Building A Trading SaaS While Working Full Time

When people discover Oblivion, one of the first questions they ask is usually:

"How long did it take to build?"

The honest answer is that I don't really know anymore. Not because I haven't kept track, but because the project slowly became part of my daily life.

Oblivion wasn't built during a startup accelerator. It wasn't funded by investors. It wasn't developed by a team.

For most of its existence, it was simply a project I worked on after work, during weekends, and whenever I could find time.

The Reality Of Building After Work

There is a romantic image of entrepreneurship that often appears online: people quitting their jobs, raising money, moving fast and building companies full-time. My experience has been very different.

Most days looked more like this:

• Work during the day
• Personal responsibilities in the evening
• Development late at night

Progress rarely came from huge breakthroughs. It came from small, consistent steps repeated over a very long period of time: one bug fixed, one feature improved, one assumption tested. Then the process started again.

Motivation Changes Over Time

At the beginning, motivation comes naturally. Everything is exciting. Every new feature feels important, and every milestone feels significant.

But after months, and then years, something changes. The project stops being exciting all the time. Instead, it becomes a commitment.

There are periods where progress is fast, periods where nothing seems to move, and moments where you question whether the effort is worth it. The difficult part isn't starting. The difficult part is continuing.

Building Before Anyone Is Watching

One of the strangest aspects of long-term projects is that most of the work happens before anyone notices.

For years, Oblivion had no audience, no users, no blog, no social media presence and no public roadmap. Just code, experiments and continuous iteration.

In some ways, that was liberating. There was no pressure to impress anyone. The only goal was to make the system better than it was the day before.

More Engineering Than Trading

People often assume that building a trading platform is mostly about markets. In reality, a large part of the challenge has nothing to do with trading.

It involves infrastructure, reliability, monitoring, error handling, data consistency, security and automation. The longer I worked on Oblivion, the more I realized that successful automation depends less on finding perfect strategies and more on building systems that continue operating when things go wrong.

Because eventually, something always goes wrong.

Why I Kept Going

A question I occasionally ask myself is:

Why not stop?

Why spend years building something this complex?

The answer is simple. Every year, I became more convinced that the original problem was worth solving: building a reliable, transparent and controllable trading automation system capable of operating over the long term. Not only for myself, but potentially for other people as well.

The goal was never to build software for the sake of building software. The goal was to create a system that could operate consistently, transparently and responsibly over the long term.

Looking Back

If I could go back to the beginning, I would probably underestimate the amount of work required. But I would still start.

Because the most valuable thing gained from building Oblivion isn't a feature, a dashboard or even a platform. It's the collection of lessons learned while building a real system over several years.

And that process is still far from over.