The other side of building your own business you don't often see on news or social media
I feel like I've thrown away a significant part of my early 20s focusing on the wrong things, particularly building a consulting business and trying to turn some of my ideas into SaaS products.
I graduated around five years ago and started at one of the WITCH companies. Since the work was mostly nonexistent and the job was remote, I started experimenting with online businesses. After about a year, I quit to pursue an MBA and focused most of my time on building my own business.
After a year of struggling, I started making good money selling AI and automation solutions to SMBs. This was before AI automation became mainstream and the competition flooded in.
Around the same time, from my MBA, I got placed into an SAP consulting role as a safety net. It also seemed somewhat aligned with my automation consulting experience. I wanted to go all-in on my business, but I knew AI was getting better at automation, and I didn't want to risk everything on it only to struggle to find a job a year later with a gap on my resume.
I joined the job and initially managed both. For the first six months, I maintained roughly the same business revenue while working full-time.
Then, as I'd suspected, the business started declining. The number of clients kept falling month after month, although it was still manageable initially.
This year, however, has been terrible. Earlier, I could compensate for bad months with good ones. Over the last few months, my revenue has been $0.
I've tried everything to save the business. I partnered with salespeople in the US, UK and Europe, niched down, pivoted multiple times, and tried different positioning strategies. Since last year, I've also tried productizing my services into SaaS. My third product managed to attract some users, but it never became a meaningful business.
I've now shut down the business to focus entirely on my career.
Why I'm struggling with my current situation
The problem isn't just that my business has gone to zero. Iāve always worked hard to recover from losses previously. It's that I've spent most of this year doing marketing and sales rather than the actual work I enjoy and situation seems unrecoverable.Ā
My daily checklist has become another medium post, another cold email campaign, another positioning experiment, another pivot.
Honestly, I'm exhausted.
For the last two or three years, I genuinely enjoyed my work. I liked talking to clients, understanding their problems, designing solutions, integrating systems, and building automations. I was doing work I found intellectually stimulating and making good money doing it.
Now I'm spending 90-95% of my time trying to convince people to buy something, with almost nothing to show for it.
The market has also become incredibly competitive. Clients can build things themselves using AI, competitors can reproduce solutions much faster, and even established SaaS products risk being replaced by features introduced by a platform or a new AI capability.
It feels like the skills, case studies and expertise I spent years accumulating are depreciating much faster than I expected.
I'm not saying that domain expertise and client relationships have become worthless. But the economics of building software, selling automation and accumulating an advantage through implementation experience seem fundamentally different now.
I don't have the energy or desire to keep competing in this market as an independent business owner.
What I want is a stable job where I can do the work I actually enjoy without having to spend most of my time marketing and selling.
I want intellectually challenging work that lets me use the skills I've accumulated rather than starting over.
But the bigger problem is that I've neglected my career while building the business.
When the business was doing well, I did just enough at work to get by. My ratings were good enough, but not great enough to put me on a strong promotion trajectory.
When my business revenue started falling, I redirected my attention towards work. Over the past year, I've received great feedback from all my leads, and my performance has become much more consistent.
But compared to peers around my age, I'm behind in terms of career progression. I'm at Level 2 while some of my peers are already at Levels 3ā4.
I know this isn't necessarily a career-ending problem, and one good switch could change things for while. But I feel cornered into SAP functional consulting, which I don't particularly enjoy anymore.
I keep thinking that if I'd simply stayed at my first job for two years, focused heavily on DSA and software engineering, and pursued opportunities at product-based companies, I might be much further ahead financially and professionally.
I can't change that decision now, but it's difficult not to regret it.
What I actually want to do professionally
This is where things get complicated.
My experience might look scattered on paper, moving from low-code automation and AI consulting for SMBs to SAP consulting for enterprises. But the underlying work I've done has always been fairly consistent.
I've worked with clients to understand ambiguous business problems across marketing, sales, customer operations and revenue processes, and then translate those problems into structured, automated systems.
That has involved:
- Understanding business requirements and running client discussions or workshops.
- Turning vague requirements into workflows, functional designs and technical solutions.
- Connecting CRMs, ERPs, databases, APIs and other business applications.
- Building automations using tools such as n8n, Make and various CRM platforms.
- Incorporating AI into workflows, including building AI-enabled systems using APIs and tools such as Claude.
- Deploying applications and automations, sometimes using cloud infrastructure or self-hosted services.
- Working with users, explaining solutions, training them and helping them adopt the systems.
- In my current SAP role, translating business requirements into functional specifications and working between clients and technical teams to get solutions built.
I'm not a hardcore software engineer. I know the basics of coding, deployment, AI and cloud infrastructure. I can work with Python at a basic-to-intermediate level and SQL at an intermediate level. I've built applications, used AI coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor to develop systems, and written code when necessary to overcome limitations in existing platforms.
