The Hard Part of Building With Friends

Starting something with classmates in engineering feels easy. You already share trust, long hours, and the belief that you can figure it out together. That trust makes the first step simple.

The hard part shows up later. When the company begins to grow, friendship alone is not enough. Growth brings clients, salaries and choices that not everyone agrees with. Some friendships stretch with it. Others break.

In 2019, Viraj Rajani started Digipple with his engineering classmates Sid and Rushi. “When we started it was like we will do everything which is one Google search away that we can learn, design, SEO, content, anything in digital space,” Viraj says. They were nineteen. “It was very hard to get clients to believe us because we were young. But eventually we proved outcomes. We ranked keywords, we increased visibility, we designed better.”

Five years later, Digipple is a 25-person team. The work has changed. “Earlier my problem-solving skill was just to search and implement. Now it is about managing client expectations, managing people expectations and aligning short term and long term goals.” The friendship that started in an engineering classroom had to become leadership inside a company.

The hard part of building with friends is not the first idea or the first client. It is what happens when growth demands more. Can the friendship grow at the same pace as the company? Can trust survive when roles change? Can you still sit on the same side of the table when the decisions get harder?