I work a deli counter during the day and build SocialMate at night. Here's what that life actually looks like — and what it's taught me about building something real.
I wake up, go slice turkey and rotisserie chicken, answer questions about how the potato salad is made, and stay on my feet for six to eight hours. Then I come home, eat, and open my laptop.
By 10PM I'm deep in a Supabase migration or an Inngest cron function or a Stripe webhook handler. By 2AM I'm pushing a PR. By 2:30AM I'm asleep.
That's the routine.
I don't have a CS degree. I don't have investors. I don't have a co-founder or a team. I have a Wyoming LLC, a Vercel deployment, a GitHub repo, and a vision.
The deli teaches you that most people are operating on autopilot. They're showing up, doing the thing, collecting the paycheck, and going home. Not because they're lazy — because nobody showed them a door.
When you work a job like that and you're building something on the side, you start to see the gap between what exists and what should exist.
That gap is where SocialMate came from.
Perfectionism is a form of fear. When I was waiting for the product to be "ready," nothing was shipping. The moment I pushed to production and put a real URL in front of real people, everything changed.
SocialMate launched March 26, 2026 and it wasn't perfect. It's still not perfect. But it's real. People are using it. Feedback is coming in. Bugs are getting fixed.
That's how you build software. You don't design it in isolation for two years. You ship, you listen, you fix, you ship again.
One night feels like nothing. But 180 nights in a row? That's a product. That's real infrastructure. That's a platform that schedules posts to six platforms, runs AI tools, manages Stripe subscriptions, and fires Inngest cron jobs while I'm at work slicing deli meat.
Software compounds. Every function you write, every table you create — it stacks. One day you look up and you've built something that would have cost a million dollars at an agency.
Power to the people. Tear down the gatekeeping walls. Build the door.
What competitors charge $99/month for, we give for $5 — or free.
If you're building something from nothing, in the margins of your life, at 2AM after a full day of real work — keep going. The people who show up every day, without applause, without funding, without a team — they're the ones who actually change things.
The deli is just the day job. The mission is the real work.
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