Coding Required

From 9–5 to Owning a Software Business

2024-09-074 min read

A thousand mile journey starts with a single step -- Lao Tzu

It’s been more than 6 years since I left my well paying job at Microsoft to start YoPrint, and it has been incredible journey and continue to be so. Jason and I was able to take then fledgeling of and idea and was able to grow a fully bootstrapped company with a team of 8 and counting at our own terms. Though, while it may sound impressive in summary, it all started with one step.

The Idea

Around 2017, Jason pitched YoPrint to me. We did a quick market survey and realized there is truly an opportunity here and we believed the idea could work. We do have several competitors but the market is not saturated by a long shot. Also, we only did cursory investigation and decided to follow our gut.

The Struggle

We evaluated the tech-stack and started coding. I was working full-time at this point, and I could squeeze in at most 20 hours a week. Between the context switches, and piecemeal free time, I wasn’t able to make anything close to a meaningful progress.

The Freelancer

As I was talking to close friend, she pointed out that I could just hire someone to help. I went to Upwork, found a freelancer for $10/hour and invited them to work on the project. This didn’t pan out and I quickly learned, you do get what you pay for. I increased it to $15/hour and then to $20/hour. After a few months, I realized that this is not working and I can’t afford to pay anything more than that.

Burning the PTOs

By this time, it’s been almost a year since we started this project and we are nowhere close to a MVP. I decided to take 2 weeks off from my work to work on my project to see if I can make a serious dent and boy was it eye-opening. I rewrote pretty much everything the outsourcer wrote and then some. It was written up to my standards and it was working great. I was making incredible progress that going back to work felt like a chore.

The Boiling Point

By this time, I’ve already been contemplating the idea of quitting my job and pursuing YoPrint full time. I did have some money saved so my living expenses would at least be covered for a bit. I realized I am almost 30, and combined with the death of my grandmother, I decided it’s just now or never. My wife was supportive of this choice so I put in my two week notice.

The Point of No Return

Now that I am jobless, I worked my butt off to make YoPrint happen. We built the software with no one to use it. We tried SEO, door to door, cold calling, cold emails, and even attending a trade show. It was not until 2019 we cinched our first customer and we broke even on Jan 2021.

The Liberation

Once we broke even, we could finally breathe. The 3 years where we burned out savings, time and energy was finally paying off. Miraculously, we didn’t have to take any investment and we still own 100% of the company.

What we could have done differently?

Honestly, I feel like our story is riddled with mistakes. There are so many things we could have done differently. We could have massively reduced the scope so we could have launched the MVP sooner. We could have worked on promoting YoPrint more aggressively to break even faster. I could have quit my job sooner instead of waiting for significant life event.

The reality is that, you don’t know what you don’t know and given the same circumstances, you would make the same choices. I know at least I would. All those mistakes is what made YoPrint what it is today and while we can’t change the past, we can certainly make the future better.

Closing Thoughts

Even with all of our mistakes, we were able to make something we are proud of by moving forward one step at a time. Anytime we hit a wall, we course corrected and forged ahead. Our thousand mile journey started with a single step in 2017 when we committed our first line of code.

Anbin Muniandy
CEO & Principal Engineer, YoPrint