From PM to co-founder - my personal story
Moving from a product manager job to becoming a co-founder of a startup has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. In this article I'll share my personal experience.
My journey so far
To provide a bit more context for this article, I’ll share some of my professional background. I have been involved in product management for over 20 years. In the early years, this was more focused on technical product management, more like a product owner role. From there, I transitioned into a position where I coordinated the work of engineering and product teams.
Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to be directly involved in launching several new products (including leading the development and launch of Smart-ID). Over the years, I have switched between self contributing senior PM roles and leadership roles of product management.
I’ve also learned some hard lessons in my career, such as being involved for 1.5 years in Textmagic developing a Touchpoint customer service platform, that was ultimately not launched.
As a product manager, I consider my strengths to be empathy toward the customer, curiosity and desire to understand their problems, courage to experiment, creating clarity regarding goals and the ability to engage the team.
It turns out that the same skills that make a good product manager — like understanding the customers, solving their problems, and setting focus — are also key to building your own company.
How it started: the situation
Phishbite is a cybersecurity startup helping companies to reduce their risks by increasing employee security awareness with phishing simulations and bite size regular cyber security awareness training.
When I joined the Phishbite startup as a co-founder:
The team had been working on the product for 5 months, there was no clarity on our early customer profile.
We had 48,000 euros in grant money to fund us from Tehnopol and the State Information Authority Cyber Security incubator.
There were three co-founders (including me), but only two of us worked full-time. The third founder had another full time job.
We had two developers who also worked part-time.
I proposed to the founders of Phishbite that I join them for two months. We'll test how well we work together, whether I bring enough value to the team, and at the same time, I’ll have the opportunity to learn more about the problem space and the market.
At first, everything felt exciting but also a little chaotic. It’s hard to know where to start when you have so much to do and so few people to do it with.
My first steps in co-founder role
My initial goal was to conduct as many interviews as possible with potential customers, define the MVP scope, and bring the product to market as quickly as possible to gather early feedback from potential customers.
My painful lessons from Touchpoint were still very fresh in my mind, and I felt it was the right decision to release the product as early as possible. At the same time, I understood better than ever before what it feels like as a founder to release something you’re not yet fully satisfied with. I had never experienced this in such a way during my career before. This was one of the first clearly noticeable differences between being a co-founder and a hired PM.
Since we agreed that marketing would initially be my responsibility as well, I also contributed to messaging and positioning and worked on the copy for the new website. During my time at Touchpoint, I had extensive collaboration with the marketing team on web content, but there I primarily acted as a product team partner to them.
Given that Phishbite had a very limited budget, we decided not to hire a separate marketing person. While I could discuss ideas with the co-founders and the designer, the greater responsibility ultimately rested on me. This revealed the second major difference for me – taking on more responsibility in areas where I don’t feel like an expert.
What stayed the same between PM and co-founder roles?
Customer focus
As a PM, you’re always thinking about customers — their problems and how to solve them. That focus is even more important in a startup. You have to validate everything to find your product-market fit, and without a good understanding of your customers, it’s almost impossible.
Keeping end goal in mind
In a PM role, you rely on product metrics to measure success. As a co-founder, you still use metrics, but you look at everything from user adoption to how much money is left in the bank. Mainly, you are looking for signals that confirm you are on the path to product-market fit and that you can acquire and retain customers.
Thinking strategically
Product managers often help guide a company’s strategy. As a co-founder, you’re in charge. You decide where the company and product are heading, and every decision matters.
What’s different?
Fewer resources
Startups, especially when you are bootstrapping, have small teams and small budgets. You do things you’ve never done before, even if you don’t feel ready:
Making interviews with potential customers ? Me.
Writing copy on our website ? Me again.
Testing product functionality ? Still me.
This pushes you to learn quickly, but it can also be exhausting. At times, it’s difficult when you’re used to delegating tasks to experts who are better than you, but now you have to do them yourself.
Quicker decisions
I noticed a certain difference in decision-making processes. When building a small team company, it’s much easier to make decisions quickly and fully understand the reasons behind them. On one hand, the speed of decisions comes from having fewer stakeholders; on the other, when you don’t yet have customers, the risks associated with these decisions are lower.
More uncertainty
In a early stage startup there is always a lot of uncertainty:
Do customers even want our product?
What is the biggest problem to solve?
What channels to use to reach potential customers?
Am I spending my time on the right tasks?
Financial uncertainty is especially tough. Instead of getting a monthly income, you watch your savings shrink. For example, I had to tell my family that we would skip our annual winter trip to Southeast Asia this year, a trip we’re used to taking with friends. It’s emotionally surprisingly hard, but it’s part of the journey.
