Exiting my startup notalgia

Wow, I needed to put another blog post after this one two weeks ago. I have an exciting release coming soon that I want to blog about along with the development process, but first a nostalgic one inspired by the final episode of the podcast Startup.

That episode was the final episode and detailed the sale of Gimlet to Spotify. The final season of 3 episodes detailed that process and it was cool to get there after starting to listen to all the episodes a few months ago. The biggest thing that I personally took away from these was reliving the process of me selling g(Math).

Quick background: For those that don't know, I got into this developer thing sorta by accident. I developed g(Math), a Google Add-on for the students in my class as I was teaching math as a full-time teacher. It grew over the course of 2 years and had millions of users. I couldn't handle teaching full-time and supporting g(Math) so I chose the path that inspired me the most. That was going to be pursuing g(Math) as a full-time gig. Oh yeah, I was also the only one bringing in income as my wife was still staying at home with our 2 year old daughter.

So not only was I going to change careers to pursue something I had only been doing on the side for a few years, I was doing it with no financial safety net. We were living in Chile and just moved there about 8 months before from Singapore. Moving internationally is not cheap. We were going to have to move again from Chile...

[cue the voice in my head trying to be responsible] So....you are going to give up all guaranteed income, move to your 3rd country in less than a year, with a 2 year old. Oh yeah, you don't even have any experience in this field and there are really no examples of Add-ons being monetized....not the best idea [/end cue]

As I was listening to Alex and Nazanin talk about the pros and cons of selling Gimlet, I flashed back to those days.