Dealing with Stress as a First-time Founder

A first-time founder's take on support systems to help deal with chaos while trying to put out fires for 70 hours a week

Hi there,

Welcome to another edition of Minty Analyst, a newsletter where I sometimes share my struggles and experiences as a SaaS founder and a brand-new dad.

DISCLAIMER: This issue is slightly different than the ones I've sent before, so proceed with caution and at your discretion.

Today, I want to share the support systems I've put in place to deal with the chaos of being the CEO and co-founder of Magnimetrics. It is my first time running an early-stage startup, and if you spend 15 minutes on our social, it shows! 😅

Getting funded

For my technical co-founder Ivo and me, Magnimetrics started as a passion project a few years back. We'd play around with it on nights and weekends, joke about going all in and making the big bucks. Looking back at our naive thinking, I can't help but smile. We were so green, knew so little...

Fast-forward a few years, and we decided to go all in last year. We both quit our jobs, incorporated in the US, and managed to raise a pre-seed round with some angel investors.

And let me tell you, you should bootstrap your business as far as possible! It's not about keeping more equity (although that's good) but taking someone's money, as it completely changes the game.

You are no longer doing a passion project. You have investors who trust you with their hard-earned money, which imposes a huge responsibility on you.

That's where the stress starts to creep in. From a fun project you do out of love, it turns into a real business that needs a lot of admin work. And who, you might ask, picks up all these new admin tasks that didn't exist before? Well, it's you.

If you thought your project was chaotic, wait until it becomes a business. For a large part of the time, it completely sucks! But I guess that's the cost of running your own company. These times are hard but more than worth it for the few precious moments when it doesn't suck. In fact, it's fantastic, the best professional life experience ever. You must embrace the sucky parts and learn to love them as they get you to the great parts.

Getting paid

Initially, after we went all in, I was still doing consulting work on the side. I would spend around 25% of my time working as a freelancer. Given my work hours, I still put in more than 40 hours in Magnimetrics weekly.

Still, I felt terrible about it, especially after we took money from investors. I wanted to stretch the pre-seed round as much as possible, so I kept doing Excel consults to keep the lights on. I didn't pay myself anything from the company for quite some time. But the stress of sporadically serving separate clients, the chaos my financial situation was consumed in, and the feeling that I was putting Magnimetrics in second place (even though I really wasn't) got to me, and at some point, I started paying myself a small salary, so I can focus every waking moment on the business.

I am glad that I did it, as it reduced stress dramatically and spared me a lot of mental energy that I can now put into the business, but I should've done it sooner.

If you are starting/growing an early-stage startup, especially if it's your first, you probably know what I mean. Even though we all read and watch videos about VCs and how it all works, it's still hard sometimes to fully understand that these people were fine losing the money when they invested in you, that they took a chance for the potential of a very high return.

What is the best way to serve their interest? Focus on running your startup and pay yourself a regular (or slightly lower) salary. As soon as you eliminate the financial stress from your personal life, your business life will significantly improve.

Launching too late

Being late to launch brought a lot of stress and made our journey more chaotic than it should have been. I remember reading the phrase 'Every launch is too late' a while back and not fully understanding it. There must be some things you simply cannon half-ass, right?

Well, I guess the startup world sentiment is a bit different. However, as we didn't know what we were doing and had no founder friends when we started, we had to figure things out. And we made a lot of mistakes along the way.

I think the biggest one was launching too late.

The idea started from an Excel spreadsheet with financial ratios analysis that I had prepared and reused with many clients. We wanted to turn it into a SaaS, where you input your financial statements and get the analysis immediately.

We should've built it in a few months, launched it, and started iterating and improving until we found product-market fit. Instead, we spent 2 years developing it before we launched our beta. Yes, it was only on nights and weekends, but still, it was way too long, and in hindsight, we should've done it much sooner. But new feature ideas always seemed too important to leave out! So, we did the sensible thing and built them in.

And then we launched. Got a few hundred free sign-ups and raised our pre-seed round.

We kept getting sign-ups but soon realized no one was actually using our product. It was too complex to use because we had all those great features that were almost done and worked almost all the time. On top of that, our onboarding experience was, let's say, quite unique.

Being a startup gives you one fantastic advantage that other companies don't have. Everyone expects your product to suck, act buggy, and lack essential features. And it will suck in the beginning. And that's okay. Embrace it and ship fast, then talk with users and figure things out.

Doing it all wrong... again

You would think we talked to users and started improving our platform. And we did, but before that, we spent 2 months stumbling around and doing something dumb... again.

You see, I am not the one writing the code for Magnimetrics, but I've been doing light development all my life, primarily for internal tools. So, ever since my first corporate Excel-centric job in 2011, I started writing and using macros. Whenever I came up with a clever one, I'd package it in my Dobri Tools Excel add-in. At its peak, about 20 of my EY colleagues used it daily.

Over the years, I have improved it and developed it further. So I had a brilliant idea. I will let Magnimetrics use the code base, rebrand and repackage it as an installable COM add-in, and sell it on a subscription basis.

Okay, it really does fit the company, and an Excel add-in was in our future plans anyway, but it was dumb to spend time on it at this early stage of our company.

I was worried about the subscription model (and rightfully so) as I know only one subscription-based Excel add-in, Macabacus. And their capabilities are light years ahead of ours.

We have a few paying customers, but it wasn't the raging success every founder dreams about. Don't get me wrong, having a working product that someone is paying to use is amazing, but it just wasn't the right time.

