Musician Turned Founder: Shipping a Lean SaaS Team
I am a musician turned founder. This is the one rule that runs both crafts: what can be removed and still have the song work, and the tests I use.
The operating rule I carry into every product review is one I first learned writing songs: what can be removed and still have the song work. I am Abhishek Choudhary, a Hindi songwriter and senior software engineer who has spent fifteen years running both crafts in parallel. This post is not a memoir. It is the single rule that links the two, the feedback-loop tests I use, and the team-leadership mechanics that come from treating a backend review like a vocal comping session.
The one rule a musician turned founder actually keeps
The internal phrase I say out loud, in a studio and in a product review, is the same sentence: does this part earn its place, and if I took it out would the thing still work. In a session it comes out when a second guitar layer is technically clean but fighting the vocal, and I am on the couch saying "take it out for a bar, let me hear it without." In a product review it is the same voice, different room. I am on the staging URL, staring at a settings page with seven toggles, asking the same question. If the answer is not immediate, the toggle goes.
The contrarian position, which I argue against weekly, is "more is more, a song or a product is not finished until every idea you had is in it." Defensible as artistic position. Also what kills solo-run products and late-career records. Depth is not redundancy. Depth is a small number of parts, each earning its place.
Two cross-taught moments, anchored to the year
Around 2021 I was arranging a track with a long instrumental bridge I had spent weeks on. Muted it once to hear the vocal and the song was just better without it. Killed the bridge that night. Same week, I was deep in a client dashboard with a third analytics tab I had justified as "useful for power users." Muting the bridge gave me permission to mute the tab. Shipped without it. Nobody ever asked for it back.
The inverse happened too. Around 2017 to 2018 I was rebuilding an ecom backend and the cleanest refactor was to stop branching logic per product type and collapse to one shared path with a couple of flags. That same week I was stuck on a song with a verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus, and bridge: five distinct zones. I stripped it to verse, chorus, verse, chorus, outro and the song finally breathed. The refactor gave me the vocabulary: stop branching, use one shared path. Music went on a break shortly after, and I did not come back to the DAW until the end of 2020, which gave this particular cross-taught move a long shelf life: by the time I was mixing again, the refactor vocabulary had hardened into instinct.
An early meditation app from the pre-boom mobile era taught me the same lesson from the hiring side. I shipped v1 in 2010 for iPhone, v2 in 2014 with the Android port, and it eventually got acquired. I wrote the code and composed the meditation music myself. Peak engineering headcount was three and the smallest team that shipped a real public release was also three, because I never let it grow past that. The one hire I would not have made as an engineer-only founder was a UI and UX designer. An engineer-only founder ships the default system UI and calls it good. A producer-brained founder knows the experience shape of a meditation app is as much the product as the audio or the code, the same way a song's arrangement is as much the record as the lyric.
Two feedback-loop tests I actually use
For songs, my last gate is the distortion test. I bounce the final mix and then abuse it on purpose: drown it in reverb, slow it down, speed it up, listen through each variation. If the hook still hits through every one of those deformations, the song is done. If it only works at the one speed and the one mix I already tuned, the arrangement is too fragile to survive the phones and speakers it will actually live on.
For software, my equivalent is the dogfood-a-week test. I ship the feature, use it for seven days on my own setup, and watch for workarounds. If by day three I am copy-pasting into a terminal instead of using the UI I just built, the feature is decorative, not done.
Both tests share one shape: the artefact has to survive deformation. A song has to hold under reverb, tempo change, and a phone speaker. A feature has to hold under a week of self-use with no polish left to hide behind. The controlled environment flatters the work, the deformation tells the truth.
Killing a record, killing a product, same signal
Shortly after the 2020 return to the DAW I shelved a song after weeks of polish because it only worked at the original tempo, in the original mix, on the original monitors. The moment I slowed it down or drowned it in reverb the hook dissolved. Nothing survived deformation. Not a re-mix, a full kill. The engineering equivalent came a few years later. I had been sinking months into the first version of a paid API product I run, built on a heavier stack than it needed. A real paid-ads budget burned. Zero paid sales. The product only worked in the demo video I had shot for it; once it had to stand up to real-world use, it fell apart for the same reason the song did.
