I wrote about quitting my job here. This is what happened after.
March: heads-down
The first full month of being all-in started about as glamorously as it sounds, which is to say not at all. I was back to the same rhythm as before, except now without a paycheck to soften the late nights.
Most of my focus was on Ghostwriter. When everything else in your life is uncertain, the thing your hands already know how to do becomes a kind of comfort, and the alternative was sitting with the uncertainty, which is not great company.
The harder thing was everything around the building. Learning distribution, building a personal brand, writing content, the whole apparatus that turns a product into something people actually see. I'd been thinking about distribution for a while as the part of building that nobody can easily copy, but thinking about it and doing it turn out to be very different sports. So I started posting more. I went to conferences and talks. I took a lot of coffee chats and sat in a lot of rooms where I clearly did not know what I was doing yet.
On the side I was also building smaller apps, partly to learn mobile, partly to mess around with new AI tools, and partly because my hands needed something to do. I didn't need any of them to become anything yet, I was just keeping the gears moving, even if the shape of where it was all headed wasn't visible.
March was mostly invisible work. Just a lot of gears turning slowly in the background, and a lot of conversations that didn't seem to lead anywhere. It was thrilling and lonely in roughly equal measure, which is to say exactly what I'd quit my job to do.
The cross-country trip
Five cities in nine days, and what was supposed to be a single trip to LA turned into something closer to a reset, though I didn't realize that's what was happening at the time.
The trip was never supposed to be a trip. A childhood mate was turning thirty in LA, and once I'd committed to that, the rest of it kind of compounded. If I was already flying out west I should swing through Kansas City to see my relatives, and then a conference came up in Boston, and then some of the friends I'd be seeing in LA asked if I wanted to drop by theirs in Dallas, and then another friend was passing through New York. By the time the dust settled I had a route that read like a Greyhound brochure: LA, Dallas, Kansas City, back to New York for a night, train up to Boston, train back. Nine days, five cities, thirty-plus hours in transit. I mostly booked the flights because I'd already said yes to people, and people were the one thing I'd been bad at lately.
I pulled an all-nighter before the first flight, because of course I did, and got to JFK to find the kind of TSA line you read about in the news during a crisis. Two hours in line at four in the morning, everyone cranky and visibly afraid they were about to miss their flights, some of them already having missed flights, all of them radiating the specific kind of airport anger that builds when nobody can do anything about it. A great start to the trip, all in all.
LA carried most of the weight. These are childhood friends, people who knew me and any of the various versions of myself I've been. We caught up the way you can only catch up in person, which doesn't happen on FaceTime no matter how many times you schedule it.
A few of these guys are running their own businesses now, and they're further down the road I've just started walking. I came home with notes on market research and ICPs and a few other founder-flavored topics I'd been avoiding because I'm a builder by instinct and the founder muscles still felt like a foreign language. But the bigger thing wasn't the notes, it was watching people I've known since we were kids navigate the same uncertainty I'd been white-knuckling alone, and noticing that they weren't really white-knuckling it. They were just doing it, which is, it turns out, the only way it actually gets done.
The thirty hours of transit gave me something I hadn't had in a while, which was time to just think, with nowhere to be and nothing to build, and what I noticed sitting (or standing in line at the airport) with my own thoughts was that I wasn't dreading them. I was, surprisingly, kind of okay. I came back to New York exhausted and somehow lighter than when I'd left.
Back in New York
Two weeks of focused work again, except this time it had a plan attached.
The trip had given me more than rest, it had given me a to-do list: do the market research I'd been skipping, get clearer on who we were actually building for, and pressure-test the product against that. The kind of work I'd been avoiding because it felt like founder homework. So I did what builders do when faced with homework and built a tool to do it for me. I spun up a market research agent, and once that was running I went back to Ghostwriter with a more honest sense of who I was actually building for. The product was getting real feedback by then. Beta users were telling us what worked and what didn't, and we were pushing changes constantly.
I was tired in a different way than before, because the grind hadn't changed shape but the stakes had. Every late night was costing me money I wasn't earning, and every hour was a bet that this was actually going to work, and I didn't always feel sure that it would.
Portugal
The first vacation I'd had in years where I actually rested, as in actually rested, not "checked Slack less."
The first few days I still had work brain. I'd open the laptop in the mornings, push a few changes, and tell myself I was earning the trip, which is the kind of bargain you strike with yourself when you don't know how to be on vacation. At some point, I gave up (don't let the team know). I had, after all, flown to Portugal, and it seemed silly to be in Portugal without being in Portugal.
I went surfing. I hadn't surfed in years and I'd somehow forgotten how much I loved it, which is a thing that happens when you spend years staring at a laptop indoors. I met a group of solo travelers, people from all over doing all kinds of things, none of whom needed me to explain myself, which was its own kind of relief.
A lot of stress I'd been carrying for years, work and life stress and the general weight of being the person who has to figure it out, kind of lifted while I was there. Not all of it, but enough that I noticed, and enough that I came back as a slightly different builder than the one who'd left.