Burnout can happen faster
When it’s your own company, you always feel like you should do more. There’s no one telling you to stop working, and the risk of burnout is real.
At one point, I felt completely exhausted and realized I needed to step back a bit. I understood that the main reason for this was that doing things for the first time requires significantly more energy than repeating something you’ve done before. And in a startup, there are quite a lot of things you’re doing for the first time.
I was surprised at how quickly I reached this point. Fortunately, I recognized the situation, and pulling back quickly helped.
Current trends that make starting a company easier
I believe that right now, it’s somewhat easier to build a new company as a small team (or even as a solo founder) than it was some time ago.
Impact of the LLM’s revolution
A significant factor here is the spread of generative language models. By using them, it’s possible to greatly increase efficiency in areas like market research, data analysis, working with texts, and even writing a code.
This impact isn’t limited to the co-founder role, but it’s especially noticeable there. If you want to move forward efficiently and quickly, tools like ChatGPT and other large language models have been incredibly helpful for me in improving my productivity, enabling me to accomplish tasks I otherwise couldn’t or that would take far more time.
The growing share of freelancers
I see a clear trend that there are more and more freelancers and consultants in the market. While previously there were relatively many freelance developers, now in Estonia there are increasingly more freelancers in other roles as well — designers, marketers with various specializations, salespeople, and virtual assistants.
This makes it possible to hire a skilled expert in a specific area to solve a particular problem effectively.
You don’t need to hire a marketing or sales person on a full-time salary right at the start, creating a fixed cost for your company. The wider use of social networks, especially LinkedIn, makes finding such collaborators much easier.
Mentor networks
Estonia has a well-developed startup ecosystem, and founders are generally willing to generously share their experiences. Therefore, networking and communication provide an excellent opportunity to learn from one another — all it takes is a bit of courage. Additionally, there are quite a few accelerators here with excellent mentor networks. For example, Tehnopol, whose accelerator we are participating in, has over 150 mentors from various fields.
Podcasts, articles, and events
Founders and experts are increasingly sharing their experiences across various channels. One example is the Tallinn Product Group substack channel, but in addition to this, there are many excellent local and international platforms where you can learn from others. I would highlight Y Combinator's Startup School as an example.
Key lessons for PMs who want to start their own company
Find a real problem you care about 🌟
You need to feel passionate about the problem you are solving so you won’t give up when it gets tough. If you feel passionate only about the solution, not the underlying problem itself, then you’ll be in quite a big trouble, if you don’t find product-problem-fit.
Choose the right co-founders 🤝
Your co-founders will go through the highs and lows with you. Pick people you trust and enjoy working with. Choose co-founders who complement each other.Prepare for financial changes 💸
Starting a company often means earning less money for a while. Make sure you’re ready for this and talk to your family about it.Use your PM skills 🧠
Skills like understanding customers, setting priorities, and focusing outcomes are key to running a startup.Surround yourself with a support network 🫂
By a support network, I mean both experts and those who provide mental support.You can always go back ↩️
If it doesn’t work out, you can always return to product management. You’ll bring back valuable experience that will make you a stronger PM.
What it feels like
Running a startup feels like driving a car really fast without all the safety equipment. It’s exciting, but it’s also very risky. The support you had in a big company is gone, and you have to rely on yourself and your small team. It is very helpful to have a support network, whether it’s family, friends, or professional connections, who can provide emotional support along the way.
When building a startup, a lot happens in a short period of time, but there’s an internal expectation for things to happen even faster. Therefore, an essential part of building a startup is managing your own expectations. Often, our dissatisfaction stems from unrealistic expectations.
We are still at the beginning of our journey with Phishbite. We already have over 50 paying customers, and according to our plan, we will be able to start paying ourselves our first salaries next year (so far, we have reinvested all earnings into product development). I believe that our second year of operation will be the true test of how good our product-market fit is.
I am excited to continue this incredible journey with my co-founders and the rest of the team.
Final thoughts
If you’re a PM thinking about starting your own company, I say: go for it. You already have a lot of the skills you need. Yes, it will be hard, and yes, it will feel uncomfortable, but you’ll learn and grow in ways you never imagined.
Take the leap. Build something you care about. If it doesn’t work, you can always go back to a paid product management role. But if it does work, you might discover something amazing about yourself.
I share my experience of building Phishbite quite a lot on LinkedIn.
If you're interested in the latest content, feel free to connect or just follow me linkedin.com/in/urmokeskel/.
For me, writing this article was like a meditative reflection on the past year.
I took the time to process and make sense of a few things for myself.
I hope that sharing my journey will also be helpful to the Tallinn Product Group substack channel readers.