viktoratanasov.com

Leaving Microsoft to start a business

November 28, 2023·738 words

In November 2020, I left Microsoft to pursue entrepreneurship full-time. My business partner and I had been working on Numerro on the side for the last couple of months and it was finally starting to show promise. It was decision time - fully commit to the project or stay at Microsoft. We decided to commit.

The journey since then hasn’t been as straightforward as I naively thought it would be. There were a lot of ups, but there were also many, many downs. And as of recently, I’ve even decided to get back into employment and joined Vercel as a Customer Success Manager.

People have asked me if leaving Microsoft was worth it. Most of the time, they’ve asked me that when things were not going particularly well. The answer is nuanced and I am only able to reflect on the whole experience now that I’ve taken a step back from it.

Here is the good and the not-so-good:

The good

  • I learned how to make money on the internet
  • I gained flexibility and freedom to choose what I want to work on
  • I learned to use many important digital tools as part of my workflow - Figma, Webflow, Notion etc.
  • I (together with my co-founder) took an idea from scratch and built it into a $4-5,000/month business that a year later got acquired for $X…
  • …which led to me having my first, albeit small, win at the age of 25 and the confidence that I could make something work
  • I learned how to code and build web apps!
  • I gained fundamental knowledge of marketing, design and sales.
  • I learned how to work with a co-founder. As a result, I developed a strong business and personal relationship with my partner, who I now consider a very close friend.
  • I learned about the Minimum Viable Product framework and how to apply it to any idea I have
  • I built many interesting projects that have brought some value to the world. A couple of them are still being actively used to this day - numerro.io, blackoutpoetry.co, thelondonweekend.com
  • I became an active participant in the world of business and tech, instead of just a spectator on the side, who passively consumes Paul G’s essays and YC’s start-up courses, but never does anything about it
  • It was fun (most of the time)

The not-so-good

  • Huge financial instability. I didn’t really have a consistent source of income since the sale of Numerro - 2 years ago. Money has come through one-off sales and acquisitions, but I never reached the stage where I could afford to pay myself on a regular basis.
  • I was missing a clear feedback loop. In many cases, we would try out a strategy that didn’t work out and we wouldn’t have a clear idea of what went wrong. Was it the messaging? Was it the product? I didn’t have a manager to tell me why that was - I had to figure it out by myself. And that was not easy.
  • It was socially restrictive. I wasn’t part of a company or a team anymore, so meeting like-minded people became difficult. I felt like I played the game in a solo mode and I didn’t enjoy that. I missed the team spirit and working on a problem together with a group of people.
  • Finding good problems to solve became difficult. At Microsoft, I was bombarded by different processes, tools and systems, so recognising issues and identifying solutions was not hard. That’s how Numerro started. Working from home, I didn’t get the same luxury.
  • Struggling with confidence. When you try 3 things and none of them works out, it’s just inevitable that your confidence will eventually take a hit.
  • Struggling with prioritisation. I was in charge of my own time, so I could decide what to do with it. But choosing the right thing to work on was not easy.

Conclusion

So was quitting Microsoft the right decision? I believe so. If you want to learn how to start a business, go start a business. Or in other words, quitting didn’t help me start a successful company. But quitting did help me acquire some of the skills necessary to start a successful company.

What this is going to lead to - well, we will see…