TL;DR: Generic, I know, but it’s the truth. I spent 10 years in TCS, moved into SaaS with my friend Rupam, and learned that building is only one small part of founder life. While helping grow our products, I felt the pain of messy browser research and built TabMate to solve it. Shipping it felt great. Now comes the harder part: marketing, distribution, doubt, and the daily fight to keep going.

Aloha, back to blogging after a while! So much has happened since!

I quit my job at TCS after serving 10 years to take a foray into the Founder world. I learned a lot during my time there (I was lucky enough to be in projects that had a mix of dev, devops, infra, platform, security and AI) and matured as a developer. The only drawbacks were - constraints that would not let me build solutions for common pains we faced unless the client approved and, not being paid as much for the work I did. Well, in hindsight, it’s just how service based companies work, and I am not complaining. I wanted to have the freedom to build what I want and be able to say truthfully that I get paid for doing what I love.

I started my founder journey under an old college friend, Rupam. Since college days, he always had a founder mindset. I remember he had built a social networking website for our college - all with plain old HTML, CSS, PHP and SQLite. He is one of those old-school programmers whose learned the trade through sweat and toil. He, too, was in TCS though, he quit 6 years before me to start his own ventures.

When I joined him, he already had two profitable products in the market and one in the pipeline. I am grateful he agreed to mentor and guide me, given how differently we saw things when it came to managing the software lifecycle! See, I was from a controlled, constrained world where the user base was guaranteed hence, I optimized for longevity with failsafes, fallbacks, redundancy and best practices. He, on the other hand, optimized for velocity, stable MVPs, user-building and feedback driven features - and it makes sense because in the SaaS world, it doesn’t matter how polished or robust your solution is if no one uses it. I joined him with the project, Smart Bank Statement where, I learned the basics of the Founder life - and the hard truth that code is only a small part of it!

With Smart Bank Statement now stable and slowly gaining users, we turned our focus to improving what we have and, if possible, start on a new project. He started addressing feature requests from one of the products while I started looking into the other. During this time, my work involved browsing way more than I used to as I was actively learning the part of the software lifecycle that most devs don’t get to experience - selling it. The workflow was the same most days - google search, open up tabs, open a ChatGPT session, go here, copy this, paste that, fight ChatGPT over forgetting stuff, re-find the same info again - it got annoying, monotnonous and boring pretty soon. I wanted a ChatGPT in my browser which had context across all my tabs and also, remember where we were when I came back the next day. I basically wanted a retrieval agent IN THE BROWSER!

Well, we developers love a challenge. I set out to build it (hence the delay in this post). It initially started out as a side panel that could just see the text you selected, save memories which you choose to save and used a heuristic retrieval system. With time, however, it evolved into an assistant that could remember what you saved across your sessions and bring them up when necessary! Whenever I found something useful, I would just pin it or save it as a memory. Later, when I was prepping and needed reference, I would just ask it and that piece of info saved god knows how many tabs and hours ago just shows up! I named it TabMate out of love (and because I couldn’t think of anything else).

I pitched this idea to Rupam. My goal was to contribute to the pot. If I daresay, to me, our partnership sounds like the faint whispers an institute of products in the making. He has already contributed three products, it’s only fair for me to pitch in and pull my weight. He was skeptical and cross-questioned the idea, just like a rigorous co-founder should. One thing he said really stuck with me - “We, devs, build tools for ourselves then, we think everyone will find it useful. But most often, that is not the case.” I realized that he was right - the tool started out as a dev’s assistant but, dev workflows are pretty niche and varies from dev to dev. I couldn’t pitch a generic dev assistant at the browser level, I had to find the proper group of people whose work involves scouring across websites and living in “tabland”.

He let me take time to think and build it through and, after a lot of brainstorming and researching across the internet (lol), I finally managed to build a stable MVP. Yeah, it took longer than usual as I had to iterate and tune the retrieval loops and user flows. I was finally able to release it publicly on 27th April 2026. Now begins the hard game. The dopamine rush of building and shipping is over.

As I sit here now, putting into action the marketing strat I have for TabMate (trust me, it adapts every day), so many thoughts are playing across my mind. Did I do the right? When will conversion actually start? What else can I do to improve its reach and distribution? How do I tune my strategy? Do I give ads? Do I give it all up and go back to working for someone else? I read a quote on IndieHackers which read - “I built and I failed and I kept building.” Now, that guy sits at over $30K/month revenue. While stories and quotes are motivating, the human mind is a prison when left alone to think about and contemplate all possibilities. Mostly, it tends to converge on the negatives. There are times I think that it’s best to keep TabMate for myself and concentrate on the products we already have. I guess I am still human. Yet, the thought of having real users for a system I built with my own hands is really seducing and I keep doing what is necessary - ethical and fair but, necessary.

It’s the early days and yes, there are a lot of uncertainties. TabMate might live for a while then be integrated into browsers, get shelved and stay as my personal tool or, truly live its potential. I mean, this context switching pain is something everyone must be feeling, I just have to get to the right kind of people. I might pivot and build other ideas - let’s see how it goes. For now, the dopamine rush of building has settled and the dread of marketing has set in. I have to find ways to get a dopamine rush out of this phase too. Maybe take some programmatic help? Hmmm, let’s see.