I quit my job in November 2025, and, to be honest, I had been thinking about it for at least six months before that, maybe longer. A lot of things were piling up, and I want to actually go through them, because the question I keep getting is "how's it going" and "should I do the same," and I'm tired of giving the short answer.
This isn't a guide. I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just writing down what these six months have actually been like.
Why I quit
Four reasons stacked on top of each other for almost a year.
The first one was money. I wasn't getting paid properly for the last 8 to 10 months. And for the last 3 months straight, I wasn't getting paid at all. Zero. The company lacked proper clients, planning, or structure, and had no timeline for when salaries would resume. Why was I still going in? Honestly, I don't know for sure. There's a voice in your head that tells you walking out of any job is irresponsible, and I was listening to it longer than I should have.
The second was the workload. Insane work pressure with expectations to work on weekends, late nights, early mornings, and even on public holidays, all without any kind of benefits or overtime pay. And, like I said, often no salary either. Just constant urgency without any direction underneath it.
The third was the math. I was already making good money from my blogs and my online business, but I was still putting sixty to seventy hours a week into a job that wasn't paying me, with a two-hour daily commute on top of that, while the actual paying business of mine was getting whatever leftover hours I had at the end of the day. At some point, you have to look at that and ask what you're actually doing.
The fourth was the trigger. We had this one external partner attached to one of the only clients we had, who was, and I'm just going to be honest here, toxic as fuck, abusive, brutal, and unprofessional. He made the lives of every one of my teammates and me a living hell with constant calls throughout the day to ramble on about random bullshit. He used to rant for hours, preventing us from actually doing our work. He was the final nail.
One evening, I sat down and saw the picture for what it was. Sixty-plus hours a week, a toxic partner, no pay, ignoring the actual paying business of mine. There wasn't really anything to debate.
I sent my resignation email the next morning.
How the exit actually went
I was bracing for it to be hard. The corporate brain in me was convinced they'd push back, try to make me stay, mess with my head, drag the exit out, do something.
None of that happened.
The CTO called me after seeing the email. He was actually really decent about it, and even wished me well with the solo stuff. I was out within a week of sending the email. To be fair, what were they going to negotiate with? You can't ask someone to stay when you haven't paid them in months.
I walked out on a Friday. The Monday after, I sat at my desk at home, and there was no calendar invite, no Slack ping, and no manager waiting for me to update them on something. The anxiety and stress that had been background noise for over a year just kind of disappeared, almost overnight. I felt freer, happier, and more grateful than I had in years. I was finally going to do what I actually loved, on my own time, on my own terms.
The harder conversation was at home
Telling the company was the easy part. Telling my family was not.
My family was hesitant when I told them because the appeal of a steady salary is very real, especially when there's a home loan and household responsibilities to consider. They were focused on the reliability of a corporate job. What I was proposing wasn't reliable in that same way.
What changed their minds was an Excel sheet. I sat down and pulled together my last year's online earnings across my blogs, Medium, sponsorships, and affiliate income.
I showed them how much I'd been making in the cracks of a sixty-hour work week. And I made the argument I actually believed. With a job, your salary is fixed. No matter how hard you work, that number doesn't move. As a creator, there's no real ceiling. The output is whatever ideas you can execute on. If I were making this much in evenings and weekends, what could I do with all my time?
They agreed to a six-month trial. If it didn't work out, I'd start looking for another job.
There were also voices outside the immediate family. People who had been asking for years why I was wasting time creating content online instead of climbing the corporate ladder like everyone else. Why I wasn't preparing for certifications. Why I wasn't grinding for interviews at bigger companies. Some of them genuinely thought I'd wasted a lot of time and money doing my master's degree if I was just going to become a solopreneur creating content. Like, all of that schooling for this?
I never argued back. I just kept building.
What that first month was actually like
The first month was a strange mix of feeling completely free and feeling this leftover anxiety I couldn't shake.
The freedom showed up immediately in the small stuff. Long overdue plans and appointments. Going for a vacation, going to the bank, going to dentist appointments, doing all of these whenever I wanted to, instead of going through the process of applying for leaves, explaining myself, or waiting for the right time when there was no deadline or something. The hundred small life things a job had been silently making harder for years just dissolved.
The leftover anxiety was about start times. For the first few weeks, I had this hum at 9 am like I should be at a desk somewhere. Getting used to the fact that I could start my workday when I actually wanted to and felt like it, instead of sticking to a rigid schedule, was a boon. It was freeing, and it improved my creative thinking process more than I expected.
I also started picking back up the things and habits the toxic job had pushed out of my life. Things I wanted to do but couldn't do consistently because of the job. Learning piano (a brand new thing for me), reading books every day, and going for evening walks with my 4-year-old nephew. Spending real time writing on my blog instead of squeezing it into the cracks. Exploring my own creative thought process. The physical act of writing in a journal. Writing down my thoughts. None of these were new hobbies. They were just things I'd been forced to push aside for too long.
On the work side, I moved fast. I tightened up the content calendar for The Useful Tech, my Apple-focused publication on Medium. I launched two new blogs in this period: one for my book-reading habits and analog life, and one for the creator lifestyle and solopreneur stuff. And I shipped my first-ever digital product.
The thing I didn't like much in that first month was not having anyone to discuss my work with, interact with, or get feedback from. Not leaving my house for days on end. I got used to it quickly by replacing it with online communities of like-minded people on Discord and Twitter. But the gap was real for a while.
I also told my family and friends I'd quit. Most of them were skeptical at first. But I had some friends tell me they were happy for me, that I was getting to do my own thing. And there were even a few of them who either quit their jobs or started a side hustle because they were inspired by me. I felt very proud at that point, and I screenshotted those messages as motivation to look back at if I ever felt my decision was wrong.
