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We sat down with the founder in a co-working space that still smells of fresh paint to talk through the first eighteen months of the company. The conversation started, as these usually do, with the origin story: a side project built to scratch a personal itch, shared with a handful of former colleagues, that quietly kept growing until it was obviously the thing to work on full time. There was no dramatic quitting moment, just a slow realisation over a few weekends that the thing they were building on the side had become more interesting than the job paying for it.

What makes this one worth publishing is what came after. They walked us through the decision to turn down a larger round in favour of a smaller one on friendlier terms, and were unusually specific about the numbers, the dilution, and the board dynamics that came with each option. They described the messy process of hiring their first three engineers, including the offer that fell through the day before the start date, and the contractor who quietly became the most important person in the company.

They talked about the week they nearly shut everything down, the spreadsheet that said they had six weeks of runway, and the single enterprise contract that landed on a Friday afternoon and changed the maths entirely.

We also get into the daily texture of building in public: what they share, what they hold back, how they think about competitors reading every changelog entry, and why they still write those entries themselves instead of handing it to marketing. It is a candid, detailed account of the parts of company building that rarely make it into a launch post, and it should be useful to anyone weighing up whether to start something of their own this year.