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I started my company in 2023 after building a ton of solutions looking for problems. I'm a software engineer who's always fucking loved writing code. I can't stop. I'm always building and if I'm not I'm depressed. I built a SaaS tool at the behest of my wife, a PHD chemist, to solve a real problem she was having.
The thing is, just as I was starting to see success and the potential to pay myself from this side project we got pregnant. I wasn't going to risk the future of my child on an (semi)unproven software idea. So I kept my day job and worked 60 hours a week (40 at the day job, 20 at the start up) to scale the business. So many things hit at once though and it was an exceptionally stressful time towards the end.
Fast forward another year and I have an 8 month old and 6 people working on this side-project-that's-gotten-out-of-hand. I was still working a day job and incredibly burnt out. Again, not willing to risk my future on the business at this stage in my life, I started looking for a buyer. I found 3, one via outreach on LinkedIn another via a networking event that happened a year prior, and another was a contact I knew. I ultimately took the riskiest deal, so less cash up front but more upside potential and much more interesting work.
At the end of the day, I owned 85.5% of the company I sold and now have this sale as a feather in my cap. I'm currently back to being a standard W-2 employee only, albeit a founding engineer at the company that acquired mine. It's such a mixture of happiness, anxiety and, oddly enough, numbness to the sale. I feel like I'm still working on awesome stuff, but fundamentally my life hasn't changed. We'll have the house paid off, and the kids college fund paid for, but I'm still just a working stiff.
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