Everyone should take a trip like that at some point, the kind where you stop optimizing and just exist for a while, where you remember that the point of all this isn't the building. The building is the vehicle, and the life is the point.
Launch
Months of work, late nights, a trip across the country, and a trip across the ocean, all leading up to what was, in the end, a fairly normal Tuesday. The only thing that made it different was that the thing we'd been building was finally out in the world.
We launched on Product Hunt and hit number five.
That number meant a lot to me, and not really because of the ranking. It meant a lot because it was the first time I'd shipped something I'd built from the ground up that strangers could actually see, use, and tell me what they thought of. Their feedback said it all.
The launch wasn't actually the proof that I'm a builder, the grind was, and the launch was just the moment I let myself believe it.
Two months in
The burden has lifted a little. I'm calmer, things are moving at their own pace, and I have to keep reminding myself that every day is progress, even on the days that don't feel like it.
I'm also letting myself enjoy more of it along the way, which is something I was previously bad at. People talk about the grind like it's a virtue, but nobody quite explains what the point of the grind is if you don't get to enjoy the thing you're grinding for.
AI has changed how I work, and I'm trying to figure out what that means for the life I'm building, not just the products. The honest version is I'm still working it out, but it's a question I now spend real time on instead of skipping past.
What I actually want is the freedom of a Tuesday, the freedom to climb in the middle of the day, to be outside when the sun is out, to not spend every daylight hour at a desk just because that's where I'm supposed to be. The grind is the vehicle, and the Tuesday is the destination. It's going to take a lot out of me to build that, and I'm okay with it now that I know what I'm doing it for.
What I'm taking with me
A few things I didn't know two months ago.
Rest isn't a reward, it's a tool. It's what lets me keep going, and it's not just sleep, it's the people who give me energy back, the ones who get it, the ones who don't need me to explain why I left a stable job. Sometimes the work is sitting with people who see you.
Consistency beats intensity. There's no linear progression in this, it comes in waves, and some days I'm running and some days I'm too tired to run so I take a fifteen-minute walk to clear my head before I sit back down, which counts too. The people who actually make it through this are not the ones who go hardest on a Tuesday, they're the ones who keep showing up on the Wednesday and the Thursday after.
Distribution is the part nobody can copy. You can build the best version of a thing and still lose if nobody sees it, and the thing nobody else has is the audience and the support system you've built around yourself over time. That's what I keep coming back to, and it's what most of my work that isn't building is actually about.
Putting yourself out there is the win. Even if the launch had gone badly, the win was already in the shipping, because I built something I'm proud of and let strangers see it. Everything after is a bonus.
You don't find your purpose, you come back to it. Or maybe that's not quite right either, and maybe the purpose is just to keep looking, or to live well enough that the looking stops feeling so urgent. I used to think purpose was something you arrive at, like a destination, and I'm starting to think it's actually something you build slowly, in small daily choices, until eventually your actions are pointing somewhere you didn't notice you were heading. I'm not there yet, and that's fine, and I'm closer than I was two months ago.
Before I close
I can't write this without naming the people who made the last two months possible.
Renee took a chance on me, and I'm still grateful for it. She had an idea, she pitched it, and somehow she trusted me to be the person who'd help her build it. She's wonderful to work with, gives me space to build the way I think it should be built, and pushes back when she has a stronger view, which is exactly what you want from a co-founder. The product is better for it.
Martin, Matty, and Tim have been the technical brain trust. The ones I bounce things off when I'm stuck, and the ones who push me when I'm coasting. We're all walking different versions of the same path, and being able to compare notes along the way makes the path significantly less lonely.
Hyunsu, Insu, and Raymond are the childhood friends who built their own things. I've learned more from watching how they move than from any course or book. The way they think about work, risk, and time has quietly rewired the way I think about all three. They also share a kind of personality I admire, which is that they work hard and play hard in the truest sense of both. When it's time to focus they focus completely, and when it's time to enjoy life they do that completely too.
Eugen, my housemate, puts up with my antics and somehow does not seem to mind (or maybe he does and just doesn't say). He's the one who sees the daily struggles up close, the late nights and the muttering at my laptop and the days I disappear entirely into my own head, and he keeps me grounded in something that resembles reality. Every builder needs an Eugen.
And to my friends and family, the ones who don't fully understand what I'm doing and love me anyway, the ones who give me other things to think about, the ones who remind me there's a life outside the build.
Moving forward
I don't have a clean answer for what comes next, which is itself a thing I'm getting more comfortable saying out loud.
A lot of balls are still moving. My instinct is to want to be a part of everything, and I'm slowly learning to pick and choose. Mostly that means saying no to good things so I can say yes to better ones, which sounds simple and is somehow extremely hard in practice.
There's one more short trip this month, then June, mostly back in New York and back at it. July and August are already shaping up to be busy in good ways, and there's a lot of motion and a lot of things happening, and my job for now is to stay afloat and keep going.
That's pretty much the whole plan, which is to show up tomorrow, and show up the day after that, and trust that consistency, over enough Tuesdays, eventually becomes a life.
If you're building something and you want to compare notes, reach out.