I haven't had to look back at them once.
The moment I knew it was actually working
There was a specific moment. My first digital product launched and started making thousands of dollars in its first weeks. And around the same time, my Medium revenue shot up to its highest level since I started this whole online journey back in 2021. That's when I knew. Okay. This is actually working. New revenue stream unlocked. The existing one is accelerating. All of it within a few months of leaving a job that wasn't even paying me.
The wins I genuinely didn't see coming
I made $10K for two consecutive months. Something I never even dreamed of. That too, right after quitting my job. That motivated the hell out of me.
I also never thought I'd make over $11K in the first 5 months of launching digital products as a new revenue stream. When I launched the Life Planner, my honest internal benchmark was that if it made $500 a month, I'd be thrilled. Five months later, the digital products catalog has crossed $11K.
And I never thought I'd be able to collectively build an online community of over 600 people who actually want to talk about tech and books with me. The Useful Tech Club currently has 210 free members and 20 paid subscribers. Twenty paid subscribers doesn't sound like a lot until you remember they're paying me every single month to be in there.
I felt scared about charging people a monthly subscription. I genuinely thought no one would opt for it. But within the first few weeks, I had over 20 paying subscribers. And here's the thing I didn't expect. I started the paid tier to generate recurring revenue outside of Medium's dependency. I've grown to love it for an entirely different reason. It's the one place in my work where I get to interact directly with people in real time, hear what they actually want, and have back-and-forth conversations.
The stuff that didn't work
Not everything worked. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
The Useful Creator brand, the one I built specifically around my solopreneur journey and the lessons I learned from it, hasn't gotten the reach I expected. I thought my experience and sharing what I'd learned would help a lot of people. But it didn't get much reach. Part of that is on me because I wasn't very consistent. But part of it is just that the audience for this kind of content is harder to find than I thought.
Twitter was the bigger swing that didn't pay off. I posted consistently. I bought their premium subscription. Tried different formats. It didn't do shit. Whatever the algorithm rewards, my stuff isn't it.
I'm not abandoning either. I'm rethinking how I approach them. But six months in, both have underperformed by a wide margin, and I'd rather just say that.
The hardest part of these 6 months
The hardest stretch wasn't a single bad week. It was the underlying thing. The unreliable nature of algorithms. Not knowing whether my views would tank or soar on any given day. As a creator, that's what's hit me the hardest mentally.
I'm working on it by building more reliable sources of income. Digital products on Gumroad. The paid Discord community. iPhone apps that I'm seriously planning right now. Online courses I'm starting to put together. The goal is simply to avoid being in a position where one platform's algorithm change can wipe out a quarter of my income overnight.
The other thing I miss is colleagues. The basic thing of having people I can interact with and discuss the ups and downs of the job with. Moral, emotional, and technical support. Instant validation. That part of a job, I genuinely miss. But I love that I have full control of everything I do now and don't have to rely on managers or owners for approvals or feedback. So it's a trade. And I'd take this trade every time.
Things I didn't know about myself
Going solo killed a belief I'd been conditioned into for years. The belief that you need to put in 8 or 9 hours a day, irrespective of whether you have work or not. I stopped tying my output to the number of hours spent and shifted to the quality of the work. Some days, even if I work for 2, 3, or 4 hours, I'm still happy and satisfied with my work. Some days I work for 10 hours because the energy is there. The hour count just stopped mattering.
I also discovered something else about myself. I deliver my best and most creative work when there's no deadline or manager looming over my head, and I have the freedom to start and stop working whenever I want based on my energy levels rather than a fixed schedule.
And then there's money. Honestly, I've been making a lot more money every month than I ever did in my traditional job, and I'm extremely grateful for it. It's drastically changed my relationship with money. Letting me buy higher-quality stuff, where I used to buy the cheapest. Letting me buy things I actually want and love instead of always factoring in the money first. It's improved my standard of living, and that's made my family and me happier and more satisfied. It's also allowed me to pay off some of my debts quicker.
The one thing I regret
There's one thing I'd do differently if I were starting these six months over.
I haven't focused enough on my personal life. Things like building a daily exercise habit. Traveling more frequently. Having themed date nights. Eating healthily. The work side has gotten almost all my attention, and the personal stuff has been quietly subsidizing it the whole time.
If I were starting over, I'd definitely give equal importance to my health and my relationships from day one. The next six months are going to look different on this front.
What I'm building next
Two things have me genuinely excited right now.
The first is iPhone apps. I'm working on app concepts that I believe can reach and impact far more people than blog posts can, while also adding a meaningful new income stream, both mentally and monetarily. There's a step counter app idea I've been writing specs for, and a few more queued behind it.
The second is online courses, where I teach people how to make a living through writing and content creation. I expect the same kind of impact from that. Not the polished guru version. The real one, with all the experimentation and failure included.
What I'd tell the version of me from November 2025
Quit right away. Don't wait.
Tell him everything would work out much better than he could have imagined in his wildest dreams. Tell him his decision to go full-time on this solopreneur thing was the right one all along. He should be happy and proud and grateful that he never had self-doubt, even when most people in his life doubted him and looked at him as if he were joking.
The people who said he wasted a lot of time and money pursuing his master's degree, if he was just going to become a solopreneur, creating content. The people who said he should focus on leveling up the corporate career ladder like everyone else, instead of wasting his free time creating content when he should be studying for certifications and preparing for interviews. He'll keep ignoring them. And six months in, he'll have stopped caring what they think.
And take care of your body and your marriage.
Six months ago, I sent an email and ended a chapter. The chapter that started after has already given me more than the previous one ever did.
I'm not going back.