From Burning Out in a Startup to $250/day as a Solo Founder
I was the second technical employee to join a small early-stage startup where my 12h+ working days were filled with coffee and code.
Weekends too, but then my coffee was replaced with alcohol more often than not. I made 20K in my first year which grew to 200K/year in the next five.
I lived in a small penthouse and drove my new Audi A6 to the office almost every day, including weekends and holidays. I had no life outside of the startup.
One night, after finishing up some code in my living room, I went to bed, but I couldn't sleep. My mind was racing with thoughts, as it had done for years, but this time I stayed up all night. I didn't know that I wouldn't be able to fall asleep for the next several weeks and that it will be a turning point in my life.
Today, I make around $250/day with my microstartup Remote Hunt. I work from my bedroom.
I have no meetings. No employees. No investors. No debt.
I play with my daughters. We have weekly poker nights with our close friends. Most of my life happens outside of work. And I sleep well.
What happened?
Startup life
The startup I was working for was building a new product for a city government. Our platform was to handle millions of dollars per month and the project was under public interest. It was watched by media companies who wrote something about us almost every week.
And our team was way too small for building this. We only had a few developers, and I was one of them. Every day brought more new problems than we were able to solve the previous day.
I was often without sleep for two or three nights in a row to fix something critical. At first, it was fine – I was tired but could function.
But after a while, I started to see some alarming signs.
It was an early morning after being up again for three nights in the office. I was driving my car back home when my body suddenly shut itself off and went to sleep without asking my permission. I was lucky that I woke up only a few seconds later, just before I would have hit the car in front of me.
Or when my eyes started to play tricks on me. "Do you see this fog around us?" I asked my reasonably well-slept co-workers. They didn't.
When I told the CEO one night that I'll go home and sleep some hours and then come back to the office, he suggested sleeping on the office couch instead. And so I did. I slept for a few hours and woke up to a coffee machine when people started coming in.
Dreaming code
With such a small team we didn't have any code reviews and I was the only one testing what I built. Every line of code I wrote after being up for 48h without sleep went straight to production to deal with tens of thousands of dollars per hour.
This had a disturbing side effect for me – I continued to see my code when dreaming and sometimes I recognized a problem. As my code was handling money, I just had to drag my body out of bed to fix it.
And suddenly, I wasn't able to sleep anymore. I went to bed, but my mind wouldn't turn off. Or when it occasionally did, I woke up exactly 30 minutes later. This went on for months. But even though I stayed conscious, I still lay in my bed for hours. I told myself it was a better way to rest my body than to walk around.
I thought that now that I can't sleep anymore, I would die.
The success
Today, this startup is a financial success. It was able to live through the mess. But the core team, including me, has been replaced, and new employees don't even know about the struggles we had to go through in the beginning. This is probably the origin story of many successful startups today.
It's fine to suffer as a team to achieve "success." But for who is the success, anyways? And is the only success we're looking for a financial one?
I think in most cases the financial success is for the founders and investors, not the employees. I didn't have equity in the startup.
Resetting my life
Of course, you could say that every person is free and can choose to leave the startup any day. In reality, it may not be that simple.
I think I didn't want to abandon the team and I felt a responsibility to be in this together. Now I realize that I wasn't responsible for the lack of planning and the ambitions of the founders.
As I saw that even though I couldn't sleep anymore, I continued to live and breathe. I quit my startup job and moved to a small town. I started to go running and took long walks in nature. I did push-ups and lifted some weights. Classic burnout story, right?
The new wave of work
Today, I'm running a website called Remote Hunt that helps people find their next remote team to join. It's different from all other remote job sites as I'm interviewing remote companies and asking them how they work as a team.
I want companies to publicly describe their work life so that when you start working for them, you know what you're in for. And they do it in front of their current team members so they can't just make things up.
I see that my small website is just a part of the bigger trend happening in tech. We're looking for a more balanced life, be it through finding a flexible job, going freelance, or starting side projects.
I'm making around $250/day, which is less than half of what I was making at the startup, but I'm so much happier. It's not about money for me anymore.