I quit a software development after 11 years
Tags: career, webdev, startup
Published: 2022-04-20 13:22:20

It's not my first try, but final.

![I quit a software development after 11 years](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/lejeir3kao855sned0j5.jpeg)


**Backstory**

I started my career back in 2011.
At that time I was in college, learning Visual Basic and dreaming about my own skin for Winamp. Soon I realized that Basic is dying, and the son of my mother's friend told me about PHP and HTML. I was so excited! Right next day I bought 2 books: Building web apps with PHP and MySQL, and Learning jQuery. They were boring! If PHP helps me a bit(I build a blog and a CMS), Learning jQuery I opened 2 or 3 times. The whole book was a copy of official documentation written in a storytelling format.
Then I spend the whole summer studying JavaScript and WordPress. At that time I'm not thinking about money. It was so fun building things and money after all was a nice bonus. 
Now, this passion is gone. But first things first.


**These eleven years were a journey!**

I worked in startups, grew up along with Angular and React, made friends, and travel the world. And the most important - enjoyed writing code! My career grew from writing HTML and CSS to leading an awesome team of 20 engineers.
And all this time I tried to build startups. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes(mostly) not. The main reason for failure was marketing. I didn't know what to do after the launch. And instead of thinking about marketing, I worked on new fancy features. Features that definitely will make the product viral, and magically will blow up. Always I was busy, always have job to do and putting off launch day.


**Money game**

Over time all this turned into the money game. I start thinking more about making more, and not enjoying the process. I have a chance to move to Silicon Valley to work 60–70 hours per week and make $400k a year. But I still have hope of building my own business and reject an offer.

I double down on my new startup, spend it all my time and after 9 months I failed again. It transforms twice and became an HR tool that was almost impossible to sell. But this time I did much better: thought about marketing, did user research, did around 40 sales calls and 50 demos. But I've failed. The situation could still be saved: spent 2–3 months adding new features from potential users' requests, but I was burned out and decided to take a break.

**Co-founder**

After a couple of months, a friend of mine told me that his mate looking for a tech co-founder. He was a designer, recently sold his web studio, and wants to build a SaaS business in a niche similar to my previous project. It was a crash!

We partner up and start working on it. I've reused a lot of my previous code, which speeds up us a lot, but still, it comes us with a beta version only after 5 months of development. After getting some feedback from early-stage users we build a new backlog and start looking for the seed round.

And that war in Ukraine broke everything again. I was born in Ukraine but move to Austria 2 years ago, but my co-founder lives in Kyiv. Hopes to get a seed round disappeared, and my co-founder decided to put the project on pause for an indefinite time. Fail. Again.

**A new addiction**

Over time I lost that enjoyment and fun of writing code, but still, I love building products. And a month ago I comes up with a new idea - a marketing agency for SaaS products. And my most scary nightmare turned into a new obsession. I did almost all the marketing mistakes that it is possible to make as a Founder, so why not help others to avoid them? I put a deadline - launch it in 2 weeks. I already miss it by 2 days, because of the payment system approval. But still, it's my fastest launch, mostly because it requires only HTML and CSS. Back to basics.

And yes - now I'm quite a software development game! And I'm happy. I still building and doing things that I enjoy.

[Secure Statement Converter](https://securestatementconverter.com)  — my next journey, and I hope, I'll succeed in it.