When I was working as a full-time lawyer, one of my colleagues told me to join HN and consider posting my side project there. I literally posted my Show HN [1] from my desk at the law firm, before going to lunch one day. My post made it to the front page, I took a screenshot, and then went off to lunch — figuring that was as good as it would get.

While I was gone, my post entered the top 3 and then hit the top spot. It stayed there for most of the rest of the day, and into the wee hours of the morning.

I happened to have been invited to a VC mixer that afternoon, and I remember everyone was super impressed that some random lawyer had posted a Show HN that was literally-at-that-moment the top post on HN. Some guy from Samsung introduced me to his boss' boss and said they should license it (the first of many leads I failed to convert on!) I left my legal job a while later to work on BeeLine full-time, and it's been 7 years since then.

We didn't go the traditional VC route, partly because we didn't have huge capital needs. Instead, I've mostly bootstrapped the thing, and we now have customers like Blackboard and Stanford (and a couple partnerships with HN/YCers, too! [2] [3]). There have been times where I considered going back to my legal career, but I would have kept BeeLine running in the background if so. I'm super appreciative to the community here, since it was what prompted me to make the transition to this very rewarding path!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

2: https://insightbrowser.com/

3: https://www.programaudioseries.com/