Building a startup is tough. Building a monitoring SaaS platform from scratch - while juggling capital, architecture, team, vision, life itself and not burning out? That’s another level of hard.

But somewhere between the 3am deployment fixes, the tough conversations, and the relentless search for product perfection, you learn. Sometimes painfully. Sometimes beautifully.

Here are 10 real, raw, and hard-earned lessons from our first-year building Pulseee - a simple, scalable infrastructure monitoring platform built for MSPs and SMBs. I hope this helps other founders, engineers, and builders walking their own version of this journey.

1. Never Outsource What Makes You Different

We handed our MVP to an agency, thinking it would save us time. What we got back was a lifeless shell. It looked like an empty taco shell. It wasn’t Pulseee. It wasn’t our vision.

When you outsource:

• You lose control of the architecture.

• Quality becomes unpredictable.

• Costs blow out fast.

• Worst of all - they’re not building your dream.

We brought everything back in-house - and that decision changed everything.

We didn’t just refactor. We ripped through every single line of code, line by line, and rebuilt Pulseee from scratch — this time, grounded in the lessons we learned and the hundreds of architecture whitepapers we’d studied late till the am.

We re-engineered it for scale, for simplicity, for resilience - not just to work, but to last.

Because when it’s your core IP -you don’t outsource it.

You own it. You build it. You shape it.

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2. Equity-Free Capital Is a Lifeline
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In our first year, we were accepted into the Microsoft for Startups Founder Hub, which provided us with $150,000 USD in Azure credits.

That wasn’t just cloud spend - it was real capital we could redirect into design, legal, marketing, and hiring. It gave us oxygen at a critical time.

Grants and programs like these are out there. Don’t over look them. They extend your runway without touching your cap table.

3. Bootstrap With Hustle, Not Just Pride
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We didn’t raise capital up front. Instead, I ran consulting work on the side which gave Pulseee a base income while we bootstrapped.

That gave us:

• Stability without dilution

• Freedom to make decisions without investor pressure

• The runway to build a product on our terms

Bootstrapping isn’t sexy and fast. But it’s sustainable. It teaches you discipline. And it forces you to make every dollar count.

Make $1 work like $10 -  that mindset pays off.

4. Don’t Use AI Just Because It’s Cool
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AI is everywhere in monitoring and observability - but hype isn’t value.

We explored AI monitoring early on. It didn’t take long to realise for Pulseee’s foundation, it was a distraction - not a solution.

Monitoring with AI should solve real problems, not just impress pitch decks to seek investment.

If it doesn’t improve experience or reduce noise, it’s just theatre.

Pulseee is built to work - simply, reliably, and fast.

That said, AI will play a role in our future.
It’s on our 2026–2027 roadmap to power smarter alerting and meaningful insight - when it actually helps the people who rely on us.

With AI in monitoring, it’s not about if - it’s about when, and where it truly adds value.

5. Your First Team Can Make or Break You
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I gave too many chances and opportunity to people who weren’t committed. People who over-promised and under-delivered.

One underperformer doesn’t just slow you down - they erode morale, and momentum. And as the founder, you absorb that cost.

If you feel it in your gut: act. Be kind - but act early.

6. Build to Scale From Day One
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From the beginning, we built Pulseee with:

• Decoupled services

• Cloud-native infrastructure

• Horizontally scalable ROI - where our compute cost per tenant drops as we scale

It’s tempting to cut corners. But retrofitting for scale is brutal.

This advice isn’t one-size-fits-all, but if your vision involves high concurrency and uptime, invest in the foundation early.

7. Choose Your Co-founder Like You’re Getting Married
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Your co-founder will see you at your worst and your best. Choose someone who:

• Shares your values

• Brings complementary skills

• Matches your ambition and resilience

• Will stay on the call at 2am when your database crashes

• Will challenge your product decisions

And please - use a proper founder agreement with a cliff and vesting schedule. You’re protecting your company, your friendship and most of all set clear expectations and outcome in responsibilities.

Protect your startup. Protect your relationship. Set expectations early.

8. Lawyers Aren’t Optional. Get One Early.
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   This lesson saved Pulseee.

Early on, we brought in a contributor as a co-founder. We sent them a welcome letter -friendly, clear, and well-intentioned.

But when it became clear they cared more about greed than delivery and failed to meet expectations - we parted ways.

Days later, they came back fraudulently claiming ownership of Pulseee’s equity and payment of a sorry excuse of a product we had to putdown.

But here’s what made the difference:

Our lawyer had crafted every word of that letter - including clauses around future contractual arrangements, vesting terms tied to MVP delivery, and clear boundaries.

That one document - structured, deliberate, and legally sound, shut the claim down before it even started.

• No legal battle.
• No equity loss.
• No damage to the company.

Phrases like “subject to contract,” “vesting post-MVP,” and “one-year cliff” were airtight.
It held up and protected Pulseee when it mattered most.

So if you’re thinking of skipping legal in the early days? Don’t.

Get legal sorted from day one.

Not just to protect your equity - but to safeguard your IP, your funding, your future, and your peace of mind.

⚠️ We’ll be sharing the full story soon on our YouTube channel and trust me, it’s juicy.

9. Find the Right Investors - Not Just Any Cheque
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We spoke to plenty of investors. Some got us. Others were only focused on how much equity they could get.

Here’s what I learned:

• Smart money is about alignment, not just capital
• The right investor believes in you and the problem, not just the return
• Saying “no” to the wrong cheque saves you months of pain
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Don’t force or chase an investment, the right one will come to you and that’s the power of bootstrapping you are in control.

You decide who comes on the journey.

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And that’s the real win - control, clarity, and the freedom to build Pulseee on our own terms.

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10. Product Isn’t Enough - You Still Have to Sell It

We spent a year and 6 months to date building Pulseee -obsessing over architecture, agents, dashboards, observability, scale.

But here’s what hit us hard:
No one cares how good your product is if they don’t know it exists.

That was the wake-up call.

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We have something powerful. But customers weren’t just going to show up.

So we have to learn how to:

• Write positioning that cuts through noise
• Explain value without technical jargon
• Build trust without logos or funding
• Market like our survival depended on it -  because it did
• Get out there !!!

You don’t just build a product. You build awareness. You build trust. You build distribution.

That’s what turns a project into a business.

We’re still learning this lesson. But if we waited until we felt “ready” to talk about Pulseee publicly?

We’d still be waiting.

Final Thoughts

Pulseee is still early. But in just 18 months, we’ve:

• Built a scalable infrastructure monitoring platform for MSPs and SMBs

• Defined our differentiator: on-prem agents, simplified dashboards, and soon - our own IoT monitoring probe

• Launched with the conviction that monitoring doesn’t have to be complex or expensive

If you’re building something similar or just trying to stay afloat here’s my advice:
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Keep going. Make it matter. Build for someone, not every one And above all - persistence beats perfection.

Let’s connect if you want to chat SaaS, monitoring, or the founder journey.

Kris

Founder @ Pulseee – Monitoring made easy.