Left my job to go full time on Meetme and refused a 500k/year job

This is the leap of faith. I have waited for this day since I got the initial idea of Meetme back in 2017.

First I have changed my work to work part-time. I switched to 80% to be able to do 80% on my job, and another 80% on my startup.

Since then, it has been a rollercoaster. So much hard work. Finding balance, with 2 kids and an amazing wife (kids born in 2018 and 2021) is hard. But possible.

I did a lot of SCRUM sprints alone to push myself on doing the dev. Estimating the time I could work, try to work in 2 weeks sprints. Do the retrospective on my own.

1st key to succeed here was to work from 4-5 AM to 8 AM before my day job. This was a massive helper. It was truly amazing to see how much these little chunk of time ad up and become HUGE amount down the line.

I tracked all the development time on wakatimer to add some gamification and goals like code 2h per day minimum. It helped as well!

Just before covid hit, I had a good MVP and could test it with my first paying user. Rewrote a new version during covid.

Released v2 at the end of 2021. In summer 2022 I took a few months off to grow the business and learn to do sales. Doing sales door to door is hard. The first time it was so hard to enter shops without meeting and pitch my product. Getting so much rejection is really hard. But during the first dozen cold outreach in person, I could not even enter the shops. Many time I motivated myself like: "This time I enter, let's go". Walk toward the shop like a hairdresser, and at the last second sawing so many people in it and scared of rejection and just passing in front of the shop without entering. Oh that happened to me so many times.

Now, almost 2 years since my first cold outreach meeting, I can enter any crowded area and pitch my product at any given time.

I entered some pitch contest (and love it!) as I started to realize that I might need to raise some money to grow faster.

Now, since early June, I am full time working on Meetme. I am so proud after so much struggle.

When I gave my notice to leave my job, another big company approached me for a CEO role for Switzerland. I was really teased and happy that such a big and great company offered me this opportunity. I thought "hey why not?". I did all the process, travelled to meet the worldwide CEO and had great contact and chat with them. But after giving it really some deep thoughts, I refused the job. I did all the hard work and hard choices since 5 years to be able to focus on my own business. So I turned down that 500k / year job to focus on Meetme.

What's Meetme? Meetme is yet another scheduling tool, but it has the following USP: it's mobile first, so it uses phone number for auth to ensure better engagement on bookings. And it uses the phone calendar to suggest meeting matching both user's calendar ✨

What's next? The goal is to sell my first subscription online to be able to shift away from door to door sales to online sales.