He Spent 13 Months Building His Exit. Then Five More Learning What Sells.
Matthew Stublefield spent more than 20 years in tech before launching Fieldway, a product management consulting practice, in 2025. He helps software teams work through product strategy, market expansion, and customer journey questions. Getting there took longer than the launch date suggests.
The exit he built in the margins
Matthew formed an LLC in 2022 to consult independently — then took a corporate job instead, because his family needed health insurance. He sat through eight separate rounds of layoffs in that role. Rather than wait to be cut, he treated it as a countdown: 13 months of nights and weekends building an e-learning course and stacking savings while the job still paid for it.
The leap wasn’t a moment. It was over a year of work nobody saw.
Visibility is not validation
Fieldway launched in June 2025 with a coordinated LinkedIn announcement. Strong impressions. No course sales. No coaching clients.
Five months of testing followed — workplace grief, team communication, conflict resolution — as Matthew looked for where his experience actually mattered to buyers. The turn came from a conversation at his church. Stop marketing training topics, someone told him, and start naming the problem you solve: delivery struggles inside software teams.
That reframe built the business. It also settled a question he’d been circling — narrow technical niche or generalist. He chose generalist. His value is the strategic judgment that comes from connecting pieces other people keep separate.
What independence costs
Matthew is direct about the trade. He now invests in his own equipment, tools, and health, and moving to a plan through the Missouri Chamber Benefit lifted a real weight. But contracting is isolating in a way a corporate job is not — he went through a personal grief event with no coworkers around him and still needed to stay billable.
He manages it by protecting his runway, splitting time between client delivery and business development, and refusing to scale before the business is ready. His advice to new founders: watch your budget, separate your identity from your job title, and be willing to walk toward something else if entrepreneurship turns out not to fit.
Matthew also flagged what he calls the “cheap yes” — AI handing founders confident answers that skip the judgment those answers require. That’s where Part 2 picks up.
You don’t have to find your direction alone.
Matthew spent five months learning what the market would pay for. Traction Studio AI pairs real customer discovery with AI-powered synthesis so you get that signal in days, and Show-Me Network regional partners give you the community Matthew described missing. Access is sponsored by Show-Me Network, in partnership with Codefi.
Learn fast. Build right. Gain traction.