Four years into my role at Infosys, I had a stable job, decent pay, and the kind of professional comfort that makes most people settle in and stop asking questions. I did the opposite. I started a software studio.
This isn't a story about hating my job. Infosys has been good to me — I've led real projects, worked with large-scale codebases, and learned how enterprise software actually gets built. But somewhere around year three, I started noticing a gap.
The Gap I Kept Seeing
Every week, I'd talk to someone — a friend running a small business, a family member with a startup idea, a local entrepreneur — who needed software but had no idea how to get it built. The quotes they were getting from agencies were astronomical. The freelancers they found on Upwork disappeared halfway through projects. And the "no-code" tools they tried couldn't handle anything remotely specific to their use case.
Meanwhile, I was sitting on five years of experience building exactly the kind of software they needed.
The gap wasn't technical. It was about trust and access. These people needed someone who would actually understand their problem, build the right thing, and not disappear.
Why a Studio, Not Just Freelancing
I could have simply started freelancing. Take on a few clients on weekends, earn some side income, keep things simple.
But I wanted something different. I wanted to build a reputation, not just a revenue stream. I wanted to create a brand that stood for a certain quality of work — thoughtful, pragmatic software that actually gets shipped and used.
MadakLabs is that brand. It's the vehicle for doing client work, building products, and eventually — hopefully — becoming something bigger than just me.
What the First Six Months Looked Like
Honestly? Messy. Here's what I didn't expect:
Saying yes to everything. The first instinct when you're new is to take any work that comes your way. I built a basic CRUD app for a local business, a landing page for a friend's startup, a simple inventory tracker for a small shop. None of it was glamorous. All of it taught me something.
The operations overhead. Writing proposals, following up on payments, managing client expectations — this is stuff they don't teach you when you're purely an engineer. I got slower at it before I got faster at it.
The energy math. Working 9-to-6 at Infosys, then spending evenings and weekends on MadakLabs is genuinely demanding. I had to be ruthless about sleep, cut out most TV, and say no to social plans more than I'd like. My partner has been more patient than I deserve.
The first real win. Six weeks in, a startup founder found me through LinkedIn and asked me to build their customer portal. I did it in six weeks, they loved it, and they referred me to two other founders. That was the moment it clicked that this could actually work.
What I've Learned
Building MadakLabs while employed has forced me to be incredibly efficient. I can't afford to over-engineer. I can't afford scope creep. I have to ship.
That constraint has made me a better engineer. I ask harder questions before writing a single line of code: What's the actual problem? What's the simplest thing that could work? What can we defer to version two?
I've also learned that most clients don't want the perfect solution. They want a working solution, delivered on time, by someone who communicates clearly. If you can do those three things consistently, you will have more work than you know what to do with.
Where It's Going
MadakLabs is still small. It's still mostly me, with occasional collaborators for design and QA. But the direction is clear: I want to build a boutique studio known for shipping clean, practical software for founders and SMBs who can't afford to waste money on bloated agencies.
If you're reading this and you need something built — reach out. I'm probably open to hearing about it.
And if you're an engineer thinking about starting something on the side: the gap is real, the demand is there, and the only way to find out if you can do it is to start.