I'm not going to point to one route over another. Frankly, you read as though you could use some time off. But here are a couple of things to take into consider

I'm not going to point to one route over another. Frankly, you read as though you could use some time off. But here are a couple of things to take into consideration: What I see (here and elsewhere. And I've experienced this myself a few years back) is that people tend to focus on the building part. Doubly so when it comes to software, because building something in this context requires hard earned skill that in the grander scheme of things few people have. Only the building part is not nearly as important as the product-market fit and the marketing parts. And unlike the building part, which involves being independently creative the product-market fit part means spending a lot of time talking to people and iterating based on what they say. Then there's the matter of finding an audience, and marketing is a hard skill in its own right. I have come to the understanding that just as SWEs can figure out a way from input to output, good marketers do the same thing, but in the context of audience acquisition and messaging. So with either of your options, it's worth thinking about how you plan on doing these parts as well. Whichever setting is more conductive to that kind of work also matters.