What I Owe My Startup

Three things I didn't expect to gain

The first time I was shooting a reel for Shezaar’s Instagram, it took me 4 hours to shoot a 30 second video. I kept pausing and starting over, certain that whatever I’d just said sounded exactly as stupid as I felt saying it.

There are three moments like this I keep coming back to, three things I didn’t expect a fashion-tech startup to teach me. This is where it starts.

Moment 1

I am, since forever, an extremely introverted, anti-social person. I love my solitude. I almost always have to prepare myself before I meet anyone. And I am extremely self-conscious about how I look on camera.

So... putting myself out there in front of a camera for an idea that can fail was HUGE.

And that day, despite spending hours shooting and editing that video, I didn’t post it.

But the next day, I was scrolling Instagram and I landed on another founder’s page, barely 200 followers, talking about the exact fear I’d just spent a whole day fixated on.

So I thought, if she could say the vulnerable thing out loud, I could too. And if I wanted my product out in the world, talking about it was MY job. Nobody else was going to do it for me.

So I started posting anyway. Badly and mostly to an audience of less than 100 followers.

Because the rule of entrepreneurship, especially in the early days, is to just show up.

And eventually things got better. And to my absolute horror, I actually started to like creating content.

I’m still self-conscious about how I look on camera. But what changed is I stopped caring whether I looked good and started caring whether the thing, the video, the post, the article, worked.

The whole point of content was never me. It was getting a product, even a bad one, in front of users early enough to hear what was wrong with it.

Somewhere in there, content stopped being vanity and turned into a distribution strategy.

Moment 2

Coding scared me just as much, long before Shezaar existed.

I studied electronics and telecommunication engineering in college, where a CS class was mandatory for two semesters out of eight, and I dreaded both of them. The professors who taught it were some of the strictest in the department, prone to tearing into you the moment you got something wrong. I remember the anxiety before every class, every exam, the kind of anxiety that sits in your stomach for days beforehand. Anxiety that made me hate CS as a subject.

So the moment I finished the mandatory classes, I told myself I was done. I was never touching a terminal again.

But being a solo founder meant nobody was coming to build the MVP for me. I needed a working prototype to put in front of the people signing up for my waitlist. Hiring an engineer wasn’t an option because I wanted my savings to last as long as possible. So I decided to do it myself.

I tried Bubble first, the no-code route, and it couldn’t do what I needed the product to do. So I moved to Cursor, vibe-coded most of the real thing with the help of ChatGPT and Claude, and taught myself to understand code, one Codedex exercise at a time.

Without an exam attached to it, without a professor waiting to grade the practical, coding turned out to be something I liked. I still go back to Codedex for the exercises now, just because I like doing them.

I now practically live in Claude Code. I have built so many things including an operating system that tags my tasks, tracks my content analytics across every platform, helps me remember and build my network, and is basically the smartest chief of staff.

Moment 3

Writing surprised me the most, because I already knew I loved it.

I wrote short stories as a kid and kept a journal for years.

But none of it ever left my room.

Not my parents, not my closest friends. Nobody knew I did it. Writing was the one thing I never wanted to turn into a performance.

Somewhere in my twenties I mostly forgot I used to do that. The real barrier wasn’t the newsletter itself, it was that I’d always guarded my deepest thoughts and never felt safe handing them to anyone.

So starting a substack for Shezaar gave me a low-risk way around that. I was writing in the brand’s voice, but I kept sneaking my own take in as the founder anyway, and people started discussing my opinions with me.

That’s the only reason Table For One exists. If nobody had responded to my take hiding inside Shezaar’s brand voice, starting a newsletter under my own name would never have occurred to me.

None of these three things were the plan. I built Shezaar to fix a textile-waste problem, not to become a person who is fine on camera, self-taught in code, and willing to publish her own writing. I got all three anyway, as a side effect of the one decision that actually mattered: build the thing, put it in front of real people, and let the discomfort teach you whatever it is going to teach you.

So here’s my only ask. Whatever you’re telling yourself you’re not enough for, trust that you’ll figure it out anyway. You don’t need to be good at coding right now to build an MVP. You don’t need to be good at marketing right now to get your first users. You don’t have to be good at finance to raise money.

You don’t need anything else. Because when push comes to shove, when you’re the only one who’s supposed to do it, you’ll end up doing it.

That’s why I’m building Table For One. It’s a community for solo founders brave enough to take the first step.

You still have to be the one who does it. You just don’t have to make a thousand mistakes to get there, not when other solo founders doing the exact same hard thing are already in the room.

If that’s you, apply to be a member and check out our events calendar.

Okay, commercial over.

I spent most of this newsletter telling you what Shezaar cost me. This is the other half of that ledger. I did not expect a failed startup to leave me braver, stronger, and smarter.

What would you find out about yourself if you stopped waiting for permission to start?

---

If any of this sounds like you, reply and tell me what you’re sitting on.