i'm back. and here's everything that happened.

hey. it's been a while.

i didn't stop writing because i had nothing to say. i stopped because i had too much and none of it felt ready. but i've realised something recently. it's never going to feel ready. so here we are.

this is me writing again. every week. wins, losses, and everything that happens in between. no filter. no polish. just the real thing.

the FOMO is real. and i fell for it too.

every time i open linkedin or twitter i see someone raising a round, hitting a milestone, launching the coolest feature. and for a second just a second i think why aren't we doing that?

we have a product. real users. 99+ countries. and i'm sitting here wondering why i'm not on a stage somewhere talking about our valuation.

but here's what i've learned about that feeling.

you're only seeing the part they want you to see. the funding announcement. not the 47 conversations that came before it. the launch. not the three versions they scrapped. the win. not the months that almost broke them.

i know this. and i still fell for it sometimes.

but every time i do i close the app and go back to what i'm supposed to be building.

we almost took funding. then we didn't.

my cofounder and i had the conversation. the full one. we mapped it out, talked through the scenarios, said okay let's go for it.

next morning i woke up and just knew. nope.

not because funding is bad. but because the version of getmedesign i'm building doesn't need that kind of pressure right now. i know what we're trying to do. i know the kind of company we want to be. and taking money too early would've pulled us away from that.

so we said no.

someone offered to buy us.

a company in the US reached out. we had the calls, i looked at their product, and i could see how a collaboration would've made sense for their users.

then they made an offer to acquire us.

it was generous. genuinely. for where we are right now it was a good number.

we declined.

because we're not where we thought we'd be yet. and selling before you get there that's not a win. that's just stopping.

the dark moments nobody posts about.

we built something for months. really built it. stayed up late, made decisions, got excited about it.

then we launched it internally and realised this isn't us.

scrapped it.

started again.

that moment when you have to throw away months of work because you know in your gut it's not right that's the hardest part of building something. not the competition. not the funding. not the market.

it's that moment when you have to be honest with yourself.

we've had a few of those. we'll probably have more.

why i built getmedesign in the first place.

here's the thing i always come back to when things get hard.

i built this for myself first.

the idea was simple put your identity on the internet without needing code, a designer, or three weeks. just you, three minutes, and something that actually represents who you are.

that's it. that's still it.

everything we're building comes back to that. whenever i sit down at my desk my very proud work from home setup i feel it. we're building something that actually means something.

that feeling doesn't go away. even on the hard days.

what's coming next.

i'm not going to say too much here. but we're close to launching things that fingers crossed india and maybe the world haven't quite experienced yet.

i'll write about it when it's time.

until then i'll be here. every week. writing about the product, the lessons, the life stuff, all of it.

you're not alone in figuring this out.

neither am i.