A Dad With 2 Kids Shouldn't Quit His Job. I Did Anyway.
I left a safe Silicon Valley engineering management job with two kids and gave myself five years to build a one-person internet business.
I was standing in my kitchen at 2 AM, holding a bottle in one hand and my phone in the other, reading about a guy who'd just sold his one-person startup for $20 million.
My firstborn was three weeks old. My wife was finally asleep after a day that had broken both of us. And I was doing math in my head — the kind of math you do when you're terrified but too stubborn to admit it.
If I quit my job tomorrow, how many months could we survive?
I didn't quit the next day. But I started writing my resignation letter that week. It took me another year to actually send it. And the five years that followed nearly broke me before they made me.
This is that story.
The Job Was Fine. AND That Was the Problem.
I was an Engineering Manager at a big tech company in Silicon Valley. The kind of job your parents brag about. Good salary, good team, good benefits. Every two weeks, money appeared in my account like clockwork. I had a title that impressed people at dinner parties.
And I hated the way it made me feel safe.
Not because safety is bad. Safety is great when you're choosing it. But I wasn't choosing it. I was defaulting to it. I was thirty, had one kid and another on the way, and my biggest professional achievement was moving someone else's metrics by a few percentage points. I sat in meetings about meetings. I wrote performance reviews that no one read. I optimized systems that made other people rich.
But the worst part wasn't the work itself. It was the rot. Endless 30-minute "alignment" meetings that aligned nothing and moved nothing forward. Six people on a call to discuss a decision that one person could have made in five minutes. I'd walk out of back-to-back syncs, look at my calendar, and realize I hadn't built anything all day. All week, sometimes.
The system was rotting. I could see it. I'd flag it, propose fixes, write docs nobody read. Nothing changed. And slowly, without noticing, I started rotting too. I felt worthless — not because I wasn't capable, but because capability didn't seem to matter. What mattered was showing up to the next meeting and nodding along.
Every night I'd put my kid to bed and think: is this it? Is this what the next thirty years look like?
The answer was yes. Unless I changed something.
The Deal That Changed Everything
Quitting wasn't impulsive. It was a negotiation — with the one person whose opinion actually mattered.
My wife didn't say "follow your dreams." She's not that kind of person. She's the kind of person who asks hard questions and expects real answers.
She said: "Five years. Match your old salary with your own business, or go back to a real job. No excuses, no extensions, no 'but I'm almost there.' Five years."
No investors. No co-founders. No safety net. Just a deadline from the person who believed in me enough to let me try, and loved me enough to set a limit.
I want you to understand something: that deal was scarier than any pitch meeting, any product launch, any technical challenge I've ever faced. Because if I failed, I wasn't just failing myself. I was failing the person who bet her family's stability on my ambition.
Honestly? It was more pressure than any KPI I'd ever had.
Three Years of Getting Punched in the Face
What followed was the most humbling period of my life.
I killed five projects in three years. Each one taught me a different way to fail.
O2O (Online-to-Offline). It was hot at the time. Everyone was talking about it. I built the tech, then realized the business required being out there every day — knocking on doors, running ground operations, meeting vendors in person. But I had two kids under three. I couldn't be out there every day. I was the one doing daycare pickup. I was the one making dinner at 5 PM. The business model required a version of me that didn't exist anymore. Killed it.
A marketplace. I thought if I built something big and comprehensive enough, users would come. Years in big tech had taught me that traffic just... shows up. You build it, the growth team handles the rest, the users arrive. Turns out, when you're one person with no marketing budget and no brand, nobody comes. Nobody even knows you exist. That was a $0 lesson that cost me eight months. Killed it.
Fintech. RPA. I could build the tech. Couldn't crack the business. When you're one person, picking the wrong direction doesn't just waste time. It wastes everything — your savings, your energy, your wife's patience, your kids' bedtimes that you missed for nothing.
But the worst was trying to find a co-founder.
