Anxiety rules everything around me

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Prior to being a founder, I never really experienced anxiety.

Now it’s the only thing that I know; both a blessing and a curse.

It’s the anxiety of potentially losing a customer that ensures I’m always on and available. It’s the anxiety of potentially falling behind the competition that pushes me to regularly work long hours and sprint at everything we do.

The thought of losing gives me enough anxiety and fuel to run through a wall.

But it cuts both ways. The stress and anxiety from running a high growth startup has at times been almost unbearable.

Every morning I wake up to a handful of messages, each revealing one problem after the next. Not exactly the healthiest way to start the day. Neither is living in a near-constant state of fight or flight.

I don’t ever make plans during the week because the separation anxiety of being away from my computer is unbearable. What if something breaks? What if I’m blocking someone? What is the opportunity cost of my time not being spent building the business?

You’re either reading this and thinking one of two things:

And you’re probably right to think both of those things.

I’m just coming to grips with the realization that the anxiety from the earliest days of this journey is never going to get better. In fact, it’s only gotten worse with scale.

If I could go back and tell my younger self that in less than four years beehiiv would have over 90 employees and generate $30M+ of revenue, my younger self would look like this:

But I don’t think my younger self could comprehend the level of pain that comes with that success. Each stage of the startup journey has brought its own unique challenges and anxieties.

The pre-launch stage is probably the most relatable, because everyone’s been there or knows someone who has. The stage where you have an amazing idea that you’re too afraid to tell anyone in fear that they’ll steal it and all of the enterprise value you had hoped to gain.

Back when I was at Morning Brew, we would receive hundreds of email replies each day from readers who wanted to learn more about our internal software, processes, and growth engine. As the architect behind a lot of that, it was the earliest signal I received about there being a massive opportunity here.

Of course, I had anxiously assumed that someone else would seize it first. But when I left Morning Brew a few years later, the market was still ripe for disruption.

My cofounders and I began building beehiiv as a side project on nights and weekends while balancing our other full-time jobs. We spent every spare moment building this thing with no guarantee that anything would ever come of it.

Each passing day I found myself in a pit of anxiety expecting an existing company to launch something and make our months-long effort entirely moot. That and the daily fear of getting sued out of existence with the non-competes and non-solicits I had clearly violated with my former employer.

That’s anxiety.

Because if any of those things did happen, beehiiv wouldn’t exist and you certainly wouldn’t be reading this newsletter right now.

We ended up raising a $2.6M seed round, and launching in November of 2021… which finally put some of that anxiety to rest. But something new took its place: going all in on this startup with sky-high expectations and no revenue, customers, or product.

The earliest version of beehiiv was pretty embarrassing. Each time we onboarded a new user, I just anxiously awaited their disappointment.

Every morning I’d wake up to a handful of customers threatening to churn if we didn’t launch a new feature that they needed (and that every other competitor already offered). Back in those days, a single user churning represented a non-negligible amount of revenue (because we didn’t have much to start with).

We would kick into ludicrous mode and race to ship those features prior to them churning.

Week in and week out it was just a vicious cycle of complaints, sprinting on tight deadlines, and praying that our users had the patience to wait it out. Failing to execute meant that we’d lose all momentum, burn through our capital, and end this journey years before we had anticipated.

Back then, I would fantasize about a future where we would have a more polished product, with a large talented team, and a strong reputation to stand on.

Well, you could argue that that future is now. We made it through the dog days and are currently generating more than $2M of revenue each month… but the intensity of anxiety has only compounded with time.

The higher you climb, the harder you fall. I would have rather failed in month two than in month forty-two; there’s too much to lose at this point in the game.

Plus, I can see the light. I genuinely believe we can build a generational multi-billion dollar business that will have an outsized impact on media and tech.

So what gives me anxiety today?

Wanting to grow faster, increased competition, falling behind on projects, running out of money, users not loving the product, something critical breaking, employee satisfaction and retention, macroeconomic trends, increasing complexities of the business, and probably a few thousand other things.

The anxiety of the day varies, but it all comes from the same place.

I want to win.

But it’s more than that. Nearly a hundred people took a chance and put their trust in me and the company to provide for themselves and their families. It’s a lot of pressure to operate as an unprofitable startup, racing to scale our revenue more quickly than our costs.

The margin for error is so low; and each minor setback weighs like a ton of bricks. Or so it feels.

Meanwhile, as ridiculous (and unhealthy) as it sounds: my mood is almost entirely dependent on what numbers show up on the screen when I refresh Stripe.

Adding $10K of MRR in a given day is enough dopamine to legitimately override every other problem and emotion I’m capable of feeling. Inversely, a single slow day of growth will leave me questioning our existence as a company.

It turns out I’m not alone:

My younger self would have never thought that the anxieties from the early days would pale in comparison to what I feel today.

Today, anxiety rules everything around me.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/anxiety-rules-everything-around-me

Taking a break from the regularly scheduled AI programming to showcase what big desk energy actually looks like in real life.

I’ve tried dozens of standing desks and this Duo Standing Desk by Branch has been my favorite by a mile (headphone stand on the side + drawer underneath 👀).

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