Dear me,
You just stepped away. There’s no badge to hand back, no office to clear out, no door that clicks shut behind you. Billabex was three of you - remote, in three different cities, mostly meeting inside a laptop. So leaving doesn’t look like much. You close a few tabs, you send the message to your two cofounders, and then it’s just you and a quiet room. No scene, no street. Just the absence of the next ping.
Let me be honest about how you got here, because you’re already starting to tell yourself a cleaner story. You didn’t leave because you’d outgrown the place or cracked some strategic insight. You left because something ran out. The mornings got heavier. The direction stopped matching yours, and you found yourself moving fast with no real sense of where, or why. Motion without meaning is its own kind of exhausting, and it wore you down until leaving was the only honest move left.
None of that is a verdict on what you built. You still believe in Billabex - it solves a real, brutal problem, getting small businesses paid, and the product is the right answer to it. You’re not walking away because the thing wasn’t worth building. You’re walking away because you couldn’t keep building it. Those are different things. Hold the distinction close; it will save you a lot of shame later.
I’m writing from a little further down the road. Not far. Close enough to remember exactly how your chest feels right now, and far enough to tell you a few things you can’t see yet. None of this is advice, really. It’s just what I wish someone had said to you on the day you left.
The fog is the job now
The first thing nobody warns you about is the silence.
For four years at PayFit, then through the early days of Billabex, your day was shaped by other people - messages waiting, decisions to make together, customers expecting an answer. Take that away and the quiet is deafening. You’ll open your laptop on the first Monday and realize no one is waiting for anything. No one needs a decision by noon. It’s terrifying, and you’ll mistake the terror for a mistake.
It isn’t. The fog is not a sign you chose wrong. The fog is just what it looks like when nobody is handing you the next step.
Here’s the part you’ll want to skip past: you left without a plan. No next company lined up, no clean thesis about what comes after. You don’t have the full picture - and though you can’t feel it yet, that’s the point. You stepped away to explore, not to execute. So don’t reach for the next big structure just to make the fog go away. Sit in it a little longer than is comfortable.
Small is what you choose next, not why you left
You’re going to be tempted to rewrite history - to say you left because you wanted to build small, lean, on your own terms. That’s not what happened. You left because you were spent. The small thing comes after, and it’s a choice you get to make now, not the reason you walked.
So make it deliberately. You’ll feel the pull to prove you’re still serious - to raise something, hire someone, put “founder” back on a slide. Resist it for a while. Building small is not the runner-up prize for people who couldn’t build big. It’s a different game with different physics. One person, lean, AI-native, shipping something real in a week - that isn’t a downgrade from the company you left. It’s the thing that company could never do, because it had a team to feed and a direction to defend.
Build small enough that every decision is yours and every result tells you the truth.
What you’ll miss is the people
Here’s something you don’t fully know yet, but will within a week: the part you loved was never the industry. It wasn’t invoices or cash flow or the category. It was the people. The team. The customers who let you into their problems and trusted you to fix them.
Quentin and Yassine gave you the trust, the fights, and everything the three of you built. The customers who believed in you early are the reason it was worth it. None of that came from the product being clever. It came from being in it with other people.
Remember that when you’re alone at your laptop with no standup and no team. The next thing has to put you back near people somehow - readers, users, other builders - or the quiet will hollow it out. Building small doesn’t have to mean building alone.
The unsexy mechanics are the whole game
Inside a company, a lot is done for you. Someone runs distribution. Someone owns the feedback loop. Someone notices when the thing is broken. Now that’s all you.
This is the part that will humble you. You can build something genuinely good and watch it land in total silence, because building it was only ever half the work. The other half - getting it in front of people, listening to what they actually do with it, shipping the boring fix instead of the exciting feature - is the half you used to be insulated from.
Learn to like the unsexy half. The tight loop of ship, watch, adjust, ship again is the only thing that compounds. Everything else is theater.
Write it down, in the open
You’re going to want to disappear for six months and “come back when it’s ready.” Don’t.
Start writing immediately, in public, before it’s good. Not for an audience - you don’t have one, and that’s fine - but because the writing is how you’ll think. Putting the workflow, the dead end, the honest tradeoff into words forces you to be clear with yourself first. And on the days the work goes nowhere, the post is the one thing you can still finish.
It also keeps you honest. It’s hard to quietly tell yourself a comfortable story about how it’s going when you’ve committed to writing down how it’s actually going. The open part isn’t marketing. It’s the accountability you no longer get from a team.
That’s the whole reason this site exists.
There’s no justice, and that’s the freeing part
Last thing, and it’s the one you’ll fight the longest.
You still believe, somewhere, that good work gets rewarded - that if you’re smart enough and you grind hard enough, the outcome follows. It doesn’t, not reliably. Most of what you ship from here will not work. Some of the best things you make will go unseen, and something half-baked will get all the attention. There’s no justice in any of it.
Once you stop waiting for the universe to keep score, you’re free. You build because you’re curious, because the next small thing is interesting, because you want to see if it works - not because you’re owed a result. Curiosity is the only fuel that doesn’t run out when the outcomes don’t cooperate.
You’re a pretty normal guy. No viral launch, no big exit. Just a long, winding path through the work, and now a stretch of it that’s finally yours to walk on your own terms. You don’t know what’s next, and for the first time in a long while, that feels like exactly the right place to be.
It’s going to be fine. Go build something small.
— Me, a little further down the road