From 9-to-5 to Founder: My Two-Year Journey👇 Wanted to do this for a long time, But being a bit shy always mind tells you to avoid it or procrastinate it. But here we go👇 I’m not doing a full-time job anymore. For the last 2 years, I’ve been running my own dev agency. It started after my last job as a Product Engineer at an Irish dev agency. I liked how they made products with a small team and kept things efficient. I wanted to do that too—build my own stuff and be an indie hacker 💡. But I needed money first, so I started my agency 🚀. Late 2022, I set it up as a private limited company, made a basic website, and started hunting for clients. Upwork seemed easy—no big hassle, just apply and show my work. But for three months, nothing. Zero replies. Then a friend hooked me up with a project—a property management platform. They paid 25% upfront for designs. It was rough, though. The founder was super picky. We burned through three designers just for the design part. Got some bits approved and started coding, but the advance was mostly gone on designers and early work. I wasn’t earning anything. After three stressful months and no real progress, I shut it down 😓. Told the founder, and he was fine with it. Said their no-code tool added website and booking stuff cheap anyway. He even offered me a CTO gig, same pay as my old job. I said no. Felt awful then, but now I see it was smart 💪. Back to Upwork. A month later, landed a $3,000 AI image app for a US client. Took four months to build, and they tossed in a $1,000 bonus plus a solid review 🌟. First time I felt like I nailed a project outside a 9-to-5. Next few months, we grabbed smaller gigs—$600, $800. Then an old application popped back up with a call. Big project: $6,000 for an enterprise thing with a mobile app. Said yes, even though it was a stretch. Turned out way bigger than I thought, but the Swiss founder was cool about it. It grew to $30,000 over a year. Still working on it, aiming for June. Takes a ton of time, but it’s steady cash, and the guy’s a friend now 🤝. Keeps me going—after 10+ years in tech, I finally feel like nothing’s impossible if I stick with it. That first US client? She keeps sending her friends our way. Done about $10,000 in projects from her in a year 🤝. While running the agency, I’ve been trying my own products. First was a note-taking extension—flopped. Then Easy Indexer, to fix my Google indexing issue. Launched it, and that day Google locked the API to jobs and events. Sucked 💔. Then LeadsBuddha, from a tweet by @ayushtweetshere. Thought it could work and actually did a nice research on keywords and market interest, there were actually lots of people looking for alternatives to big players, but we dragged on the tech—Next.js frontend, Django backend. Six months, no MVP. Got fed up. January, I ditched it, rebuilt from scratch, learned frontend myself. Used Cursor a bit, got 80% of the MVP done in a month. Launched, got users, added payments. Now at 150 users, my first real shot at a SaaS app 🚀. The agency keeps me afloat so I can mess with my own ideas 💰. I work on them weekends and a couple hours daily. Slow, but steady works for me 🐢. Oh, and one more thing—I’m not consistent on social media. Never been great at it, always felt like a chore. But in the last few months, I’ve noticed people out there absolutely crushing it by building in public and vibe coding. They’re sharing every step of their journey, and it’s working—big time. It’s got me inspired. I want to give it a shot too. 🤔 I’m ready to share as much of my building journey as I can—the highs, the lows, the late-night coding marathons. I’d love to make new friends along the way and try building products that actually matter. No clue where it’ll take me, but I’m pumped to find out. 🚀 Here’s to building, sharing, and seeing where this road goes. Let’s do this! 🌟 Love to connect with more people and builders and learn from them 🙌 #buildinpublic

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