I quit my job to work on Hungrimind

I’ve been trying to start a business for as long as I can remember.

But I have never succeeded.

I built a YouTube channel that never really “took off”, made apps that nobody used, and built Saas products that didn’t convert.

4 years ago, I even quit my Senior Software Engineering job to try doing it full-time.

That only lasted 3 months.

I have tried so so many things, and none of them worked. Now I’m giving it one last shot.

I’m quitting my job again. But this time it will be my last attempt.

This time I’m going all in.

All in

My name is Tadas, and I have always wanted to “build a business”. Typically, people do this because they “want to get rich”. For some reason, that never really mattered to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Buddhist monk or anything. I’m definitely trying to make some money. But that’s never been my top priority.

I believe it stems from me not caring much about flashy things. For example, over the past 4 years, I’ve been getting paid pretty well, but I still drive a 14-year-old Toyota Sienna with 120,000 miles, a rebuilt title, and hail damage (and I freaking love that car).

This desire to “build a business” stems from wanting to build something that leaves a positive impact on humanity, while having autonomy.

This desire has always existed, but it became deeper in college when a 9-5 became inevitable.

I went to college at the University of Illinois at Chicago for computer engineering. Since my freshman year of college, I remember a voice in the back of my head constantly telling me that I needed to start a business to avoid the 9-5.

Throughout those college years, I learned a little bit from school, but I also learned a lot more from my own endeavors. I lost $2000 in crypto (which was most of my money at that time), started an engineering organization, and built a few apps and websites. Despite all that, I graduated and settled into a nice corporate 9-5 cubicle job as a Software Engineer.

I don’t know why I look so sad in this picture. It’s the only selfie I could find that showed a part of my workstation. But even with this cool workstation, even as I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer, this job got quite dull.

Still, it was fine. I didn’t mind it. However that voice in the back of my head did. It started nagging me to build a business.

That led to me starting a YouTube channel in January 2020. I had a book club with friends and the flow for this book club was very unorganized. I wanted to build an app to facilitate our book clubs, and others might want an app like this, too.

When building any product, you need to market it to get traction. I didn’t like the typical salesy marketing (and still don’t), so I thought I’d make YouTube videos about building this app. If the videos get views, people might check out my app. I also used Flutter, and there weren’t many Flutter YouTubers, so I thought my videos would help someone. At the very least, it would keep me accountable to finish the app.

The app never really got finished, but the YouTube channel started seeing some traction. Could content creation be the business I was meant to build?

So, in November 2020, I quit my Senior Software Engineer job with 7,500 YouTube subscribers, making $150 a month.

I felt that this was something I had to go for. This was my dream after all.

The dream only lasted 3 months. During those 3 months, I actually made enough money to cover my expenses. I could have kept going.

However, I got a Twitter DM about a job in Developer Relations. Developer Relations is the name of a field of work, and Developer Advocate or Evangelist is the name of a specific role within the Developer Relations field.

The role of a Developer Advocate is to teach developers how to use a product and grow awareness for that product. On Youtube I was teaching developers how to use Flutter and growing awareness for Flutter.

And I was doing this for free.

You mean people pay for this stuff?

At the end of the day, it was too good of a deal to pass up.

I took that job, and this time, I really enjoyed it. I was making videos, coding, teaching, and traveling the world with a great team. It was awesome, and I genuinely loved the job.

But then again, about 2 years into it, I had that same voice in the back of my head nagging me to start a business.

Last time I quit, the job was quite dull. This time, my job was genuinely difficult and stimulating, and I was paid 3 times more than at my previous job. On top of that, I want to start a family soon, and you need income for that.

I had a decision to make.

On the one hand, I could work in Developer Relations for a long time, start a family, upgrade to a newer (not hail-damaged) Toyota Sienna, and be happy.

On the other hand, I hope to live a long time, and if I project myself to be 60 years old, I know I would regret not starting a business one more time.

So, last week was my last week working for Agora. I quit my California-based Sr Developer Advocate role (it still stings to say that) to try and build a business again.

That business is called Hungrimind.

How is this time different?

I earned enough to cover expenses the first time with sponsorships on YouTube. But relying on sponsorships is pretty ass.

1. Each sponsorship needs negotiation
2. Some sponsors want control of the content
3. It’s unreliable financially
4. Introduces conflicts of interest
5. People don’t really like watching them

So if I was going to quit my job, I needed to build a product that I could sell myself. In theory, if a sponsor was paying me $2000, they should make more than that for that investment to make sense. So, if I could be on both the receiving end and the content end, it would be a win-win.

But again, starting a company is about something other than making money for me. It’s about building something that helps humanity while having autonomy.

What’s our mission?

Since that voice in my head came back two years ago, I’ve done a lot of soul-searching by myself. Then, a year ago, I had my friend and co-founder Robert join me. His goals are very similar to mine, and we did a lot of soul-searching together.

The problem we were facing was finding a direction for the company. What is the positive impact we want to leave on humanity.

There is this method called the “3 Whys” about how to get to the root of the problem. When you are trying to figure out the root problem ask yourself why after every answer. And do it 3 times.

So what positive impact could the two of us leave on humanity?

We were both Flutter YouTubers, so our initial thoughts were to teach people Flutter and other languages.

Why?

So they could build apps and websites.

Why?

So they can build a business (aka solve problems for themselves and others).

Why?

Because for people like us, “building a business” gets that voice out of your head and leads to a more fulfilling life.

That’s not bad. We brought this up to a few people, and some of them said that building a business doesn’t sound fun. That’s another problem we found because Robert and I wholeheartedly disagree with this.

The most fun we’ve ever had was while we’ve been building a business.

The whole “it’s the journey, not the destination” cliche is so true for us. What can be more fun than finding a problem and solving it in a way that has a positive impact on humanity with your friend?

So that is our internal mission: To help you build a fun and profitable business.

To do that, we built The Best Flutter Course on the Internet because you need to have the technical knowledge before you can build anything. This course focuses on how to build apps that can scale into being full businesses.

Want to learn Flutter?

We teach you all you need to confidently build apps at hungrimind.com/learn/flutter

We also have a newsletter to share our journey of building Hungrimind so you can learn from our mistakes and insights. Some examples of things you can expect are

• Technical breakdowns about Flutter, Astro, or other technologies we use.
• How to market your business when you don’t like marketing.
• How we optimize for fun.

While we will still keep teaching Flutter (we have a course for it), during our soul searching, we asked ourselves why you would be learning Flutter? To build something with it and start your own business. We’ve learned a lot from building things and know there is much more value we could share.

Learning for learning’s sake is fine, but for people like us, we need to build.

This time, my dream of building a business has a good chance of becoming a reality. There is a lot of work ahead, but I’ve never been more excited in my life. I have a genuine sense of purpose and hope to provide as much value as possible through this email and our products.

I’m also giving myself 6 months to make enough money to support my basic needs since I want to start a family and have a mortgage to pay off.

If you want to support Robert and me, the best way is to buy our course, then tell your friends about it, and tell your company to buy it too. You can also subscribe to the newsletter to get all the updates.

This is my risk of a lifetime. Subscribe to see the results.

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