It Was Not Grit, It Was an Unsustainable Model
Warehouse by day. Software house by night. I told myself it was grit. It was a system paying the company with my sleep.
Warehouse by day. Spotex by night. Then three hours of sleep, if I was lucky.
I told myself it was grit. That this is what real founders do. That it would pay off eventually.
No. It was an unsustainable model covering missing roles, missing processes and missing margin with my nights. And I, good idiot that I am, kept handing them over.
The day never ended
Spotex didn't support me. So double shift: warehouse and software house.
Emergencies were the norm. If delivering means stealing sleep hours, you're not doing business: you're financing the company with your body. And nobody thanks you, because "you're the one who knows how to do it."
I did not only develop software
Inside Spotex I had two jobs: the visible one (writing code, shipping) and the invisible one (deciding, remembering, covering, fixing).
Outside, the warehouse.
The hours were gone before I even started. It couldn't last. No model holds when the only elastic variable is you.
Initiative was also the problem
Being the starting point exhausted me. If I didn't start it, things often didn't start. Period.
I wasn't missing willpower. I was missing an operating structure. Partners, yes. But no system that moved things even when I wasn't pushing.
The CMS could not be built that way
A product needs three things: protected time, real users, a route to sell it.
I had: emergencies, nights, and nobody to take load off me. Building the CMS in those conditions wasn't hard. It was impossible. And I knew it while I was doing it.
The myth of the founder who does not sleep
Continuous sprint isn't motivation. It's lack of margin: financial, time, human.
If I stop working nights and the company stops shipping, the problem isn't that I sleep. The problem is the company. That lived on my sleep.
Funny when you say it like that. But that's exactly what was happening.
What I learned
I set limits. Not pretty, not motivational, not LinkedIn-friendly:
- no unlimited support
- no partners without output
- no development on sleep
- no decisions in chat
- no product without protected time
Hard work must build an asset, not compensate a fragile system. If it doesn't build anything, it's not hard work. It's just self-harm dressed up as entrepreneurship.
It was not grit
It was debt. Debt of hours. Debt of attention. Debt of sleep. Debt of health.
A system requiring extreme sacrifice every week has to be changed or closed. There's no third option. And I found out too late.