Month 5

I haven’t had time to catch up with my brain most days - let alone write to an audience. But it’s always nice to take stock.

We’re now ~5 months into self-employment, which has happened somehow without my noticing. How I spend my time pendulums a lot week on week, but I have mostly swum into a very different new normal.

A lot of people I know have been contemplating founding themselves and have been asking me about what the last few months have been like - so I thought I’d write up some of the things I’ve experienced, and pass it on.

On productivity

• I have stopped needing an alarm to wake up.

  • This is half hyperbole, and wholly great (in theory).

  • The reality is that I wake up most days with my brain whirring. Sometimes in a panic, frequently at 5am.

  • I invested in some loop earbuds for deeper sleep because it turns out that now when I am up…. I am up.

• I need to work in somewhat inconsistent spurts.

  • There have been “peak periods” where I need to be performing for days on end to get from 0 to 1.

  • Once the sprint is over, my body forces me into recovery.

  • It’s been a learning curve working with my brain and body’s natural rhythms, but some of this thinking was backed up recently by Cal Newport.

• I used to think I “did it all” and now I realize I was completely wrong.

  • Yes, I used to be a very busy product manager. But it is so different being a solo founder.

  • I now realize how much support I had and completely took for granted.

  • In-house subject matter experts, engineering managers to do scrum planning with, multiple engineers, a manager to tell me what to do, HR to handle on and offboarding, implementation specialists to create playbooks…

There is nothing like working in person. Feat offsite #2.

On personal things

• I have to be more honest, more quickly.

  • I used to have the luxury of not making my expectations or disappointments known if lines got crossed; end of the day, it’s not my problem, I’m just an employee, right? But the level of starting a company skin in the game is different. Being agreeable for too long is no longer something that I can afford to do.

• I don’t have much else to say outside of work.

  • People have had to yoink me out from under my rock to tell me what’s going on in the world. I’m also noticing that when people ask “so what’s going on”, my brain literally shuts down - I swear, I don’t know what to say because I don’t know where to start, and mostly I don’t even want to talk about work.

    • (My team reading this: huh, that’s weird, because you literally never stop bothering us on Slack).

• I am delighted to follow. I really don’t have opinions.

  • My husband has planned our entire belated honeymoon - a far cry from how much I planned our wedding - and I have been SO happy to just follow his lead. Last year I made elaborate multi-course meals when his family came to visit - and now the thought of anything that’s not one-pot is just unbearable.

My hero. Thank you. <3

What am I working on?

• Nervous health.

  • You thought I was going to say mental health, but I literally do mean nervous health.

  • I have a new goal of trying to regulate my nervous system every day - even if only for a few minutes - because it’ll make me a better manager and leader.

  • This work is mostly a mental game. It never ends. You need to try and exit fight / flight as often as you can, or you will wither. (It is hard to understand unless you’re in it.)

• Delegating.

  • I am fortunate to have hired a proactive team who regularly steps forward and tries forcibly to take things off my plate. I’m really grateful for this and can tell they care about me.

    • My designer extended out of figma and artwork into a weekly scrum cadence that has been game-changing.

    • My engineer joins UXR meetings, takes notes, and listens as actively as I do.

• Zoning different days for different activities.

  • Context switching 100% has a toll.

  • Building VS distributing, different headspaces. I’m constantly calibrating on a week by week basis.

So why should you give company building a try?

There is significant pressure involved in creating something from nothing - against all odds. I think it is not for the faint of heart. But it has been an incredible experience I would not give up for the world. Things like:

• Talking directly to users.

  • There is nothing like talking to people in pain and feeling uniquely positioned to solve it.

• Headspace saved on ladder climbing.

  • I didn’t realize until I was catching up with someone the other week how much of my headspace used to go towards navigating the experience of knowing my place on a larger ladder - not creating and showing results. The ladder is critical once a business is stable, but the growth for me has been enormous in early-stage.

• Growing at hyper-speed.

  • The instinct to survive will surprise you. I literally don’t feel like I have time to be embarrassed when I have to ask everyone I know for help. People have reminded me when they talk to me 3 weeks apart how much has evolved that I haven’t noticed - that it’s “almost a totally different company”. That’s kind of cool.

• A+ bonding.

  • This is probably 80% stockholm syndrome speaking, but that doesn’t change how precious it is to get to work together with a really good hearted team on a powerful mission - especially when so much is stitched together based on trust.

  • Everything we do at this point is going to be pretty bad. How can it not be? It’s a first version. We have few resources.

  • There is no room for pontificating - and there’s amazing energy in knowing that everyone’s doing their best.

I’ll never forget these beautiful days.