Around 2018–19, a founder from California reached out to me with just an idea.

No product. No traction. Just a vision.

I shared one of my past projects, which was enough to get the work started.

Soon after, I started working with him to bring that idea to life with my teammate/friend.

We built the app from scratch. That MVP eventually scaled to process over $5M+ (something I’m still proud of).

The company raised funding. On paper, my 1% stake started to mean something. Things felt like they were working.

Then things changed.

A new CTO came in, a great guy who taught me CLI & Linux (grateful for that). But I moved from working directly with the founder to working under a new structure.

Less ownership. Less direct communication. More layers.

At the same time, the company started missing its marketing targets. Growth slowed. Burn continued.

In January 2026, I was asked to stop working. By March, even my teammate who was still supporting the mobile app with the CTO, was also asked to stop.

Eventually, the company ran out of money.

We’re still helping a bit on the marketing side now as we want this to work.

That experience taught me a few things:

- Building is only half the game, distribution decides survival

- Proximity to decision-makers matters more than you think

Still grateful I went through it.

----------- Mainly, I only post here about my product or ask something. This time I just share my x post here to share one of the learnings.