My strength is not writing thousands of lines of code from scratch or solving DSA problems under interview conditions.
My strength is understanding the problem, figuring out how the system should work, connecting the different components and getting the solution implemented.
Traditionally, this was the kind of work split between business consultants, solution architects and engineering teams. Consultants would understand requirements and design solutions, while engineers would handle the deeper implementation.
I've built my career around that intersection of business understanding, technical problem-solving and implementation.
But AI is changing the expectations. Companies increasingly want engineers who can talk to customers, understand their problems and build solutions themselves. Traditional consulting and engineering responsibilities are converging.
That creates a problem for me. I have relevant consulting and implementation experience, but I might struggle to get shortlisted for these roles because my recent title is SAP functional consultant and my independent AI experience isn't traditional engineering employment. Even when I get interviews, I may struggle with coding rounds that emphasize DSA or writing code from scratch.
I don't want to pretend those gaps don't exist. But I also don't want to discard everything I've done and restart my career as though my previous experience has no value.
The two paths I'm considering
1. Continue down the SAP consulting path.
I already have around two years of SAP experience, so this is the more straightforward route. I can continue specializing in SAP, build my enterprise consulting experience and eventually aim for senior positions.
The problem is that I'm not particularly interested in becoming deeply specialized in 1-2 SAP module.Ā
I enjoy enterprise business processes, but I don't want my entire career to revolve around one module or a narrow functional area. The work can be bureaucratic, and the opportunities are concentrated among Big Four firms, large IT services companies and specialized SAP consultancies as most PBCās just outsource SAP work to above companies instead of hiring themselves.Ā
I joined SAP initially to know how enterprises automate and it felt survivable initially as it was just temporary and big credential or one more project on resume. Now, I donāt see how I can spend my whole career on this.Ā
Even if I can build a successful career this way, I'm worried I'll end up in a role that doesn't suit the way I like to work.
2. Transition into AI-focused, client-facing technical roles.
This is closer to what I enjoyed about my independent consulting work.
I'm looking at roles such as Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Forward Deployed Solutions (FDS), GTM Engineer, AI Solutions Engineer, Implementation Engineer, Solution Architect and possibly technical product management.
I'm particularly interested in roles that combine customer discovery, business problem-solving, technical architecture, integrations, AI and implementation.
I don't necessarily need to build every component entirely from scratch. I'd be happy to understand the customer's problem, design the solution, build a prototype or the initial implementation, and either take it into production myself or work with an engineering team to complete it, depending on the role and project.
I want to own the solution, not necessarily every line of code.
Ideally, I'd also work across the end-to-end customer and revenue lifecycle rather than being confined to one process. My experience with SAP and order-to-cash would remain useful, but as part of a broader understanding of how CRM, CPQ, order management, billing, payments and other systems work together.
The challenge is that switching into these roles seems harder. I need to overcome the perception that I'm primarily an SAP functional consultant, demonstrate that my independent consulting experience is technically relevant, and meet whatever coding expectations the roles have.
I'm willing to improve my engineering skills. I just don't know how much I need to improve before I can realistically make this transition, or which roles would value my existing experience most.
What I'm trying to figure out
I'm 26 and I don't want to spend another few years pursuing a direction that I already know isn't right for me.
At the same time, I don't want to make another impulsive career decision because I'm frustrated with my current situation.
Should I continue building my SAP career because it's the most straightforward path, even if I don't particularly enjoy the work? Or should I aggressively pursue FDE, FDS, AI solutions and other client-facing technical roles, accepting that the transition might be difficult?
More specifically:
- Which roles are the most realistic fit for my existing experience? I want to avoid applying indiscriminately to every AI-related position and hoping someone sees the connection.
- How should I position my experience? How do I make my independent consulting, AI implementation work, MBA and enterprise SAP experience tell one coherent story rather than look like unrelated career moves?
- How much coding do I realistically need? Should I spend months grinding DSA, or would I be better off strengthening Python, APIs, backend development, integrations, testing and deployment while applying to roles that emphasize end-to-end implementation?
- How do I make the transition without starting from zero? I don't want to throw away the client communication, requirements gathering, workshops, solution design and implementation experience I've accumulated just because the market is changing.
- Am I making a mistake by moving away from SAP specialization? Should I use my existing enterprise experience as a foundation for integration and AI implementation, or would I be sacrificing a relatively secure career for a difficult transition into a more competitive market?
Ultimately, I want a career that combines business problem-solving, client-facing consulting, technical implementation and AI. I want to work on different problems across the customer and revenue lifecycle, rather than spend my career confined to one tool, module or workflow.
I also want the stability of employment, so I can focus on doing good technical work rather than constantly trying to sell it.
How would you approach this transition if you were in my position?
