I Left School in April to Go All-In. Building in Public Changed Everything.
April was probably the biggest turning point of my life.
I decided to take a gap year and leave school to work on my startup full-time.
At that point we had:
no funding
no audience
no marketing budget
Just a small team and one idea:
Before asking anyone else to use our product, we should use it ourselves.
That decision ended up changing almost everything.
1
Instead of buying ads...
Instead of hiring agencies...
Instead of paying creators...
We decided to become our own first customer.
Every new feature had to help us grow first.
If it didn't help our own account...
It probably wasn't worth shipping.
2
Over the next few months we kept posting publicly.
Not viral threads.
Mostly:
product updates
mistakes
experiments
screenshots
things that didn't work
Some posts reached almost nobody.
Some unexpectedly spread.
3
Something interesting started happening.
People we had admired for years started interacting with our posts.
One day I noticed that the CEO of Midjourney had followed my account.
Later, several founders and AI builders I respected also started following.
None of this happened because we "went viral."
It happened because we kept showing up consistently and joining conversations.
4
The funny part is...
These experiences completely changed our product roadmap.
Originally we thought an X tool should mainly help people write tweets.
After using it ourselves every day...
We realized writing wasn't the bottleneck.
Discovery was.
Timing was.
Replies were.
Monitoring conversations was.
So we rebuilt large parts of the product around that workflow.
Chapter 5
Today, every feature inside Volumn exists because we needed it first.
That's also why our comparison pages, AI replies, monitoring, and engagement tools all come from real usage instead of feature checklists.
We're still early.
Still learning.
Still shipping every week.
But building in public has become one of the best product decisions we've made.
Ending
If I had to summarize the biggest lesson from taking a gap year to build a startup, it'd be this:
Don't wait until you have users to validate your product.
Become your own first power user.
Ship.
Use it.
Break it.
Repeat.
That's my stories with volumn.ai and goglobal.to :)
I'd love to hear how other founders validate products before finding product-market fit.
the line that got me is "writing wasn't the bottleneck, discovery was." i'm building a social network while still learning to code, and being my own first user broke the same illusion for me: i kept polishing the posting flow when the real problem was that an empty feed gives you nothing to come back to.
curious about the school part though. did going all-in actually speed the product up, or mostly just remove the excuse not to ship?
The strongest takeaway is how using your own product changed the roadmap instead of just validating the original idea.
A lot of founders optimize for acquisition before deeply understanding the workflow. Curious which internal usage signal changed Volumn’s direction the most?
indeed
Interesting. I was actually asking because I was curious whether there was a specific moment or pattern that made you rethink the roadmap, rather than just confirming the original direction.