I Almost Let My Failed Startup Destroy Me

Why has this been allowed to be posted twice?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=I+Almost+Let+My+Failed+Startup+Des...

Both by ruidelgado

I went through a 2.5 year marathon when bootstrapping my business. I don't regret it. But if you do something like that, you must take care of sleep, eating, exercise and stress as your first priorities. And I always made time for family.

What did I cut out? Dating, making friends, a lot of leisure activities. I did some, of course, but work was the highest priority on my mind.

The payoff was that I got a significant amount of work done, and had more ideas as well, because business was the subject my idle thoughts turned to.

I'll note that I had clear revenue metrics. So while I was living for the future, I also got results and money in the present as well.

All that said, it's not without it's costs. I am happier now to be working at a lower pace. On the other hand, my business would have failed without the marathon pace in the first few years.

If you make this choice, make it a deliberate one, and take care of the bases. And have outcomes you won't accept. I had clearly defined conditions for when it would have made sense to quit, take the results I had into maintenance mode, and get a job.

This makes me think of optimization problems around creating a life of productivity. Sometimes what seems to be an improvement just leads to suboptimal local optimizations. If you want to optimize, you really need to plan and look for all options as opposed to just taking a step in what looks like the right direction.

For instance, going for fast food over learning to cook some basic meals. If you are trying to optimize for price, buying pre-made meals is so much more expensive than learning to cook some basic meals and buying the ingredients. I probably eat on about 5-10 dollars a day because I buy in bulk and I make everything. I could definitely reduce that price too.

And on working out, there are studies that working out actually gets you better focus and productivity gains for hours after you're done. So, the phrase shouldn't be "I'm too busy to work out", it should be "I'm too busy to not work out".

And luckily both of those solutions also help with your long-term health and well-being.

Over the years in the startup world, I've realized there are just a few very fundamental things that I (personally) need to do to keep going. Especially in such an exciting / stressful / uncertain ecosystem, year after year. I suspect others have this too:

- Eat well - Sleep well - Sports (both individual and team)

If I do these things more often than not, odds are that I'll be productive, have good ideas, be able to execute on them and be generally happy. It takes discipline, but I could never go back to not doing these.

Thanks to the author for a really vibrant piece, I'm sure he'll be back on his feet.

It kills me to read this. I've bootstrapped two startups and I do remember days when I ate crap and worked into the wee hours.

My advice to anybody in a situation like this is to make sure to be around family (or really close friends) because they'll call bullshit on you when you start going off the deep end. I also made sure to be on a rec. sports teams. This made me get out of my office (read room), have a good time and keep in shape.

Bootstrapping is hard work, but you cannot let it destroy you.