I'd do it all again

A personal reflection on how a single piece of critical feedback about Japanese language skills triggered a cascade of decisions that transformed a hobby into a product, then into marketing content, ultimately contributing to founder burnout. The narrative traces the journey from learning Japanese through WaniKani, to building KameSame (a language learning app with 20,000+ users), to mining that experience for conference talks and marketing material, illustrating how creative passions can become entangled with business imperatives and lose their original purpose.