I am an engineering leader. I work 40 hours a week. I have a family, a mortgage and responsibility.
And somehow, I am building my own product. Why? Not because startups are sexy.
Crusica may look like another side project. To me, it is something more.
It is my lab.
Engineering leadership often looks structured and predictable, but building a product alone exposes a different dimension of leadership.
Founder path vs Leader path
Stepping onto the indie founder path taught me an important lesson. The leader path and the founder path are different. I believe every engineering leader should build something alone at least once.
As a leader in an organisation, you have:
- structure
- budget
- team
- shared ownership
- feedback
When you build your own product alone, you have:
- silence
- no team
- extreme ownership
It sounds obvious. But until you hire the first person, everything is on you.
Every decision.
Every delay.
Every mistake.
Honestly? It is great.
Constraints everywhere
As an indie founder you face constraints everywhere:
- time
- money
- energy
- capacity
Everything works against you and you need to accept it. I could look for investors and speed things up.
But that is not the point. I am building Crusica to learn. That is why I decided to bootstrap it.
Constraints force prioritisation. As a sailor, I would love to add many features that I personally find useful.
But I must postpone most of them because there are more important things to do if I want to reach product market fit.
Building your own product is often about what you choose not to build.
Boundaries
There is another constraint. Life. I cannot let Crusica affect my work or my family. It is hard.
So I created time blocks dedicated only to the app.
Recently, I made a strict rule. I do not work on Crusica outside my home office. This decision came after realising I was coding during movie nights. I was neither coding effectively nor spending quality time with my family.
Clear boundaries make the system work. Just like in a company.
Surprises
As a leader, I thought I understood how business works and how workload spreads across teams.
Crusica taught me something else.
Development is easy. Distribution is much harder.
In the AI era, you can build an app quickly. But how do you distribute it? How do you reach users? Why should they care?
Motivation is not the problem. Time is. We work 8 hours. We sleep 8 to 10 hours. That leaves maybe 6 hours for everything else, including product development.
Organisation is not optional.
The cadence of learning is brutal.
As an indie founder, you are:
- software engineer
- QA
- designer
- marketer
- strategist
- analyst
You need to learn about business models, pricing, go to market strategy and positioning.
It is humbling.
Mistakes and lessons learned
I made many mistakes. Here are a few.
Using AI only for coding
At first, I treated AI as a coding assistant. Then I realised I could use it for much more. I created a repository called “backoffice”. I added documents about the app, positioning and pricing assumptions. Then I started using AI for marketing discussions, TAM analysis and strategy thinking. Now I store LLM outputs as files.
I have a history of decisions and thinking.
That was a game changer.
Ignoring seasonality
Crusica is seasonal. Sailors mostly use it from May to October.
In 2025, I did not think enough about go to market timing.
I did not deliver MVP before the season.
Result? Ten users. Season lost. Hard lesson.
Thinking locally first
I am from Poland, so I assumed I would start with the Polish market and scale later.
That was a mistake.
If you build digital products, you should think globally from day one.
Too big initial scope
Classic founder mistake. I kept adding features because I believed users needed them.
Instead of shipping something small and useful. Instead of validating early.
Scope is seductive. Impact is not correlated with number of features.
Leadership lessons
Building Crusica is changing me as a leader.
I cut scope faster
When it is your own time, you become ruthless about prioritisation.
Now, when someone proposes a big initiative at work, I ask:
- What problem are we really solving?
- What happens if we do not build it?
- What is the smallest valuable version?
Founder thinking sharpens leadership decisions.
I respect energy more than capacity
In companies, we talk about bandwidth. But energy is the real constraint.
When you work full time and build something on the side, you quickly realise that poor energy management kills execution.
I understand ownership differently
Extreme ownership is not a slogan. I read Jocko and I like it. Pure ownership starts when there is no one else to blame.
No QA team.
No marketing team.
No someone else.
Just you. This perspective changes how you look at accountability inside teams.
I think more about distribution
Engineers often focus on building. Founder mode forces you to think about positioning, differentiation, user acquisition and monetisation.
How does this create real value?
How will we measure it?
I value simplicity more than ever
Complexity is expensive. Doesn’t matter if’s code, strategy, marketing. When you bootstrap, you feel every unnecessary complication.
That changed how I design systems and initiatives as a leader.
Final thoughts
Crusica is my lab. Not because I want to escape my job. Not because startups are trendy.
It’s my lab because I believe every engineering leader should experience this at least once.
You should build something where:
- there is no product team to rely on
- no QA to check the quality
- no marketing department
- no external validation
- no shared accountability
You should face:
- silence
- uncertainty
- distribution problems
- pricing decisions
- real constraints
You need to feel what extreme ownership really means. You need to struggle with prioritisation when time is limited. You need to ship something imperfect. You need to realise that building is easy and distribution is hard.
Those lessons cannot be learned from a leadership book. They have to be experienced. That is why I build. Not to escape leadership. But to understand it deeper.
Leadership inside an organisation teaches coordination. Building alone teaches accountability.