The story starts with my decision to build a revenue-generating startup after moving to London from Sweden. I resigned from my well-paid tech consulting job to pursue something of my own.

The calm before the leap — leaving certainty behind to build something of my own.

At first, it sounds exciting — even a little crazy — to quit and start building for yourself. You feel freedom and commitment in the beginning. But when things don’t go your way, you start questioning your decision. Maybe you shouldn’t have quit your full-time job.

For me, however, I had been waiting a long time to build a product of my own. I had experience working in consulting companies serving clients and delivering their requirements. The unfortunate part of consulting is that you rarely get the end-to-end opportunity — from conducting real customer research to bringing a product to life and collecting feedback from users. Most consulting work is about fulfilling requests within enterprise environments or serving partial consumer needs.

I once believed it was easy to understand what customers want. That turned out to be a myth. Without proper customer interaction and interviews, assumptions are dangerous. You need deep curiosity and continuous conversations with users to truly build what they need.

Early experiments, hard lessons — traction is earned, not assumed.

My first attempt was a cloud cost optimiser product. I failed to gain traction or generate meaningful revenue. Later, I pivoted to building social pages for everyone, competing with platforms like bento.me (which was acquired by Linktree). Again, I failed to acquire customers and experimented with a no-pricing model — a mistake, in hindsight, especially for a bootstrapped or indie hacker business.

Over time, I realised something important: building apps today is easier than ever, but distribution is incredibly hard. Convincing someone to subscribe is even harder. Even powerful products face this challenge.

However, payment and quick-service providers like Uber and Deliveroo generate revenue by simply taking a percentage for enabling transactions. That signal pushed me to explore something in fintech. Around that time, stablecoins were becoming a hot topic. I started learning how stablecoins work and where they could be applied to solve a real, painful problem.

After a month of exploration, I found the Merchant of Record (MoR) space particularly interesting. Many competitors in this space take 5–10% of sellers’ revenue — often from small entrepreneurs. That felt unfair to me.

Rethinking payments — questioning legacy rails and exploring what stablecoins can unlock.

I began exploring whether stablecoin rails could be used under the hood to replace the legacy payment rails used by current providers. I am still developing this software. While building a stablecoin-based solution is exciting, I am new to fintech and blockchain. I believe anyone can become competent — even expert — by dedicating 1,000 to 2,000 focused hours. Let’s see where paaaid.com goes.

The paaaid.com journey continues. I’m writing this from the NatWest Accelerator Hub in London. I was recently accepted into their program, and today was my first visit to collect my hub pass. I’m looking forward to working here regularly and networking with fellow founders.

The future feels exciting.

Time to stop writing and get back to building.