Once upon a time....
JK
I wanted to join the military since high school. I was so confident about getting selected for the military that I didn't appear for any engineering entrance exams. So I took admission in the political science department just because the name sounded fancy.
In 2016, I got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug after reading "Zero to One" and started a peer teaching community. When we tried monetizing it, students stopped coming, and it failed.
I then took up a job selling self-help seminars and workshops to college students and faculties. I left that job in 2019 to apply for the Thiel Fellowship and Y Combinator by modifying that peer teaching idea into a platform (think AA meets Udemy).
During that time, I started learning to code because I couldn't afford an engineer to build things for us. With no money for an MBA, I got into a Master's program in Financial Economics and thought about learning other business skills on the go.
After graduation, I took up a job as an analyst in Marketing Science. I worked for a year, saved aggressively, and was ready to build something again. This time, it was a Risk & Return Assessment Tool for Islamic Banks. (Would write a detailed essay on my experience and learning on this soon)
When you have to pay your bills in dollars through money earned in rupees, every penny you save, can extend your runway. I did most of the programming with very specific hourly jobs for my contractors. I also handled slide decks, fundraising, presentations, and sales calls.
This "Jack of all trades, master of none" approach got me nowhere. I couldn't raise money or get pre-orders to extend my runway. My demos were lackluster, the app wasn't impressive enough for investors (honestly it was horrible), and I didn't come from an elite institutional pedigree. 2023, being the funding winter and interest rate hike year, didn't help either.
I come from a lower-middle-class background. My parents had no money to fund me in the first place, so naturally I had to shut my shop.
When I started learning to code in 2019 and working on freelance projects, my goal was to get the stuff done. I picked the most popular tools because they naturally have a ton of guides, documentation, videos, and Stack Overflow (when everything else fails).
Ideally, I would have built a working model, raised money, and then let my engineers rebuild it. But life's not ideal, and I lost all my money. The bubble of abstraction I was living in got popped. That's why this whole self-education and teaching thing is so important to me. Because I know I'm not alone in thinking like that, not realizing how problematic it is.
So yeah, let's change all of that. And get the foundations right this time so whatever I build, will last.
Ciao