The year I almost quit
In January 2025, I gave myself six months to figure out my shit.
I'd quit my job in June 2023 to build things on my own. A year and a half later, I'd joined Every as an Entrepreneur in Residence—full of optimism. By the time the new year rolled around, that optimism had curdled into something heavier. Our TLDR experiment didn't get much traction. I was directionless.
So I did what any reasonable person does when they're lost—I flew to Thailand with friends and stared at the ocean for two weeks.
When I came back, I made a deal with myself: June 2025. If I didn't have something working by then—something people actually wanted, something they'd pay for—I'd go back to a regular job. No more experiments. No more maybes.
The experiments that taught me nothing (and everything)
January through March was a blur of building and releasing and watching things not work.
First came Kairos, an iOS smart reading app. I built it in a week, wrote about it on Every, got a flood of downloads. People liked it. But "liking" something and paying for it are different universes. I killed it.
Then came Unwrite, a Grammarly alternative. This one felt smarter. I'd talked to teammates who actually paid for Grammarly, and in an AI-first world, the product felt ripe for disruption. I thought I'd cracked something.
Through February and March, I pushed. I onboarded 100 early adopters. I iterated on the iOS keyboard. I got feedback—lots of it. People kept asking for a Mac app, so I built one. I dove into accessibility APIs and system-level hacks, trying to make inline grammar fixes work across any application.
And somewhere in that rabbit hole, I made the same mistake I'd made with TLDR: I disappeared into the product. Weeks passed. Usage flatlined. I was building for building's sake.
By April, I was burned out.
The weekend that changed the year
When you're exhausted, sometimes the best thing you can do is work on something else entirely.
I'd had this itch for months—a smart voice-to-text Mac app. Not a serious project. Just a weekend distraction to take my mind off Unwrite's slow death. I called it Jottle, hacked it together in a couple of days.
Then came our Friday show-and-tell at Every.
I demoed Unwrite like usual. But at the end, almost as an afterthought, I showed Jottle. Kieran's eyes lit up. Others leaned in. The energy in the room shifted.
The next day—Saturday—I packaged the app into a .dmg file and dropped it in our Discord. People started using it immediately.
What happened next still surprises me. Each user was using the app hundreds of times per day. Unwrite, my "real" product, barely got touched. But this weekend hack? People couldn't stop using it.
I had stumbled into something.
Building Monologue
By late April, the conviction hit fast: stop everything else and run with this.
We renamed it Monologue (h/t Lucas). Lucas did a ton of brand exploration—these are a few that didn't make the final cut.
Through May and June, I went heads-down. Feature after feature. The product took shape. Dan and Brandon started talking about including it in the Every bundle. What began as a distraction was becoming something real.
But here's what I don't often talk about: this period wasn't just professional intensity. There were personal lows. Family stuff I won't get into. Days I couldn't work. A week in April where I stepped away completely.
When I came back, Monologue was waiting for me. Building it became a kind of therapy—a place to pour energy when everything else felt uncertain.
By July, something shifted. Early adopters were flooding in. Daily usage climbed. The momentum felt different this time—not forced, but organic. People genuinely wanted this thing.
I also found balance. That month, I spent real time with friends in Bangalore. Weekend trips. Late dinners. Work was going well, but so was life. It was the first time in a long time those two things aligned.
Launch day
We set September 16th as the public release date.
August became a redesign sprint. Daniel and Lucas Crespo from the Every team gave Monologue the kind of polish I couldn't have created alone. Every pixel mattered.
Before launch, I took five days off. A road trip with family. No code, no Discord, no metrics. Just presence. It was exactly what I needed.
Then Ben Tossell mentioned Monologue in his newsletter.
Thousand users in a week. Before we'd even publicly launched.
When September 16th finally arrived, I was back in Vizag with family. The launch went live on Wednesday. Thrusday, my Every article dropped. Friday, the podcast. Each day felt unreal, like watching someone else's story unfold.
But it was mine. It was ours.
The year in snapshots
If I zoom out, 2025 looks like a series of bets—some that paid off, most that didn't.
Kairos: Built in a week, killed in two. Taught me to ship faster.
Unwrite: Two months of effort, 100 early adopters, zero traction. Taught me that grinding harder doesn't fix product-market fit.
Monologue: A weekend distraction that became the thing. Taught me that sometimes the side project is the project.
The numbers tell part of the story: thousands of users, inclusion in Every's bundle, a product people actually pay for. But the numbers miss the texture—the burned-out weeks, the family challenges, the Friday demo that changed everything.
New York
December ended with me on a plane to New York.
This trip had been on my bucket list since I was ten or eleven, watching Home Alone and imagining what that city looked like in winter. When I landed, it had just snowed. The streets were frosted white. Everything looked exactly like the movies.
I'm writing this from brooklyn, actually. Thinking about where Monologue goes next. Feeling something I didn't feel twelve months ago: certainty.
Not certainty that everything will work. But certainty that I'm building the right thing, with the right people, in the right direction.
What I'm carrying into 2026
Last year, I prioritized work above everything. It was necessary—I had to prove to myself that I could build something that mattered. But it came at a cost.
This year, I want to find better balance. Keep the intensity, but leave room for the other things that make life worth living. Friends. Family. Random road trips. Snowfall in cities I've only seen in movies.
January 2025, I gave myself six months to figure out my shit.
January 2026, I'm still figuring it out. But now I'm doing it with a product people love, a team I believe in, and a city covered in snow outside my window.
That's more than enough to build on.