I Spent 4 Years Being Underpaid at Startups. Here's Why I'm Betting On Myself Instead.

I Spent 4 Years Being Underpaid at Startups. Here's Why I'm Betting On Myself Instead.

The short version

I spent 4 years building full products end-to-end at startups — frontend, backend, database, deployment, sometimes the parts of product decisions nobody else wanted to make — while getting paid like I was still junior, on a schedule that wasn't always reliable. There wasn't one dramatic moment that ended it. It was the slow realization that I was doing the work of an entire engineering team, and the compensation and stability never caught up to that.

So I'm doing this instead: building software directly for businesses, on my own terms, starting with the ones that need it most and have it least.

What I actually do

My stack is MERN plus TypeScript, Next.js for anything customer-facing, Postgres when data needs to be relational (which is most of the time), and React Native when a business needs a mobile app instead of — or alongside — a website.

I'm not going to tell you AI makes me "5x faster" or turns me into some kind of one-person agency-killer. What it actually does: it speeds up boilerplate, helps me catch bugs earlier, and cuts down the boring parts of a build. It doesn't replace understanding the problem, and it doesn't replace testing things properly before they touch real customers or real patient data. Anyone selling you "AI-powered 10x delivery" is selling you a pitch, not a process. I'd rather tell you what's actually true: I work fast because I don't have a management layer slowing me down, not because a chatbot is writing my code for me.

Who I'm actually looking to work with

I'm not chasing tech-savvy founders who already have three developer friends and a Figma file. I'm looking for businesses that are already running and already making money, but have no real online presence — or one that hasn't been touched in years.

Think: hospitals and clinics still running appointment booking over the phone. Franchise operations managing every location manually because nobody's built them a system that talks across locations. Local retail or e-commerce operations that never got past a basic storefront, if that.

These businesses aren't hard to convince that software would help — they usually already know it would. What they don't have is someone who'll build it for them without either overcharging them for an agency retainer or underdelivering with a templated website that doesn't actually solve their operational problem.

What I'm bad at, and I'm not pretending otherwise

I can build the thing. I have never sold the thing. Networking, cold outreach, figuring out how to walk into a hospital admin's office and explain why their booking system is costing them money — I don't know how to do that yet, and I'm not going to pretend this blog is a business-strategy masterclass while I figure it out in real time.

What I do know is how to listen to a specific operational problem and translate it into software that fixes it — not a generic solution, the actual fix for their actual bottleneck. Every post after this one is going to be honest about what's working and what isn't, including the sales side, where I expect to be bad at first.

What working with me actually looks like

No account manager. No sales rep relaying your requirements to a dev team you'll never talk to. You explain the problem to the person who writes the code, and I tell you straight what's buildable, what it'll realistically take, what's genuinely hard and why, and what's a bad idea before you spend money on it.

That's not a unique pitch. Every solo developer says some version of it. The only way it means anything is if I actually deliver on it, which is something you'll have to judge from the work, not from this post.

If this is you

If you're running a hospital, a franchise, a retail or e-commerce operation, and you know there's a system somewhere that should exist but doesn't — I'd rather hear the actual problem than pitch you on my stack.

Reach me at kreatenvibe@gmail.com .