1 Year Building a Software Company (The Brutal Reality)

So let me tell you about why I knew that this wasn't going to be easy.

So my background, whether you believe it or not, was actually in software.

I did a hybrid of software engineering in school called Business Information Systems, and I started my career in tech consulting.

I was working with large companies and governments on technical projects.

Then I actually moved into software, specifically working with the fastest growing software company of all time in the UK in finance.

I quickly had to cut my teeth in product, engineering, UX, UI, basically everything to do with building amazing mobile apps at that time.

And when I tell you that this is one of the hardest things that I've ever done in my early 20s, I really mean it.

It was actually more difficult than building my company, Voix, because software is that difficult.

I had to go from basically zero understanding to learning all the nuances on how to build great product, test it, launch it, get feedback, otherwise known as people hate you, and then make it better again and again And again, so then I knew going into Aura that it wasn't going to be just about getting something up and running like a fancy tool.

It was about how do you maintain, grow and scale an actual product with hundreds and thousands of users.

So why did I build Aura in the first place? Well, here was my unfair advantage that I had accumulated over the past couple of years.

Our consulting business works with hundreds of clients on their sales process and how to actually drive more revenue.

And the same problem that all of my clients have when it comes to sales was my actual issue.

In 2024 and in 2025, we were trying to scale our sales and revenue and we did all of the typical stuff.

All of the big sales coaches in the industry sell you these trackers, all of these different systems, all of these complex CRMs, all these sales tools that are very fragmented.

I was utilizing these in my own team and I literally thought that there was something wrong with me because we couldn't actually drive more revenue.

We were always stuck in around that 2 million a year mark.

What meant was everything was very inefficient.

The lead process was inefficient and what I realized was it was an underlying system issue.

same issue.

So I've always had the love and desire to get into software, but I wanted to find out what was that bleeding neck problem that restricts me from scaling and a lot of my clients from scaling.

And that was the problem that we wanted to solve.

So I did exactly what you should do inside your business is solve the problem for yourself before you do it for anybody else.

And last but not least, I named the company after my dog, Aura, because one, she's the best dog and two, it's a sick name.

let me get a little bit clear on what or is and most importantly what or isn't so aura is a sales intelligence platform we help people drive more leads increase their show up rate and increase their close rate we are not a crm and the real big distinction is a crm is effectively a dump of data it's where you put information in and let's be very clear no one even looks at that data and numbers and leads after What we are is a sales intelligence platform.