Quitting my job and figuring out what's next
Week 1 of 2023: It's been about 5 months since I quit my full-time job. Here's an update on what I'm up to and how I'm thinking about what's next.
Quitting my job
Towards the end of July 2022, I made a big decision. I decided to quit my full-time job at a profitable, sustainable startup. I didn’t have a concrete plan for what was next but I felt the need to make a change, reevaluate, and find a way forward.
Some factors that I considered when making my decision:
Learning: I was looking to step up the pace and intensity with which I was learning new things. At this point, the type of work I was doing as a designer was fairly predictable and straightforward to execute, albeit challenging. In everything I do so far, I’ve optimized for learning and that has always brought me deep joy and excitement in my work.
Startup goals: The startup was aiming for sustainable growth and minimized risks (not a bad thing at all, especially in this environment), whereas I was still feeling a big appetite to take risks in order to learn more, grow more, and scale the business. I recognized that my philosophy on building startups may be different from the team’s and one that I wanted to apply to my own ideas.
Building something from scratch: Ever since I launched DesignBake as a side-project in mid-2021, I re-discovered the joy of building and growing a new idea from scratch. Having grown Memberstack to $1M+ ARR with a team, I felt ready to start building something new from scratch again, along with risking the effort & time required to make it happen.
Financial upside: From a financial perspective, the upside of being a first employee is very different from that of a founder. Employees can linearly scale their salary, but founders can compound their equity. To me, owning a $100k/yr business felt 100% more valuable than making $100k/yr in salary.
Lastly, I just followed my gut. Deep down, I knew that this was a good time for me to celebrate what we had built as a team, pause on a high note, and welcome the next chapter in my life.
I cried the day I resigned from the team — what we had accomplished was very special, and saying goodbye to something we spent years building together didn’t come easy.
Losing momentum on DesignBake
Around April 2022, DesignBake went from about 7 customers (~$1.5K/mo revenue) down to 3 customers ($~300/mo revenue) in the span of a month. Most of the churn was from customers wanting to pause and cut down on costs — which makes sense given that it was the start of the current economic downturn we are in.
As this happened, I asked myself if & how I can pivot DesignBake to help startups solve other more important problems when it came to their design function. I spoke to 3-4 founders — and most of them said that they would pay for help with design recruiting, even in a downward economy.
Lesson: Finding a hair-on-fire problem — one that your customer is willing to pay to get solved no matter what happens — is critical to building a business.
So I spun up a quick Notion doc and launched a new service: DesignBake Recruiting. The idea was simple – I would help founders make a critical hire (their first full-time designer), and they would pay a placement fee on hire.
I piloted the service with a friend and then found 2 paid customers in the following months. With DesignBake advising, the revenue was a 20% margin of the overall services facilitated between startups and design advisors. In this new model, given that it was a direct service, 100% of the revenue went to DesignBake directly.
DesignBake went from about $1.5k in revenue to $5k+ in revenue per month. The tradeoff was that about 20-30% of my week was pre-committed to serving the 2 recruiting customers I was working with.
Although DesignBake Recruiting is still making revenue with 1 customer and has the potential to scale, I’m asking myself whether I want to scale a service business. I’m considering teaching a student or recent graduate how to execute the recruiting I’m doing and scaling the business with them (if you’re reading this and want to learn the ropes + scale this with me, hit me up).
Lastly, I’m also piloting a new growth marketing service with a startup — recommending growth and design experiments to help the team get to product-market fit. This feels more exciting since there is an opportunity to productize this service and apply my unique perspective as a designer & growth marketer.
Spending time with family
As I’m transitioning from working a full-time job to finding my own way forward as a maker/creator/whatever-title-best-fits, I decided to take a long 2.5-month travel break to see family and spend time with them in India. I’m enjoying spending time with loved ones, trying delicious local food, and learning new things (eg: coding).
Deciding what to do next hasn’t been easy and has resurfaced a lot of important questions — where do I want to spend my time? What problems do I deeply care about and want to help solve?
Along with other big changes in life, I’m using the time to reorient and point myself in a direction that I feel excited to dive deep into over the next 3-5 years at the minimum.
Happy 2023 to you — if you’re following along with my journey, I really appreciate you and the support. 😊🙏
That’s all for today. In the next post, I’m thinking of sharing more thoughts on deciding what to do next, exploring startup ideas, learning to code, and whatever is top of mind.
so proud to hear how the journey has been going, especially with designbake! your dream office reminds me of howl's bedroom in howl's moving castle as well 🥺