The Other Half of Shipping: What a Marketing Role Taught Me About Building
A Note on Expertise
I'm not writing as an "expert" or claiming to have all the answers. I'm a builder sharing my journey on what worked, what didn't, and what I learned along the way. The tech landscape changes constantly, and with AI tools now available, the traditional notion of "expertise" is evolving. Take what resonates, verify what matters to you, and forge your own path. This is simply my experience, offered in the hope it helps fellow builders.
A lot of founder content falls into one of two camps. The first is "I quit my day job and went all-in, and here is why you should too." The second is "I am still at my day job and I have no time to build, and here is how I cope." Neither one describes what I am actually doing.
I work as a commercial and marketing manager at Privev, a London-based electric chauffeuring company. That is a real job with real hours. I also run Havnwright as a solo founder, plus a few other projects. Both of these are happening at the same time, by choice, and have been for a while now. I want to write about what that actually looks like, because the honest middle path does not get enough attention.
Where I come from
To understand why I run these two tracks at once, it helps to know the shape of how I got here. I started as a software developer. I have always been, and still am, someone who would rather build a solution than buy one.
I have also worked as a marketer for years, across different companies. Social media, Google Ads, keyword research, full-funnel strategy, whatever the brand needed. I am not new to marketing. It is not a detour from my "real" career. It is one of two lanes I have been running in parallel for a long time.
When I graduated, I could have gone straight into a software engineering role at a specific company, working on a specific slice of a specific product. I chose not to, and the reason was simple. I did not know what I wanted to work on. I was worried that if I went deep into one domain at one company, I would eventually get tired of it, and then get tired of the broader experience of coding. I did not want to risk that. Coding was the thing I kept coming back to, no matter what else I was doing. Protecting that relationship mattered more than optimising my career.
Instead, I kept building on my own while holding roles that kept me close to the commercial side of products. Every job taught me something about how businesses actually work. Every evening, I would come home and open my editor.
The "how can I make this" reflex
There is one thing that has been true of me for as long as I can remember. When I run into a problem, my first thought is never "where can I buy a solution to this." It is "how can I build one."
Most of the time this is practical. I wanted to keep track of LinkedIn profiles I was researching for outreach, so I wrote a Chrome extension that did it better than copy-pasting links into a doc. Small thing, but it shaved real time off a real task. I have built dozens of small tools like this over the years, each one solving something specific that was bothering me.
Some of the time, the build instinct runs into reality. You cannot realistically build your own email service to replace Gmail. You cannot build your own search engine. Some problems are worth solving with someone else's product, because the engineering effort to replicate what already exists would eat every hour you have and still fall short.
Part of being a useful founder is knowing the difference. What can I build that is actually worth building. What should I buy and move on. The build reflex without the filter is just expensive hobby work. The build reflex with the filter is what lets a solo founder ship real products.
What the day job actually gives me
This is the part that would be easy to miss if you are in founder-only mode.
Working at Privev is the first time I have worked in a UK company. The rules, the regulations, the rhythm of a British workplace, the legal considerations around marketing and customer data. Different from what I knew from other countries. There is a genuine learning curve, and it is stuff you cannot easily pick up from reading.
The marketing landscape itself is also changing fast. When I started in marketing, most of the conversation was about Google. SEO, keyword targeting, algorithm updates, alignment with whatever Google rolled out next. One platform. One priority. One source of truth.
That is not the world anymore. In 2025 and into 2026, there are many platforms you have to think about, many surfaces where your brand needs to exist, many ways attention flows that did not exist a few years ago. Social platforms, AI-driven search and summarisation, short-form video, community-led discovery. The speed of change is actually accelerating. You do not update your strategy once a quarter. You keep updating, constantly, because the landscape is moving while you build on it.
Working at Privev forces me to stay current on all of this, because I propose strategies, I test ideas, and I learn from the results every week. Some of what I propose gets approved. Some does not.
The other half of shipping
Here is the biggest lesson this arrangement has taught me, and I think it is the thing most technical founders underestimate.
Building the product is half of the journey. Marketing the product is the other half.
You can build the best SaaS product anyone has ever made. If nobody knows it exists, if nobody can find it when they search for the problem you solve, if nobody trusts it when they do find it, it does not matter. The product dies in obscurity and you never understand why. The engineering was immaculate. The launch was silent.