This fueled the chaos and brought more anxiety about wasting time and not doing what's best for Magnimetrics and our angel investors. At some point, it was so bad I almost crashed. Almost.

But something remarkable happened, shifting my perspective and making me less anxious about Magnimetrics.

Having a baby

So, what's the best thing to do when you barely deal with stress in your chaotic startup dream life?

Have a baby!

Yep, my beautiful son was born this July, right as we were starting our pivot towards a much more simplified use case for our product and a much faster onboarding experience (bringing it from around 30 minutes down to about 90 seconds... sounds pretty good, right?).

Now, I know this sounds as if I'm complaining. Don't get me wrong, having a baby is a dream come true. It's the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I feel blessed that the little bundle of joy joined our family!

But having a newborn is still hard.

So. Damn. Hard.

However, he really brought a whole new level of focus into my life. My priorities are much more straightforward than they used to be, and my goals are much better defined. In a sense, dealing with all the stress around a newborn every day allowed me to have more time, be more organized, and be way more productive when it comes to getting things done for Magnimetrics.

Having a baby didn't make me more productive or innovative, nor did it turn my day into 48 hours. What it did is help me cut out the noise and be better at prioritizing the important things in my life.

You don't have to have a baby to deal with startup anxiety. Actually, for most people, having a baby is a source of stress and chaos, not calm and focus. But find someone in your life who can center you. Someone who makes it all worth it.

Over the past 2 years, this has been my wife. Her support means the world and is a tremendous help to me. The baby amplified this a hundredfold. (Still, I'm not saying you should have a baby!)

Not having the right group

This is another one that makes everything more challenging. As I mentioned, we had no founder friends when we started. It sometimes felt like it was 'us against the world.' We were still fortunate enough to have each other, but I had no one outside the business who could fully grasp what I was going through.

For example, when I told people I quit my very well-paid job and didn't even reconsider for a huge bonus, only to start doing something as foreign as founding a startup and making no money, many of my friends called me an idiot.

And I know where they came from, I get it. I understand it sounds stupid unless you are doing it yourself.

Other friends would be excited and say I'll make millions (I hope so) from Magnimetrics. But they don't get it as well. It's not about the money. Statistically speaking, we won't exist a year from now. So, it definitely doesn't come to making more money. I would've stayed in my last job if that was my goal.

It's about acting on your passion, making life better for your customers, and potentially changing the world somehow.

But remaining focused is hard when you feel misunderstood or even ridiculed by your immediate network. You need to find people doing similar things, talk to other founders, and, most importantly, to people who have done it.

This is how you bring order to the chaos and tame the constant stress. And these feelings won't go away, but they'll be much more manageable. This is all you need. Having people in your circle who understand what you are going through helps you reflect and refocus your beliefs around why you are doing what you are doing. It reminds you why you started and why you love it. And this makes all the difference.

What helped me the most?

Running a business, getting married, moving to a new place, renovating, and having a baby… it all took a toll.

This year, I gained weight, and I had a double disc herniation in my lower back (not good). Overall, I had a few pretty rough months, both physically and emotionally.

I've already mentioned all the routines and increased physical activity I started introducing into my life when I realized what I was doing with my life was utterly unsustainable.

However, I don't think I've shared the one thing that has helped me the most when it comes to putting my mind at ease. It's writing these newsletters.

For around 2 years, when we started Magnimetrics as a passion project, I used to write and publish a financial analysis tutorial on our website every week. But it quickly became a hassle, a part of the job, and my pool of ideas started to dry out. I've been focusing on developing content for the platform lately, so the Magnimetrics blog posts have become rare.

I also started writing some posts on medium.com under the name of my YouTube channel, Minty Analyst. However, those also quickly became a chore. I love writing and have always wanted to have a long-running blog or a newsletter, but whenever I tried in the past, it was always around a specific topic, and it became a struggle pretty fast.

This time, I decided to have no rules regarding topic, format, etc. I only have one rule when it comes to this newsletter. I send one every week. This is my 14th email, and I've been diligent with the weekly thing for the past 12 weeks. And even with the weekly rule, it doesn't feel like a chore. It feels great!

Because it's not supposed to entice potential customers, it's not supposed to promote a product or service, it's not focused on a specific niche. It's just me sharing my thoughts on whatever interests me. The other thing is that I don't share or promote my newsletter. I repost on medium.com to see how it will perform compared to my previous, more targeted pieces. Not promoting means I only have 20-something subscribers right now. And I love this, as there are no expectations, and I can use this space to freely express myself.

I am sure I will find my preferred topic and focus at some point, but I don't have to rush it, and that makes all the difference in the world.

And this has absolutely saved me over the past 3 months. With the baby, all the work around Magnimetrics, and money being tight, the stress was starting to really get to me. Writing these has helped tremendously.

Why have I been rambling for so long? Well, I wanted to share some experiences and suggest you try a newsletter. Don't advertise it. You can even make it private, add only a few friends to feel accountable, and use it instead of a journal. Who knows where it may lead you!

I guess that was all I wanted to share today. This was a long and weird one, so if anyone made it this far, thanks for reading the entire email! Thank you for the support and, as usual, extra brownie points for those of you who share it with a friend.

So, think about starting your own newsletter, whether private or public. I fully believe it has the potential to help you tremendously.

If there's anything you want to share or ask, reply to this email or comment (if you are reading through the Substack app).

Till next week,
Dobri