what's happening with the startup, october update
My co-founder quit. And a new co-founder joined.
In early July — three months after our product launch and just as our first two customers began paying us in real, not Canadian, dollars — my co-founder quit. The short version: he ran out of savings and needed to get a job. He generously offered to transition everything over to me at no cost, except for retaining a minor stake in the company.
I had a choice: to stop and get a job myself, or to double down on the business. I chose to keep going. After all, we had just landed our first paying customers on a monthly subscription. Someone wanted our product, and there was a good chance I could find more of those people. Plus, it was seven hundred dollars coming into my bank account every month for a product that was already built. Would be stupid to say no, right?
Fortunately, I didn't have to run the company by myself, and a friend of mine, Prateek, agreed to join as a CTO. A few days ago, we finally announced the news on LinkedIn.
We spent July and August moving the company ownership from my previous co-founder, Zane, to the new corporation with a clean cap table. At this stage, with the product still young and fragile, every delay is critical. These two months felt like an eternity. We lost a lot of momentum — onboarding a new person into the codebase, recovering lost credentials, and switching payment systems took weeks. I'll probably never forget the two days when I needed to update DNS entries on the domain, and Zane realized he couldn't access Namecheap. We tried everything — restoring the password, calling their support team, sending emails. Nothing worked. Two days later, Zane texted, "I fixed it. The domain was on GoDaddy."
Life goes on. We are mostly back on track, soon releasing one of the biggest product updates, which will make our lives drastically easier. Most importantly, we have agreed on a vision that makes the most sense. Ah, the startup pivots... Whether customers will like it more remains to be seen, but we will find out soon.