This sounds obvious written down. It is not obvious in practice, because it is easy for a builder to believe that quality wins. Quality is necessary. Quality is not sufficient. The founder who understands how to frame their product, who knows which keywords matter, which channels reach the right people, how to tell the story so the right audience pays attention, will outship the better engineer who does not.
I did not fully internalise this until I was doing both sides of it at the same time. Shipping Havnwright features in the evening. Optimising marketing funnels at the day job. The overlap between those two disciplines is where the real leverage lives, and it is where I think I have the unusual advantage.
What travels between the two
Most founder content frames day jobs as an obstacle. Something you have to put up with until you can quit. That framing is available to me, but it is not the framing that matches my experience.
What actually happens is that the two roles feed each other in ways I did not plan for.
From the day job, I bring marketing intuition to Havnwright. What a landing page needs to do. How to think about a funnel. Which words matter. What kind of content earns attention and what kind is just noise. Where to spend and where not to. This is not abstract. I can look at a page on Havnwright and see, quickly, what is working and what is not, because I have been doing this professionally for years.
From my own projects, I bring a builder's understanding back to the day job. When someone asks "can we do X with our website" or "can we integrate Y," I know what is a thirty-minute job and what is a three-week job. I know what is architecturally sensible and what is a workaround that will bite later. This is not replacing developers. It is being able to ask better questions.
Neither direction of flow was obvious before I was doing both. You do not find out that your day job skills translate to your founder work until you are actually doing both at once.
The honest cost
I want to be fair about the price.
I work eight hours a day from Monday to Friday for Privev. Those are real hours and they get my full attention. When the day ends, I come home and open my project windows, and I build until late. I have written about what that costs in energy and life habits, so I will not repeat it here.
The condensed version is this: limited time is a real constraint. You do not get the same open-ended hours that a full-time founder has. What you get instead is financial stability, exposure to a different domain every day, and forced discipline about what matters. Scarcity of time means you only work on what is actually important, because there is no runway to waste.
For some personalities, that constraint is the thing that makes founder work possible rather than impossible. The "quit your job and go" advice assumes you will use the extra time well. Some people do. Some people stare at their editor and spend three months deciding what to build.
I am not saying my path is better. I am saying it is a valid path, and one that deserves more airtime than it gets.
Why the founder work still pulls harder
Even with all that I have said about the cross-pollination, there is an honest admission to make. The founder work is where my attention naturally pulls.
This is not about Privev being uninteresting. I am lucky to work on a team where what I do has visible impact and what I learn is useful. The pull towards the founder work is about ownership. My own projects are mine, end to end. Every decision is mine. Every mistake is mine. Every win is mine. That kind of ownership changes the way you relate to work, and once you have tasted it, it is hard not to spend your free hours returning to it.
Both sides are real. Both sides are valuable. I am not choosing between them any time soon. But if you asked me which one I wake up thinking about, the honest answer is the one with my name on it.
What I would tell someone trying to do both
A few things I have learned.
Your skills from the day job are not a detour. They are probably the most transferable assets you have. Whatever you do for pay is feeding your founder work in ways you are not noticing until you look.
The scarcity of time is a feature, not just a cost. Limited hours force you to prioritise. You will not waste them on vanity work because you cannot afford to.
Know what to build yourself and what to buy. The "how can I make this" reflex is powerful, but without a filter it becomes a time sink. If replacing an existing service would take you six months, it is not worth it. Buy it, move on.
Do not apologise for the dual-track life. Founder content will tell you that the only real path is the full-time one. It is not true. Some of the best products I have seen were built in evenings, by people who had the financial floor of a day job holding them up while they built.
Accept that one side will pull harder. That is fine. It does not mean the other side is less valuable. It means you have found what you want to build next, which is exactly what this phase of your career is supposed to reveal.
This is part of a series about building products as a solo founder. Earlier posts cover my personal journey, what parallel projects really cost, and how I think about content as a solo founder. More coming.
About the Author
Alireza Elahi is a solo founder building products that solve real problems. Currently working on Havnwright, Publishora, and the Founder Knowledge Graph.