I quit my job to build my own startup

Three months ago, I left my high paying corporate job and started completely focusing on my own startup. It was not an easy decision for me. The job was very peaceful and flexible. I hardly go to the office one or two days a week. I have 14 years of experience, worked on multiple tech and product based companies, recently I was part of one of the leading cyber security companies in the world.

How it started?

Around 3 years back, my friend Sachin shared an idea of implementing price localization for digital products. We started it as a side project. We developed and released the product. Sachin quit his job and started concentrating completely on the product, that really worked. Within a short span of time we got good traction. Multiple payment providers reached out to us for integration and everything went well, we got many popular creators and some of the fastest growing SaaS companies as customers.

During this time, we talked to many customers and also helped them with their pricing setup. That's how we came to know how difficult it is for them to implement stripe, especially usage based billing, managing feature access, handling webhooks, and customers.

Other requirements were that PMs want to do pricing changes quickly, but they are always blocked on engineering which takes sprints for a simple change. Last day ChatGPT launched a new pricing tier only for India. Imagine, how much engineering effort would have gone into this? What if they can get a new pricing plan up and running without code change in under 5 minutes?

We also came to know that there is no simple tool helps you do pricing experiments easily.

As AI is booming and most of the companies are moving their pricing models from their legacy fixed pricing models to usage based / outcome based pricing models, we found that there is a need for this product. And we finally decided to go all in on this. Another co-founder (Alok, who was head of design at Branch) has also quit his full time job and joined us. Now we are completely focusing on our startup.

Feelings so far..

Last 3 months was very difficult for me and during this time, i was:

— working like 2 full time job at once (easily 16 hours a day)
— 5x stressed than before (feels as same as when i started my career in 2012)
— withdrawing zero salary (first time in last 14 years)
— no weekdays or weekends, everything is same. Sometimes I am exhausted like anything.
— on top of that, one day a production issue killed me, it actually taught me the real difference between as an employee and a founder.

What’s next?

Now we have completed the major development and the app ParityDeals is in private beta (free up to $10K MRR). We have a few early customers already using it.

Feeling a little nervous and excited for launch day next week. Fingers crossed :)

If you have any questions or would like to know more about the product or my personal journey, feel free to connect with me on Twitter, as I will be inscribing my thoughts there very frequently.