The first year you don't talk about
My husband thought I was working on a hobby. For a long time, I thought he might be right.
That’s the version of this I haven’t said out loud much. There were nights I came home from my crypto job and genuinely could not tell the difference between a person building something real and a person running out the clock on an idea they weren’t ready to abandon. My husband could see the whole picture and he wasn’t sure which one I was. And because he knew me better than anyone, his uncertainty had a specific weight that other people’s didn’t.
I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. I need to keep saying that because I think the story gets cleaned up into something it wasn’t. Most founder stories are about someone who had a vision and went after it. This one is about a gap, something I saw and couldn’t stop seeing, and me being too stubborn to leave it alone. That’s a different thing. Stubbornness in the direction of a problem isn’t the same as knowing you’re going to build a business. For most of that year, I couldn’t have told you which one it was.
I was still at my corporate job. Full calendar, full performance, goals up every quarter. Nobody at work knew I was doing anything else. Not because I was hiding it, but because it hadn’t become something with a name yet. Between meetings, I’d walk to the Diamond District. Not once. Not occasionally. Repeatedly, multiple times a week, running from midtown offices to 47th Street and back in whatever time I had between things.
Every single time I went, my ego got crushed. I want to say that plainly because I think founding stories get made to sound gritty and formative in retrospect, and they were, but in real time it felt like walking into rooms full of people who could immediately see that I had no business being there. I didn’t have the vocabulary for this industry yet. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which is the specific kind of ignorance that’s visible to everyone except you. I could feel the recalibration happening in the first thirty seconds of every conversation, them figuring out how much time I was worth, which was usually not very much.
I’d leave and open my notes app and write down everything I’d just learned. Because every time I got my ego crushed in there, I also came out knowing something I hadn’t known going in. That’s the thing that kept pulling me back. Not confidence, not conviction, just the fact that every humiliating trip also taught me something real. I had no connections, no framework, no map. Just a notes app that kept getting longer.
The people who eventually helped me didn’t help me because I was impressive. I want to be honest about this because the version where suppliers saw the vision and wanted to be part of it is a better story, but it’s not this one. They helped because they felt sorry for me. Someone was refusing to stop showing up, and that moved something in them. Those relationships are still the ones the business runs on today, built not on a compelling pitch but on a person who kept coming back.
Everyone in this space talks about building in public, documenting the process, bringing people along. I didn’t do any of that. Not because I had a theory about it. Because what was I going to share? That I was going to the Diamond District and getting my ego crushed every time? That I was writing down what I’d learned in a notes app and going back the next week? There was nothing to document that looked like a business yet. There was just someone figuring it out badly and refusing to stop.
What nobody around me could see during that year was that the not-stopping was the point. I couldn’t see it either. I was too inside it.
At the end of that year I flew to India for three months. I was staying at my aunt’s house on the outskirts of Bombay. Two hours each way to vendors, every day. I didn’t speak Hindi. I spoke a broken version of it mixed with Gujarati and hoped it was enough to get me through conversations about designs and cards and quantities with people who could tell immediately that I wasn’t from here, not in the way that counted. I was still employed. I hadn’t launched anything. I ordered Zomato every night because I had no friends there and no time to find any, and I hated being there, and I missed my husband, and he couldn’t come.
The days were vendors and logistics and decisions I’d have to live with later. The two-hour commute back was when I started my actual job, answering calls, catching up on whatever had happened while I was figuring out packaging quantities on the other side of the city. I worked until 3 or 4 in the morning most nights. Then did it again.
I didn’t know why I was doing it. That’s the honest answer. I couldn’t have articulated a reason that would have satisfied anyone who asked. Something in me just wasn’t willing to leave until it was finished. I don’t know what to call that. I just know it kept me there.
I was there covering Asia for my corporate job. The vendor trips and the packaging decisions and the Zomato at midnight were what I built around it.
The choices I made in those three months are still the choices the business runs on.
What ended it wasn’t readiness. I launched when I needed the cash and had run out of time to keep postponing. There was no moment of certainty, no sign that said go. The part where I had it figured out never came. I went from building in private to building in public and I was just as uncertain on the other side of it.
The year nobody saw is the one the whole business is built on. My husband came around eventually. Not because I convinced him, but because I had built something he could see. The building had already happened, in the year when neither of us was sure it would.
The quiet year is not the waiting room. It is the work.
Sincerely,
Shreya