Dear person who didn't think they'd actually do it either,
My husband expected this to be a project I never launched. A lot of the time, I believed him.
I hadn't set out to be an entrepreneur. I wasn't chasing a vision or a dream. I just couldn't stop noticing there was a gap — women who wanted something that didn't exist — and once I saw it I couldn't un-see it. So one night at dinner I thought of a name, looked it up, saw the domain was free, and bought it. Then spent a year building it with no launch plan and no deadline.
What that year looked like: I was still at my crypto job — same calendar, same meetings, nobody there knew a thing about what I was doing on the side. Between those meetings, I'd walk to the Diamond District, going door to door asking questions I didn't know how to ask, to people who could immediately tell I had no idea what I was doing. No industry connections, no framework for who to trust — just a problem I couldn't leave alone and the willingness to keep showing up to a place I didn't belong. The people who eventually helped me helped because they felt sorry for me. That is the honest version. Not vision, not compelling pitch — someone was refusing to stop, and that turned out to be enough to make them want to be part of it.
Those relationships still carry the business today.
I didn't have conviction the whole time. Some days I thought my husband was right. Some days I'd finish a day at the office — the kind of day that reminded me how good I was at that job, how much I'd built there, how comfortable that version of my life was — and think this was just a thing I was working on before I went back to my actual life. I kept walking to the District anyway. I kept asking the questions anyway. Not because I was certain. Because there was a gap and I couldn't leave it alone.
By the end of that year I was in India for three months, figuring out packaging.
What ended it wasn't readiness. I launched with seven pieces because I needed the cash and I was out of time. I did not arrive at launch. I went from building in private to building in public, and the part where I had it figured out never came.
The business exists not because I believed in it enough, but because I kept going even when I didn't. That year — the one that looked like nothing, the one where even I thought he might be right — is what the whole thing is built on.
The quiet year is not the waiting room. It is the work.
--- The full year — the Diamond District, India, and why the people who helped me did it out of pity, not vision — is on Substack.