny enough, traveling was the answer to that.
The big release
It’s out — Timepal launched on the end of November. Since then each day is an incredible joy and full of surprises. We’ve been fortunate to receive only great feedback so far, but we are still far away from being profitable.
It is f** scary, but I wouldn’t change a thing, not even the mistakes. Otherwise — how do you learn for real?
Final words
As I said at the beginning, I want to write for my own sake but, also to maybe inspire someone to make a step into fulfilling their dream. Don’t just run ahead and quit your job without thinking about how you will survive. Save up money, save up knowledge, and just try over and over, until you’ve made it! It doesn’t have to be earning millions or owning fancy cars. Being able to live out your own ideas and with it hopefully help others, is already an incredible gift in life.
Thank you for taking the time to read this! ❤️
If you found this interesting and want to stay in the loop, I invite you to follow my posts here on Medium or on Twitter.
A big thank you to my dear friend Rishat for proofreading my mess of words, and for always leading by example. Go check him out, he writes great stuff.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +418,678 people.
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