Why I Left My Career to Build a Business
My curiosity about how systems work has always driven my path. From the logic of a computer to the mechanics of a car's engine, I have always wanted to know how things work. This led me to a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, where I focused on fluid dynamics and factory management.
During an internship at Mercedes-Benz, I gained hands-on experience with factory management and lean production. These principles aim to maximize value for the customer while minimizing waste, as described in The Toyota Way. I noticed that software was becoming the most valuable part of the system, and high-quality data was increasingly more important than hardware. This insight led me to focus on building skills in data science and software engineering. Around the same time, I had the opportunity to contribute to a data science project that improved production quality at the company.
Through this work, I discovered a passion for building production-grade, reliable software. I taught myself algorithms and data structures through online courses, then became a software engineer. In my first full-time role, I was fortunate to learn from senior engineers through which I got valuable practical experience.
Outside of work, I built increasingly complex side projects, sharing them on my blogs for natural language processing and retrieval-augmented generation (https://deconvoluteai.com) and for object detection (https://neuralception.com). But I learned an uncomfortable lesson. I was building app after app, yet no one was using them. Building a great product is not enough. The real bottleneck is, how do you find the people who find it valuable. That is where I realized that a successful business requires much more than engineering excellence. It requires understanding marketing, that is identifying, attracting, and retaining customers. The “4 Ps” of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) capture this well.
The Pivot to Entrepreneurship
This curiosity about how to build customer relationships led me to my next challenge. I realized that building a business was the ultimate systems problem. It is an opportunity to apply everything I had learned about robust design and complex systems to a new domain. I began reading marketing books, listening to business podcasts, and crucially talking to marketing professionals about their challenges.
I found that the same systems mindset I had used in engineering could be applied to business. Using lean production principles to separate value-adding work from waste, I questioned why certain workflows existed at all. Many marketing teams, creators, and agency owners told me they relied heavily on Notion and Google Sheets, but disliked constantly switching between tools.
That insight became the starting point for BroadPost, a marketing automation platform that transforms Notion into a social media management and publishing hub.
The goal is not just to build another tool. It is to create a system shaped by ongoing conversations with the people who will use it. By continuously gathering feedback from marketing teams and creators, I am designing BroadPost to turn Notion into a first-class client for social media automation. It acts as a reliable bridge between a content creator’s ideas and their audience, removing friction and letting them focus on what they do best: creating.
References
[1] Jeffrey K. Liker. 2004. The Toyota Way: 14 Managment Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer
[2] American Marketing Organization. 2022. The Four Ps of Marketing. https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/the-four-ps-of-marketing/
