Founders' journey is arduous and highly personal. I reflect on my last 4 years and a half years as a founder of two SaaS businesses.

Some real feels in this one 😬

I left my job at Intercom.com about 4 and a half years ago. It was a great place, I loved it.

Nearing the end of my time there I felt that I wasn't happy, I reflected a lot on my unhappiness while climbing some of the Atlas peaks in Morocco. Great therapy by the way. 😅

I had a great job, I worked with smart people, and things were great really. Why do I want to leave? Why am I unhappy?

I understood that I had the energy to do 5x more, get to where I know I can get to 10x faster, and learn at a much much faster pace.

I left maybe most of my equity, an excellent and stable job, and a salary that I very much needed (didn't have much savings), and took the decision to quit literally over a weekend, and spoke to my manager on Monday. 🥲

I had zero plans, and I just always wonder to myself if there was no logical sense to make this decision. It is literally just a long list of cons with devastating consequences. 😅

I listen to my gut feeling a lot. I knew that if I didn't do it, I would be extremely unhappy and affect my job too. I wanted to own my time again.

Did a few stints here and there. I didn't do well, which was a tough spot in my life. I was really down.

I then went into hibernation for 3 months – literally sleeping & waking just building what-to-be Octopods. Not glorifying this but I spent maybe not less than 12 hours every day for 3 months just building.

Long story short, my partner and best friend Mohamed joined me later in the year, and a year in we made Octopods a very successful and profitable bootstrapped business. Got two solid acquisition offers. But I didn't feel this was it for us. I felt we can do more, and tackle a more ambitious problem.

We spoke to thousands of business-building Octopods. People loved Octopods. They paid good money for it too. Our gut feeling was right about this. We bet on Omnichannel messaging before it was a strict must, and lots of big companies started to realise that. But there were a few big problems we couldn't solve with Octopods - specifically with messaging channels like #WhatsApp where the majority of our customers needed solved well.

This is where Rasayel.io came in. We worked even harder on building Rasayel.io. Re-wrote the guts of the tech we built for Octopods but for Rasayel.io this time. It was and still is a very tough product to build, market and sell – and mind you, this is probably the third time we do this. 😅

Two years in, I genuinely believe that we gathered a brilliant group of people together, and built the best product on the market for businesses to grow over #WhatsApp, a product that solves an excruciating problem with already many customers happily paying for it.

I am extremely happy with where things are today, and if you ask me 4 and half years ago to try and anticipate the series of events that will happen, it would be beyond my wildest guesses – I am so excited for the future. ❤️

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tarek-khalil-2261bb22_coming-soon-rasayel-grow-with-whatsapp-activity-7075359499296874496-O82D?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop