1 year after sending my resignation letter: Was it worth it?

date: 2024-01-19

A year ago, I made the very hard decision to leave my stable job to pursue entrepreneurship.

I was an AI tech lead at AI Inside, a public company in Japan, and things were good. I grew my 5-man team into the AI engineer department and got promoted twice in the first two years. If I showed my 2019 self this progress and asked, 'Is this what you want?', I would definitely say 'Yes'. Back in 2019, I was still in a low-paying postdoc position in academia that seemed never-ending.

So why, after just 3 years, do I feel completely different? This is a story for another time.

Let me tell you what happened after my resignation.

First 6 months

I already created the MVP of my first product, JimakuAI a few months back as a weekend project. But I know I needed help on the business side so I decided to find a co-founder and start a company around it.

But how do you find a co-founder? It's not by luck, it's by putting yourself out there to increase your chances of meeting the right person. I've been very active in ML communities organizing events but I know the person I'm looking for is not there so I had to find somewhere else.

An accelerator program is a good place to start. I joined the first cohort of Antler Japan and met a lot of great people. I was able to find a co-founder and we started working on the company full-time. He was an ex-Amazon business guy with lots of connections in Japan and I was the tech guy with a product. We were a good match. We were doing great in the program but decided it was not for us. We left the program and continued working on the company.

We got a few customers and a 10M JPY investment loan. Product was getting better as we were getting more feedback from customers. I thought we were on the right track. But by the end of June, we decided to part ways. We had different visions for the company and it was not going to work out.

I now have to make a decision: Kill the company or continue on my own? I chose the latter.

Next 6 months, alone

The first thing I did was ask for help.

Fortunately, I know people willing to help me out. I got help with client management, sales, marketing, tax and even legal. Since our burn rate was low, I was able to continue working on the product and even released the B2C version of JimakuAI.

This was a lot of learning of me, both on the business and technical side. I was able to get a lot of feedback from customers and I was able to ship features that improve the product a lot. But there was no growth. We flat out at less than 20 paid users per month.

Maybe because we did not put any effort on marketing. No ads, just me posting on ProductHunt, LinkedIn, PRTimes and X. We were also approached by several digital marketing agencies but I refused to work with them. I was not convinced that they can help us.

On the B2B side, we were able to close a 6-month contract with a big company. But it was not enough to sustain the company. I needed 2 more of those to be sustainable. I was not able to close any more deals.

So to keep the company alive, I decided to do consulting work. I was able to get a few clients and was able to sustain the company. I'm still prioritizing my time over money so I limit the number consulting clients I take.

Now

During the holidays, I did some reflection, and thought that the ML boilerplate I use for my consulting work can be a product DeployFast. The technical effort to make it a product is not that much and I can do it on my own. So I decided to do it.

At the time of writting I've already earned $400 from it. It's not much but it's showed that there are people out there that gets value from it. Much of the work now is marketing and I'm not good at it, yet, so this is my focus for 2024.

Was it worth it?

Time

Money

Learning

Network

Happiness

TLDR; It was worth it.

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