The exact moment I became a founder

1:33 PM on 9th October 2020.

I remember the exact moment my life changed.

9th October 2020. Friday. Peak COVID.

With Singapore largely locked down, I was working from home.

I was sitting on the backrest of the sofa, enjoying a post-lunch chai break with my flatmate, talking about nothing and everything at the same time.

1:33 PM.

Ting.

"Payment of $3000.00 from WV for Adaface".

This wasn’t our first customer, or even the tenth, and we had closed a few low five-figure deals by then, so they weren't close to being the biggest. They probably weren't even our first customer from Australia, I'm not sure.

But this one hit different.

My co-founder and I had started Adaface, a skills assessment platform, in 2018. The first version of our skills assessment chatbot was the two of us taking turns at 12 hour shifts to be a 24/7 available chatbot that interviewed candidates on behalf of our customers. Our first paying customers were our founder friends who felt bad for us.

We had come a long way since the early days. Adaface was now self-serve, bootstrapped, and profitable.

Yet, as we reached the two-year mark, the novelty was just about wearing off. COVID added another layer of stress — my co-founder had relocated to India to be closer to family, the isolation made each day blur into the next.

But this sale — tiny by most standards — was validation for everything we had worked on. Validation that we were adding value.

This customer hadn't required any selling. No cold outreach, no sales calls, no negotiations. We didn’t even run any ads. They had found us on the internet and decided, on their own, that they wanted what we had built.

There was something magical about a small company in Australia finding an even smaller company in Singapore online, exploring the free trial, and building conviction to purchase entirely on their own.

It felt like something finally clicked into place.

We built it and they came!

We have since served over 1200 businesses in more than 80 countries. We’ve gone through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows over the last 6 years, but this one moment is etched in my brain. I might not have realized it back then, but it flipped a switch.

I truly understood what leverage meant: how code could add value to the world and generate money even when I wasn't at my desk. Build once, sell to a hundred or a thousand people. Or a hundred thousand people. There is no cost of replication and no additional effort. That changes everything.