In April 2022 I registered Joro Services Ltd. I was already three months into my SRE role at Eiger. Two years on, here is an honest account of what running both looks like.
The Honest Answer to "How Do You Manage It"
You don't manage it. You prioritise, and you accept that some weeks one track wins and the other idles. The SRE role came with on-call responsibilities and production incidents that cannot be deprioritised. The business has customers who depend on it. When those two demands collide — and they do — the job that pays the bills wins.
That sounds bleak. It isn't. The constraint forces discipline. Every hour you spend on the business has to matter. There is no "noodling on a feature because it seems interesting." You ship, or you close the laptop.
What Being an SRE Gives the Business
Most of the infrastructure mistakes I see in early-stage SaaS products are ones I would never make, because I have spent years cleaning them up in production. Corcada runs on a boring, well-understood stack. Deployments are automated. Alerts are meaningful. The runbooks exist.
That is not a flex. It is just accumulated scar tissue applied to something I care about.
What the Business Gives the SRE Work
Building and shipping products solo has made me a significantly better engineer in my day job. You cannot hide behind process or handoffs when you are the only person on the project. Every architectural decision is yours, and you live with the consequences.
That sharpens your judgement in ways that a single employer cannot.
The Things Nobody Tells You
Legal separation matters. Joro Services Ltd is a separate legal entity. My employment contract has clauses about IP developed during employment. I take those seriously. Corcada solves a problem in the care sector — a domain with no overlap with financial services infrastructure. If the projects had overlapped, I would not have pursued them.
Billing is a discipline. Running a limited company means quarterly VAT returns, corporation tax, Companies House filings, and payroll if you have employees. None of that was in my engineering training. I found an accountant in month three, which I should have done in month one.
Loneliness is real. There is no team for the business, no one to sense-check a decision with. X and engineering communities fill part of that gap. A small network of other technical founders fills the rest.
What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out
Keep the day job longer than feels comfortable. It funds the experiments, removes the desperation that leads to bad commercial decisions, and gives you a consistent forcing function for prioritisation.
Build something boring. Boring domains — care scheduling, family admin, ephemeral notes — have real problems that are not being solved well. They do not attract venture-backed competitors. You can win by being present and reliable.
Write. Not for content marketing. Just to think clearly. Some of the best product decisions I have made started as notes I was writing to work out why something felt wrong.