What I Learned Turning 31 (In a Year I’ll Never Forget)
Today I’m 31.
Four months ago, I became a father for the first time. A thing I never wanted. A thing I now can’t imagine my life without.
One month ago, I launched my first product. A thing I worked nights and weekends for. A thing that reached exactly zero customers and zero revenue.
This year taught me more than the previous eight combined working in tech.
Not because I did everything right. Because I did a lot of things wrong and one thing spectacularly, unexpectedly right.
The Thing I Never Wanted
I never wanted to be a father.
Not in an angsty way. Just in a “that’s not for me” way. I had plans. Building products. Growing a career. Creating financial freedom. A kid didn’t fit into that picture.
Then my son was born.
And everything I thought I knew about what I wanted got flipped upside down.
When I see him smile. When I hold him while his mother eats lunch. When he grabs my finger with hands so tiny I forget how small humans start. When I walk him around the neighborhood until he finally sleeps in my arms. When I remember his first day—that impossibly cute nose, those dark eyes seeing the world for the first time.
These are the memories I want to see in the last seconds before I die.
Not the products I shipped. Not the revenue I generated. Not the metrics I optimized.
Him.
I have zero regrets. Every single second I spend with my son is pure joy I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.
I was wrong about what I wanted.
The Thing I Worked For
Meanwhile, I launched FindForce.
Business email finder. Chrome extension. Built for sales teams. Ninety-five percent accuracy. Flat-rate pricing. All the things I knew would differentiate it from Hunter and Apollo.
Two months of nights and weekends. Clean code. Good architecture. Solid product.
Launched it. Multiple distribution channels. Different offers. Outreach on LinkedIn. Email campaigns. The whole playbook.
Results:
- Customers: 0
- Revenue: $0
- Lessons learned: Everything
The product I poured myself into failed. The person I never planned for became my greatest source of meaning.
That’s the year.
What Both Taught Me
Here’s what stuck from watching one thing fail while another exceeded every expectation:
Distribution is everything. Your beautiful code means nothing if nobody knows it exists. I should have spent those two months building an audience, not building features. FindForce was technically solid. It was also invisible.
Product-market fit is non-negotiable. You can have the perfect product, great storytelling, solid distribution—but if there’s no real demand, you’re just building features no one asked for. I was solving a problem that wasn’t painful enough.
Audience defines everything. The founders who succeed are building in public, sharing their journey, earning trust through transparency. People buy from people they know. I was a stranger selling to strangers.
Customer interviews aren’t optional. Skipping this step sets you up for expensive surprises. The kind that waste months and crush your spirit. I learned more from zero customers than I would have from building in isolation.
Resilience is mandatory. If you can’t handle “no,” if failure breaks you instead of teaching you, this path will destroy you. Especially solo. The mental game matters more than the technical skills.
Find your people. Bootstrapping alone is brutal. If you find someone who shares your wavelength, who can weather the growth and the setbacks with you, you’re already ahead. The emotional support matters as much as the extra hands.
And here’s the lesson from my son:
Plans are just guesses. The best thing in my life was the thing I never planned for. Sometimes what you think you want and what you actually need are completely different. Stay open.
Some Harder Truths
Nobody cares about you. Not really. Not the way you think. Those people posting on social media about how mean everyone is? The universe isn’t conspiring against them. Most people are too busy with their own lives to think about you at all.
This isn’t depressing. It’s liberating.
You don’t need permission. You don’t need approval. You don’t need everyone to understand what you’re building.
Focus on yourself instead. Get one percent better every day. Compare yourself to yesterday’s version. Your only competition is in the mirror.
Don’t trash talk. Don’t try to prove anything with words. Do the work. Let the results speak.
Put yourself out there anyway. Build stuff. Share your work. Share your journey. Be creative. Document your struggles and your outputs. Even the failures. Especially the failures.
People relate to honest, transparent journeys more than polished highlight reels.
Every creator you admire started with lousy, unprofessional content before taking it to the next level. The difference is they started.
Your environment matters. I was born in Iran. Beautiful country. Genuinely kind, hard-working people. Fascinating history. Just not run by beautiful leadership.
I left after mandatory military service because I wanted more. A place where I could express myself freely. Where civil liberties aren’t negotiable. Where lifestyle isn’t dictated by government.
If you need to change your environment to become who you want to be, do it. Don’t wait for permission. Make it happen yourself.
Fundamentals still matter. Everyone’s looking for shortcuts now. That 21-year-old who vibes a SaaS in a weekend and hits $20K MRR in three months. Those get-rich-quick schemes with AI agents. Web3 before that.
I’m concerned that when the old-school software engineers retire, we’ll be left with people who never learned data structures because AI kinda replaced that need.
Speed is valuable. But understanding why something works matters more than just knowing it works.
Life partners are non-negotiable. Having someone authentic, someone you trust, someone you can be vulnerable with—that’s not optional. That’s survival.
Unreliable people will ruin what a good partnership should feel like. Don’t stay in a toxic relationship any more than you’d stay in a toxic job.
Respect people’s time. Here’s a pet peeve: people who message “hi” and wait for a reply before getting to the point. Then “how are you” before stating what they actually want.
If you’re reaching out cold, your first message should introduce who you are and what you want. Concisely. Directly. Respect that the other person has limited attention.
If you’re reaching out to reconnect as a friend, say that upfront: “Hey, it’s been a while. No business, not asking for money, just wanted to catch up.”
The difference matters. One respects time. The other wastes it.
What Changes at 31
I’m still figuring this out.
Still learning how to balance building products with being present for my son. Still processing what it means to fail at something I worked hard on. Still discovering what actually matters versus what I thought should matter.
But here’s what I know now that I didn’t at 30:
Success and failure happen simultaneously. You can be winning at life while losing at business, or vice versa. The trick is knowing which one actually matters when you look back.
The things you plan for and the things that happen rarely align. Flexibility matters more than rigid goals.
Building in public, sharing the journey, being honest about failures—that’s not a marketing tactic. It’s how you find your people. The ones who get it. The ones who are figuring it out too.
And at the end of the day, nobody has this figured out. We’re all just doing our best with incomplete information, hoping we’re learning fast enough.
Still Here
31 doesn’t feel different than 30. Or 29.
But the year that got me here was different than any before it.
I failed at something I worked hard on. I succeeded at something I didn’t plan for. I learned that distribution beats product, that audience beats everything, and that resilience is the only skill that actually matters.
I learned that plans are just guesses and the best things might be the ones you never saw coming.
I’m still building. Still failing. Still learning.
Just with a tiny human depending on me now.
That changes everything.
Happy birthday to me. And to anyone else still figuring it out—we’re in good company.