Sheer resilience mostly

I’ve been wanting to write about life at Saturn for a while now. Apart from staring at a blank screen and dealing with writer's block, I need to start somewhere. Tbh, the blinking cursor was killing me to the point where it felt like it began to silently start yelling at me ‘WELL??? WRITE SOMETHING YOU IDIOT!’.

Yeah, that's where I am right now.

So, without wasting time on an intro, let me take you down memory lane on how I met your mother, ah!, sorry, wrong show..., and how my life has been at Saturn.

It's been almost a year and three months since I've been in Saturn. I've always loved this famous quote: "To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did." Sounds simple enough, right? Just follow the steps: Do a new thing, get a shiny reward, and profit! It feels like life has a winning algorithm.

But I don't think it works that way, it's more like taking the scenic route through a minefield of trial and error. And each time you fall, you learn to stand back up and dust yourself off. Or better yet, train to take a punch! Resilience… as people would call it.

Most of the startup chaos I've witnessed so far follows this exact pattern. Exploring, iterating, a constant tug of war between this or that, shuffling priorities to see if the product fits the market etc.

Sometimes it got on my nerves, honestly. Picture this: there's sudden urgency to build something, everyone's in sprint mode, pulling late nights, treating it like the next big breakthrough. Then it launches to... maybe two clients? Three if you're lucky. It's deflating, isn't it? All that adrenaline, all that "we need this yesterday" energy, only to watch it land with the impact of a pebble in an ocean. You start questioning whether the urgency was real or just a startup thing, that hustle culture where everything feels like a fire alarm, even when it's not. But here's what it is, sometimes the real product isn't what you ship to those firms, it's what you learn about building under pressure, about your capacity to bounce back when reality doesn't match the hype.

I remember Rohit and I were casually talking one day a while back and he mentioned how a blueprint of a superhero movie is; The hero is presented with a problem, the hero fails and has a shift in the character arc due to that, he stands up (dramatic music cued) and deals with the problem.

I feel like everyone goes through this movie trope, we get our face-plant hard, then somehow find a way to dust ourselves off and come back swinging. With no dramatic soundtrack, unfortunately, just the hard hums of keystrokes and the occasional frustrated sigh.

If you'd told me 15 months ago that I'd be comfortable with this, I would've laughed. I always wanted clear plans, predictable outcomes, and well-defined metrics. I was the type who colour-coded calendars and felt the need for pen and paper always (I still do). At least up until November, my Tuesday entertainment was stashing all my changes to work on something else.

I used to measure my work by how rarely I failed. Now I measure it by how quickly I can bounce back when I do. It's a weird kind of confidence, not the bulletproof kind, but the kind that says "okay, what’s next?.”

But honestly… I was not alone. You can't build it out of thin air. You must be presented with the opportunity, the grit, the bricks, and the right amount of motivation to push through. Where do you find all of these? Exposure.

The team, it is always the team, they're like your personal Wikipedia of "what can go wrong?". One person's epic failure becomes everyone's "well, at least we didn't do THAT again!" moment. We're not just individual contributors anymore; we're this wired, machine that gets stronger every time one of us gets metaphorically punched in the face. Through all the “We need to demo it tomorrow” late nights, the “caffeine-induced” debugging sessions and the classic “works on my local” shenanigans… we always will have that “well, that's one way to mess it up!” grin on our faces.

I enjoy it, all of it, the whole package. We work hard, we party harder!— I know who will be laughing after reading this line. It's always the “everything is on fire” moments that make good stories that you laugh about later. It's not the induced feeling of winning that makes growth, it's the blunt reality of failure. So fail, fail again, but fail better.

Which brings me back to that blinking cursor. A year ago, I would've needed a detailed outline, three drafts, and probably a few motivational videos before writing a single word. Tonight, I just started typing and let the story find its way.

Maybe that's what it has taught me, not just how to build products, but how to be okay with starting before you're ready. Because if you wait for the perfect moment, the perfect plan, the perfect opening line, you'll be staring at that cursor forever.

So here we are. Messy, unpolished, and somehow exactly where we need to be. To be smacked on the face again, to fall again, and to get back up again.

Eyes on the prize fellas, LFG!!