A New Chapter

When my contract at Wrkr ended after four years, I felt both uncertainty and relief. I’d been preparing for this moment, saving enough to cover eighteen months of living expenses so I could give my own products my full attention. But once it arrived, I realized how much of my daily life had been organized around the job. On my last day, I called the colleagues I’d worked most closely with to say goodbye. I’d grown fond of them, and those conversations made leaving feel real in a way that planning for it hadn’t.

The relief came from knowing I was ready to move on. I’d felt stagnant in the role for a while, although it had given me a life I appreciated: a good income, the ability to work from anywhere, and the freedom to move to Thailand and travel. Those were meaningful things to give up. In fact, they were some of the things I’d once imagined I would need to become an entrepreneur to have.

That made the decision less obvious than it might sound. I already had a considerable amount of freedom. What I kept wanting was more control over the work itself: the chance to decide what to build, put my judgment into it, and find out whether I could make a living from the result. That desire had followed me through several failed attempts and years of building on the side. To explain why it persisted, I have to go back quite a bit further than my career.

As a child, I wanted to be an inventor. My father is a physicist, and I was drawn to science, especially chemistry. I would bring home discarded electronics from the street and take them apart to see how they worked. I removed resistors, worked out their resistance, and taped them into a notebook. I liked discovering that something complicated could be opened up and understood a piece at a time.

When I started middle school, I felt disconnected from the other kids and found refuge in computers. They gave that curiosity somewhere to go, and eventually gave me a way to make things myself. Looking back, I can see a connection between that early interest and the people I’ve come to admire: Steve Jobs, Edwin Land, and Claude Shannon. What draws me to them is the combination of curiosity and the ability to turn an idea into something that other people can use or build on. It’s also what still appeals to me about software.

By sixteen, I’d become interested in Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship. I began to see that making things could also be a way to support myself. Around nineteen, I tried e-commerce, without much success. Those failures didn’t make me lose interest in business, but over time my ambition became more closely tied to software. I wanted to build a successful SaaS, something useful enough that people would pay for it and that could eventually support me.

As I got older, the freedom this might give me became a larger part of the motivation. I still enjoyed building, but I also wanted to choose where I lived and how I spent my time. The difficulty was finding a way to turn that desire into a business while continuing to earn a living. I made several attempts alongside my work as an engineer, some of which took me into situations I would have found difficult to imagine a few years earlier.

One of those ventures involved a partnership with a unicorn YC founder. Having been interested in that world since I was sixteen, I found it fascinating to collaborate with someone who had experienced that degree of success. I could hear how he approached things and compare his thinking with my own. But the venture itself didn’t end well. I became frustrated with how it was being led, and the team eventually split. The experience was interesting, but I was still left with the problem I’d started with: how to build a business that worked.

Throughout these attempts, working as an engineer gave me stability and room to keep learning. My four years at Wrkr were particularly important in that respect. I developed as an engineer, saved money, and had experiences outside work that I’m grateful for. The job helped fund both the life I was enjoying and the possibility of eventually doing something different.

At the same time, it helped me understand what I found difficult about working within an organization. Office politics could pull attention away from building, and I often felt limited in what I could contribute. From my perspective, putting in more effort and performing well didn’t consistently lead to recognition or better pay. Over time, that weakened my motivation, and I found myself putting more hope into the products I was building on the side.

I don’t expect working independently to create a dependable relationship between effort and reward. I could spend months on a product that nobody wants. But I want the opportunity to make the decisions and learn directly from their consequences. If something isn’t working, I want to be able to change the product, the way I present it, or the people I’m trying to reach. That responsibility is part of what attracts me, even though I expect it to be uncomfortable at times.

The end of my contract gave me the occasion to make that change. AI gives me another reason to believe it is worth attempting now. I think the tools available today make it possible for one person to take on work that would previously have required more time, money, or help. For someone with ideas and limited resources, that creates room to experiment.

But the same tools are available to everyone else, so building more quickly cannot be the whole advantage. If more people can make software, more products will compete for attention. This is why I think taste, craftsmanship, and marketing will matter so much for independent makers. As the cost of turning an idea into software falls, the judgment involved in choosing and shaping the idea becomes a larger part of the work.

Taste matters because the ability to add something doesn’t tell you whether it belongs. You still have to decide which problem is worth solving, what the product should feel like, and how much complexity to ask the user to accept.

Craftsmanship carries those decisions through into something people can depend on. The product has to work beyond the demonstration, including the awkward cases that are easy to overlook when you’re eager to ship.

Marketing connects that work to the people it is meant to help, and it is the part I most need to take seriously from the beginning. As an engineer, I can always find another improvement to make. That is familiar territory, which makes it easy to stay there. But improving a product doesn’t necessarily improve the business if the real problem is that nobody knows it exists, or that I’ve misunderstood why someone would want it.

That’s why the title Attention Is All You Need keeps coming to mind. The paper uses attention in a different technical sense, but the phrase is a useful reminder for someone inclined to spend all his time building. A product has to enter someone’s awareness before its quality can matter to them. Getting that attention means understanding where people look, what they care about, and how to explain the product in terms that make sense to them. I want that understanding to influence what I build, rather than arrive as an afterthought once I consider the software finished.

Over the next three years, my goal is to build consumer applications and B2B SaaS products that reach 30k in monthly recurring revenue as a solo founder. I don’t yet know which products will get me there, and eighteen months of savings means I will have to assess my progress well before those three years are up. The target gives me a direction; the work will tell me whether my assumptions are any good.

What I can commit to now is giving the whole process my attention. That includes the parts I enjoy, like shaping and building a product, and the parts I still need to learn, like finding customers and earning their trust. My previous attempts have made it clear that I can remain busy building for a long time. This time, I want to get better at finding out whether that work is becoming useful to other people.

I’m leaving Wrkr with appreciation for the people and for the life those four years made possible. They also gave me the experience and savings to take this next step. The ambition has been with me since I was young, but until now it has mostly lived alongside something else. For the next eighteen months, I have the chance to organize my days around it and see what happens.