I killed that version and rebuilt from scratch on a lighter runtime over a couple of months at the end of the year. The rewrite started hitting paid subscriptions inside a few weeks of launch. The lesson was not "switch runtimes." It was that endless polish on an unproven record is the same failure mode as endless polish on an unsold feature, and the fix is to stop polishing and start either killing or releasing.
That API runs on a modest homelab rather than a public cloud, because it lives on two laptops a previous client left me as compensation for a salary that never came. I am evaluating a managed VPS as an alternative host, purely for the SLA story with higher-tier customers. Anyone assuming you need an AWS bill to run a real API is paying the AWS tax. The rest of the setup is on my full bio.
Leading a small team like a vocal comping session
Last year I wrapped a contract where I reviewed three engineers' attempts at the same backend feature. Instead of picking one implementation, I ran it like comping a vocal: this function from attempt two, this error-handling block from attempt four, this test from attempt one. Live, in front of everyone, stitching the final version from the best bars of each take. Nobody's ego was the winner, the finished track was. It also taught the engineers that none of their work was wasted, the same way a singer does not waste a take just because only one line made the final comp.
The move works in reverse. During the 2013 album jampad sessions I ran the days exactly like an engineering standup, before I knew what a standup was. Everyone got one question: what single part are you tracking today, what do you need from me to get it clean, what is blocking you. Bass player needed a different DI, got it in ten minutes. One part each, one clean pass, done. The two guys from my college band came in for one drum line and one bass line across the whole record; I took the tapes home and edited for a month after. That was the first session where I understood that independent is not the same word as isolated.
You can own a catalog and still bring in a session bassist (or a sitar player) for the one pass the arrangement demands. You can run a one-person SaaS and still lead a small, deliberate engineering team on the sub-problems where another pair of hands sharpens the work. A track like Aaj Bhi owes its shape to collaborators I trusted for one pass each; every product I have shipped owes its shape to small teams I built and led around a specific problem.
The weekly floor that keeps the craft alive
Five to seven hours a week, per discipline, as a floor. Below that, you stop making real decisions and start maintaining muscle memory. Weeks where music dropped below five hours I came back to the DAW feeling like a tourist. Weeks where engineering dropped below five I would reopen a project and spend the first hour remembering my own conventions. Under five, you are not practising, you are forgetting on a delay.
The number is a constraint, not a brag. Two crafts in a given week, not three or four, and the two have to pay each other back. Around 2021, deep in code full-time and easing back into production after a long break, I caught myself treating a mix like unit tests: solo each track, fix it, confirm it passes, stack them, wonder why the song felt dead. A mix is not a test suite. It is a conversation between parts, and nothing passes on its own. The fix was to stop soloing and start muting, which is the same move I now use in product reviews.
Where this goes next
The rule I am actively testing in 2026, and have not yet proven, is whether the API product can grow on pure subtraction through Q2: no outbound, no sales calls, no paid ads, just removing friction from signup and the starter templates until the product sells itself the way a hook sells a song. If subtraction wins the quarter, the rule generalises and I will write a follow-up in proportion form. If it does not, the rule has a scope limit and I would rather report that plainly.
The cross-domain pattern is scarcer than it looks in public writing. The HuffPost piece "Composing Code: Why Musicians Make the Best Programmers" and the older Medium essay on musicians and programming are the two adjacent reads I see cited, and both are written from a single-career seat looking across, not from inside both at once.
FAQ
Does being a working musician make you a better software engineer?
In my experience it does not make you better at writing code. It makes you better at deciding what to keep. The subtraction rule shows up as fewer features, tighter reviews, and faster kills on unproven work. Music will not teach you new syntax. It will teach you when the third analytics tab does not earn its place.
How does release cadence in music map to shipping cadence in software?
Both crafts reward a steady release rhythm and punish long internal polish cycles. My rule is five to seven hours per discipline as a weekly floor and one public artefact per quarter as a ceiling-check. The mechanism to catch over-polish is a single file in my notes repo listing the four things I am allowed to work on this month.
How do you prevent two crafts from cannibalising each other's time?
Two is the cap. The two also have to pay each other back: songwriting contributes the subtraction rule and comping discipline, software contributes refactor vocabulary and the dogfood-a-week test. When one pulls more than sixty percent of a week for more than two weeks, that is the signal to restore balance.
