The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.
It's really tricky at that stage between hiring help and having the time/motivation to maintain those very non-tech parts while trying to continue doing other core parts of the side project / startup.
The first sale feels great, as does first showing the prototype.
By comparison, extra $100 MRR milestones don't feel so great, nor does dealing with customers/disputes eventually (it's a lot of negativity in general - pleased customers just leave reviews occasionally, negative ones email you). And a down negative month or two always feels like a stabbing and like it's all over.
Really don't know how to avoid this. Scaling quickly? Via investment in most cases? Maybe.
> The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.
These three challenges + context-switching between marketing and product are really tough at the early stage.
I've found that growing a business from 0-1 is very formulaic - not easy but the roadmap is clear. Scaling one is much harder, especially without outside capital. There's a huge gulf between earning enough to replace your salary vs. hiring good people to take over lower-level tasks early on. And marketing usually ends up being too critical to outsource at first.
At least with digital products, customer disputes can always be settled with refunds, even when the claim is dubious. Eat the loss and move on. Physical product disputes really sting when you're out the cost of inventory + labor.
I wonder if there's often a mismatch between what one thinks a business is going to be like, and what a business is actually like.
One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part, and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes to run a business.
We know the answer to this even before modern tech businesses existed: running a business is a very different experience from what people expect. This is exacerbated with certain experiences that create worldviews which are closer to the opposite of running a business.
This is why startup people straight out of school are often unencumbered with ideas that impact their mission. If you go into a large organization, you are exposed to a reality that can distort your perspective. It's a myth that people can't move between large and small organizations, but the differentiator is their awareness of and desire to embrace the current circumstances. Many end up preferring the luxury and ease of large organizations and fail because they don't make the switch. Many startup people don't make the move in the other direction (even if they are exceedingly successful and it might be practical move.)
Similarly, a desire to only focus on engineering is something you feel will inhibit your ability to run a business. Over time you might be able to discover ways to reduce your hate for the other work. People here love to prescribe advice for situations like this, but it's really hard to give good advice without knowing a lot more about you.
My solution largely came out of recognizing this reality. So I just don't do side gigs. I channel that energy into little tech projects that do not seek to be a salable product. So I make my living 40 hours per week, and then do the rest on my terms.
It was practically dogma ten years ago that the CEO that built the business was not the CEO that took you public. In the late '00s and a big chunk of the '10s they swapped board members in order to go big.
But if you kill the culture before the IPO, then you have nothing and nothing.
I don't think that 'everyone an entrepreneur' would increase economic output and productivity, and the fact is that some people just want a paycheck because they don't really care about making more money than the paycheck gives them, and the work is fine.
Indeed. I love that my career is a minor sideshow of my life. I love the stability of working about 40 hours a week and then doing what I really want to be doing with life.
It’s a bonus that those 40 hours don’t feel like work.
I imagine that the creative class was revered and feared. Potters had very low status making a commodity product that everyone needed. Hard to say what was going on.
True. If you want to spend all day programming, be a contract programmer. Don't start a software business - you'll spend a lot of your timing doing admin, documentation, websites, newsletters, accounts, support etc.
And if you get a partner, they will insist that the part that is engineering is even smaller than it objectively should be and end up leaving you with a minority position in the product you invented.
Usually if something isn't working it becomes a bottleneck so a lot gets built up behind it. Once the 'dam breaks' so to speak you're playing catch up plus you probably don't want to think about the problem anymore. This is also a reason things don't get documented.
Also its easy to verify that it doesn't work but hard to verify that it does. So often it might take time to verify that and when you're confident about it you've lost the chat session or closed the browser, restarted the computer, went home already etc.
Me too but I only ever do this unintentionally, and it usually corresponds with a delay in the reply from support coming back to me. (Ie I’m now focused on other things or have solved the problem a different way).
Whenever I’m conscious enough of it I do try to thank people - trying to remember how hard it must be on the other end!
A ticket system I've worked with in the past had an "autoclose" state where you could set the ticket to automatically close after a set date if no reply comes in until then.
If a reply comes with the info that it worked, I get a smile and close the ticket. If not, I never see the ticket again, no hard feelings.
The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.
It's really tricky at that stage between hiring help and having the time/motivation to maintain those very non-tech parts while trying to continue doing other core parts of the side project / startup.
The first sale feels great, as does first showing the prototype.
By comparison, extra $100 MRR milestones don't feel so great, nor does dealing with customers/disputes eventually (it's a lot of negativity in general - pleased customers just leave reviews occasionally, negative ones email you). And a down negative month or two always feels like a stabbing and like it's all over.
Really don't know how to avoid this. Scaling quickly? Via investment in most cases? Maybe.