When I started building a company I thought it would be like walking down a straight road. You pick an idea, you build it, you find customers. Simple. But the truth is it feels like walking into a maze with no map. Every path is blocked. Every door looks the same. Some open to nothing. Some take you somewhere completely unexpected. Most of the time you do not even know if you are heading in the right direction.
Chapter 1: The Start of My Career
Let’s start from the beginning. A year before I started my company I was 18, fresh out of high school, and I knew nothing about business. I had been teaching myself to code since I was 11. First it was basic HTML, then game development, releasing my own little indie games on itch.io, and by 2023 I was deep into React and Next.js.
I never liked living life the way others wanted me to. So instead of four years in college I took a four month data science bootcamp. Right after that I landed in a small legacy social media startup. At first I was just a data science intern. A month later I was writing full-stack code. A couple months after that I was leading tech. Those seven months showed me everything. The speed. The stress. The wins. The mistakes. Most importantly it showed me how startups really operate when you peel back the glossy pitch.
Chapter 2: Databuddy is Conceptualized
While at my old startup, we had a requirement to add analytics, and looking at all the existing tools, none really made sense for what we were building, we needed to understand our users but it had to be privacy focused, as were we. Plausible? way too simple, Posthog? Way too complex and not privacy focused, then I had the idea, what if I just made it myself?
Months of prototyping, research, and early testing, a first version of Databuddy was born. and no, it has almost 0 correlation to the actual current product, the entire codebase is different, that's the degree of change you can expect from prototype to real world product, but I kept working on it and convinced my first early users to give it a try too, being Ping (SWE @better-auth, working on better-auth-kit at the time), and Dominik, working on Rivo.gg, They gave me feedback that pushed me forward. It felt like the first spark.
Chapter 3: The Maze Begins
Nobody tells you this about starting a company. It is a maze. You start in an empty room surrounded by doors. You do not know what is behind each one. You can either stay stuck or keep opening them, hoping there is something on the other side.
Most of my first doors were empty. I would spend weeks chasing an idea or a path that led nowhere. That is part of the game. As an entrepreneur you have no promises and no guarantees. The only move is to keep going.
Over time I learned there are three types of doors you keep running into:
Empty doors: hours, days, weeks, maybe even months wasted going through empty doors, they do nothing for you
Directly beneficial doors: think random partnerships, people you meet, a customer signs up, people mention your product, it directly helps you
Indirectly beneficial doors: this is the most long-term and most common door, a direct result of putting yourself out there, getting connections, they stack up and you begin to see the effects after a while
And also over time, I realized that not all doors are obvious. Some doors look like they lead nowhere but eventually circle back in unexpected ways. A conversation that seemed useless at the time might later turn into a partnership. A failed experiment might teach a lesson you didn’t know you needed.
The trick is not to obsess over which door is the right one. That’s impossible. You can’t predict it. What you can control is how many doors you open and how consistently you put yourself in situations where doors even exist.
You also learn that doors are not equally spaced. Some doors you stumble upon immediately. Others take months or even years to appear. And sometimes, the hardest doors to open are the ones that matter most. They require persistence, patience, and sometimes a little courage.
Chapter 4: Engineered Luck
Everyone knows luck. Chances. It’s completely random. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to your advantage. If anything, it only proves that you will eventually make it.
Think of it this way. Every time you put yourself out there, there’s an X % chance you run into a lucky encounter that benefits you. Either a direct door or an indirect door.
For me, I put myself out there a lot. Posting on X, hosting spaces, doing Twitter streams. Not all of them did well. Some did absolutely nothing. But the one percent that worked did really well.
It compounds. If you had a 1 percent chance of success on stream one, you’ll have 2 percent on the next one, then 3 percent the one after. Most people quit around the 3 to 10 mark. They’ve tried a few times but had no success. Not realizing their chances keep getting higher.
A random stream of mine did really well. A lucky encounter. Hayden Bleasel, a well-known developer and open-source legend, joined the space and made it interesting. Thanks to him, the spaces started performing better. I made more connections, talked to incredible people like Tanner (Mr Tanstack), Joh the intern, Brandon, and so many others I couldn’t even fit in here.
Point is. One lucky encounter can take your chances of success from 5 percent to 20 percent. You can literally engineer it into existence by putting yourself out there more. Independently of whether or not you think it will succeed that time. Let it compound.
Success isn’t a number, or a metric, or a strategy. Success is a mindset. Success is not giving up when things feel like they’re going nowhere. When every door leads to a dead-end. Because at the end of your streak of unlucky doors, there’s that one door. That one door that doesn’t just benefit you but opens the way to more doors after it.
The future. I plan to keep engineering my luck until there’s no way to fail. Like a surgeon trains not until they can do surgery correctly, but until they can never do it wrong. Once you get that lucky break, you can never fail again.
I’ll continue putting myself out there. Anywhere I can. Any way I can. Because that’s the only recipe for success. And it makes me no different than you. Get out there. Don’t give up.