Holy crap building a business is hard
I’m laying on my couch right now. This is the sixth day in a row that I’ve spent 90% of the day on this couch, because I likely have a herniated disc in my back. I can’t stand up straight because when I do, pain shoots down my right and my right foot tingles like when it’s waking up after being slept on all night.
I’d say this is tough, and it is, but I feel like I’ve become mostly immune to pain over the last few years. I’ve always had a high pain tolerance too, so that’s saying something. My old physical therapist (I think I’ve seen 5 in the last 7 years) told me that he would frequently have linebackers in tears doing the work on them that he did on me. I’d barely wince.
I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
I’ve been working for myself for almost exactly two and a half year (as of three weeks from now). This is the longest I have ever stayed at a job, with my previous longest stint being 27 months at Distilled in New York City.
Usually I just keep trucking forward and dealing with the entrepreneurial blows. I shake them off, push forward, and eventually come up with something that seems to work for a while. That is, until it doesn’t and everything has to be rethought again because the market has changed, our ideal customer has changed, and my company has changed.
Building a company is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Harder than getting through undergrad (that wasn’t that hard, actually), harder than figuring out what I want to be when I grow up (does anyone ever know?), harder than finding a partner (my wife and I met on OKcupid), harder than that night I slept in a phone booth in Switzerland in February when I was 21 (that was a cold night!).
It’s easy to glamorize entrepreneurship. Survivorship bias shows us those who have survived and thrived — from the Zuckerbergs and Musks to the Pat Flynns and Casey Neistats. And these people have legitimately done incredibly well, and I am very happy for them.
My business doesn’t do so bad itself. In the three months after I left my last job we made about $60,000. In 2016, our first full calendar year, we did $170,000 in revenue. And in 2017, we did $430,000 in revenue.
This year I’ve hired a Customer Success person, an admin/ops assistant, and am hoping to increase my engagement with my developer. We’re doing about $35k/mo across the different revenue streams right now.
Everything is great right? The bank account balance is growing, we have money to reinvest into people and strategies, the team is doing great work, we get to travel and work from anywhere.
From the outside everything is great.
What you don’t see is the mental torment I go through when lead volume has dipped and I’m not sure why.
What you don’t see is when a big customer stops working with us because they’re full up and not able to take on new work for a while, so continuing to pay us doesn’t make sense.
What you don’t see is the late nights writing content that hopefully thousands of you will see and enjoy and share with your friends.
What you don’t see is trying to keep a growing company running smoothly while I am flat on my back for days at a time because I am in an unbelievable amount of pain. And I still have to somehow be nice to people emailing and calling me.
What you don’t see is at the same time as the above is happening, we’re trying to buy a house and heading on a long trip in a few weeks where we might not be able to do something we love (backpacking) in an amazing place (New Zealand) because of my back.
So I guess all this is to say, I hope you have people in your life that you can be real with about life’s struggles. Because even when things look glamorous, they can be really frickin hard.
Hug those close to you. I read Matt Cutts’s news about his wife today today and my heart broke for him. May we all find that level of connection with someone in our lives.
Tomorrow’s a new day.
Edit: here are some other resources that may help you when you’re feeling like I am. They’ve helped me:
