I’m Adam. I always wanted to be a founder.

Straight out of uni I joined BuyerDeck, a tiny startup, as the first go-to-market hire. I ended up taking on customer success (and avoiding the true sales grunt), then product management too, because nobody else was steering the engineers. I was the front line of the customer’s voice, and I became enamoured by adoption: finding pains in a business and solving them by building brand new products. I know to some it sounds boring, but to me it was the best kind of exciting feedback loop.

For a decade I’ve been inspired by the bootstrapped founders, the folks at Buffer, Jason Fried and DHH, who shunned traditional VC and built great companies with happy employees and even happier customers. SaaS, unlike the real world of physics and atoms, can get close to that near perfect equilibrium, because nobody has to lose. I still believe this to this day.

After the startup died I moved to InVision, who (seems mad now) were one of the fastest growing companies at the time. Alas, Figma came along and killed that off. Then Hopin, a massive Covid growth story (fastest growing company in the world?), 200 to 1,000 employees in less than a year. Wild ride. I moved into people management, then got chewed up and spat out. I’ve been on the rough end of a few companies not hitting good times. None of it was personal.

All the while I was earning good money, perhaps more than my low-confidence self saw myself earning so quickly, and I got a bit tied to it. I’d moved to London with £3k saved and lived pay cheque to pay cheque, so my risk tolerance was unusually low. I stayed in CS, rising in seniority, secretly (and not so secretly to some people) hoping to make the leap to product, but never jumped. Truthfully, I was intimidated by smarter people I’d met, and an inner critic kept saying “not you, they’re better, leave it to them”. But this is fucking nuts.

Today I’m at Miro, serving one of the best products in the world to some of the biggest companies in the world, but there’s still a massive itch unscratched. I’ve always been a huge tool tester: Product Hunt, anything with a freemium plan. A year ago something changed. ChatGPT, then Replit, Lovable and v0, then Claude Code in the terminal, which was a new way to do computers (I can talk to mine). Then Claude Code desktop, and I was off to the races. Then Codex dropped. Now I’m dual wielding paid plans on the frontier models, with a cracked team of super developers in my pocket at all times.

To be clear, I’m not proclaiming some higher power level of productivity yet. I used to have to convince a developer friend my idea was worth building and recruit a CTO before I could make progress. Now I can build the literal actual thing and realise that… no, it’s not worth investing in. But what a time to be alive.

Obsaased started when I was trying to break into tech. I’d been on the internet so early that I had an AOL address as a kid (RIP footiefan@aol.com) and a Hotmail my brother made me so I could send my school crushes animated dancing pigs on MSN Messenger. I’d missed the Gmail rush, and with a name like Adam Williams no good ones existed. I was paranoid that every recruiter would see Hotmail, know I was a tech fraud and never hire me. So I bought obsaased.io and a WordPress theme, and put up my first ever personal site, very much a graduate CV.

It’s stuck. I am obsessed with SaaS. Hopefully now I’m less of a pretender than I’ve always been, and I can prove my nerdiness versus just saying “trust me bro, I know EVERYTHING that happens in the tech world”.

I’ve always known (and been afraid to admit, maybe because if I say it and don’t do it, it’s failure) that I wanted to create, found, take a risk, launch something, anything. Now it’s genuinely possible to do it alone. I’m not at all scared, because change has been the only constant in all of my companies and all of my roles. I want to be closer to building products, whether I’m directing agents, working with “real” devs, talking to customers or launching something. I’ve been putting this off for too long.

My son is one of my biggest whys. I want him to see that I have my struggles, but I battled them and finally backed myself to create, to produce, to put myself out there, to build, and to try and lead, myself and maybe others again.