Mriddul Aanand 🌊

It was 3rd December 2024, exactly three months before I turned 25.

On paper, I had three options: dive back into polymers, look for a job, or explore another traditional B2B business—learn it, and eventually build something of my own.

At the time, I was chasing the “holy trinity” from day one: a remote job, pay in $$$, and a D2C side hustle! Why D2C? – FOMO & FANCY. In hindsight, I should’ve backed those ambitions with crystal-clear goals, spread over 6-12 months.

But I still had to figure out two major things: (1) Who would value my experience enough to hire me? (2) What field did I truly want to build a career in—what did I enjoy and what felt meaningful?

Big questions with even bigger implications.

I decided to dive deep through self-reflection, using the set of questions attached below. They worked wonders for me, though they may not have the same effect for everyone.

One conversation with a friend stood out. They said, “If this is your last chance, you can’t just base it on a project with friends, just because you’ve always wanted to work with them.”

Deep down, I knew this, but I needed someone to hold up the mirror for me to finally act on it.

So instead of chasing something I fancied, I grounded myself in reality, and chose what I’d organically grown to like over the years: sales. Future blogs will cover how I landed a role as an SDR for a US-based firm—and the key lessons from that journey.

D2C Excerpts (if LinkedIn brought you here)

Fancy is when you want to be somewhere, achieve something but you are not obsessed. It’s all in your head without the correct alignments, motivations, and most importantly, execution. Obsession is what really drives our brain to change, and act on something. Obsessing over a goal isn’t as bad as we might be led to believe. 

I had already failed to land a part time remote gig during the past 6 months of search, tried working at a retail store in beddings & linen space, and accumulated debt. Fuelled by online gurus, drop-shipping videos, and the FOMO from people launching online brands around me, I was running behind a D2C launch. Working with school friends with whom I had a good history of not being able to work together, professionally. (As Ben Horowitz says: “Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.”) 

The result? lost time, money, a lot of fun, and learnings related to the D2C, Meta ads, and listening to gut. However much we might have achieved individually, I knew the chances of us being able to pull this off were slim. Lack of alignment on values, motivations behind launching the brand, decision fatigue were just some of the reasons. We all wanted different things out of it, and had no obsession, just fancy.