When you have a young family, finding someone who matches your rhythm is nearly impossible. You need to leave at 4:30 to pick up the kids. They want to schedule a brainstorm at 9 PM. You can't travel next week because your daughter has a fever. They think you're not committed enough. You think they don't understand your constraints.
One co-founder conflict wiped out months of work and left behind real emotional damage — the kind that makes you question not just the partnership, but yourself. Eventually I realized the energy I'd spend managing a relationship was better spent building the product.
So I went solo. Truly solo. And I started wondering if maybe I was just not cut out for this. Maybe some people are meant to build things, and some people are meant to have stable jobs and raise their kids and be grateful for what they have.
I was three years into a five-year deal, and I had nothing to show for it.
And Then a Fortune-Telling App Changed Everything
Yes, really.
Two years ago, out of frustration and curiosity, I built an AI tarot reading app. A Silicon Valley engineer building a fortune-telling product. I know how it sounds.
I didn't expect anything from it. It was a weekend project. Something to remind myself that building things could still be fun, because somewhere in those three years of failure, I'd forgotten that.
But then something happened that I will never forget.
It made money. Not a lot. But real money. My first dollar earned on the internet.
If you've never experienced this, I can't fully explain what it feels like. Someone, somewhere in the world — someone I've never met, will never meet, don't even know the name of — opened something I made, found it valuable, and paid for it. No sales calls. No meetings. No networking. No pitching. I literally went to sleep, and woke up to revenue.
The product just sat there on the internet, and money came in.
That's when everything clicked. Building internet products solo is the perfect business model for a parent with young kids. No commute. No employees. No office politics. No investors to answer to. Kids awake? I'm dad. Kids asleep? I'm building. The costs are almost nothing — a domain name, some hosting, my time. But a single product, if it finds its audience, can outgrow a salary.
I'd spent three years looking for a complicated answer. The answer was simple. Build small things, put them on the internet, let them work while you sleep.
From Tarot to Real Products
What happened next felt like destiny — fitting, given how it started.
From the tarot app, I went on to build MakeForm — an AI-powered form builder. Completely different market, but the same playbook: find a real need, build a product, acquire users through SEO instead of ads.
MakeForm taught me things I wish I'd learned years earlier. How to cold-start SEO from absolute zero. How to get Google to send you customers for free. How to grow without spending a single dollar on advertising. How to compete with funded companies by being faster, leaner, and more obsessive about the product.
Today I have four products generating steady revenue. No clock to punch. No boss to report to. No one to ask permission from. No one to tell me what to work on today.
I wake up, check my dashboards, and decide what matters most. Some days that's building new features. Some days that's writing content. Some days that's just being present with my kids, because the beautiful thing about this life is that I can choose.
The money isn't life-changing yet. I'm not buying a yacht. But it's real, it's growing, and it's mine.
This Year: The Final Push
Five years ago, I made a bet with my wife. This year, I plan to win it.
The goal is aggressive: 10x my revenue and deliver on the promise I made. Is the pressure real? Absolutely. Some mornings I wake up and the weight of it sits on my chest before I even open my eyes.
But here's what I've learned: a guy who's been shipping code between diaper changes for four years has stopped caring about what other people think is "realistic."
I've failed more times than most people have tried. I've built things nobody used, poured months into ideas that went nowhere, questioned myself at 2 AM more times than I can count. And I'm still here. Still building. Still going.
Not because I'm special. Because I gave myself no other option.
I'll be sharing this journey as it happens — how to run multiple products solo, how to cold-start with SEO, how to balance building a business with raising small kids, and every mistake I make along the way.
If you're building solo — or thinking about it — follow along. If you're sitting in a job that feels safe but not right, and you're doing that same 2 AM math I was doing five years ago, maybe this is your sign to start.
Not to quit tomorrow. But to start building your Plan B tonight.
Five years ago, I had nothing but a deal with my wife and a terrible idea about tarot cards. Now I have four products, complete freedom over my time, and a story I'm proud to tell.
The best parts haven't been written yet.
I'm Nil. Silicon Valley dad of two. One-person company builder. Follow me on X @_nilni and LinkedIn for the unfiltered journey.