Going full-time on a software business

I officially resigned from my day job this week. It was pretty scary. I’ve never left a job before and the fears of disappointing my team quickly disappeared when I was met with a chorus of support from colleagues and mentors. In this post I’m going to talk about what I’ve been up to.

Like many, quarantine and lockdown left me free time to pursue some business opportunities that I haven’t had the time to work on.

In January, my sister and I started Dainty Diamond, an ecommerce jewelery brand. We built the brand from the ground-up, sourced product, created a Shopify site and started finding our first customers. Since then, she’s taken Dainty Diamond from an unknown brand to $20k in sales in the first 3 months of operations. Pretty cool!

Around the same time, I also began working on a B2B SaaS business called Whatis. Whatis is a Slack application (at least for now) that helps teams better manage their internal jargon, terminology, acronyms, and more.

B2B SaaS is a whole other beast. Selling into enterprises takes time, and navigating buying centers is difficult. We’ve grown the business to about $2k in monthly recurring revenue, but it was time to take it to the next level. It was impossible to support existing customers and find new ones during regular business hours when I had a direct conflict in my software sales role. So I made the tough, but right, decision to go full-time on Whatis.

I’m nervous, excited, curious, humbled.

I can’t wait to get started.