Four years in the maelstrom
A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?
And at one point, I noticed that Grotowski was at the center of one group huddled around a bunch of candles that they'd gathered together. And like a little child fascinated by fire, I saw that he had his hand right in the flame and was holding it there! And as I approached his group, I wondered if I could do it. I put my left hand in the flame, and I found I could it there for as long as I like and there was no burn and no pain. But when I tried to put my right hand in the flame, I couldn't hold it there for a second. So, Grotowski said, 'If it burns, try to change some little thing in yourself.' And I tried to do that - didn't work.
This time two years ago, I wrote two-years sitting in an airport lobby, waiting to head to MicroConf. I was unable to make it to MicroConf this year, but the absence reminded me about that post — which, to this day, is one of my favorites that I've ever read or written. I wanted to think about what has changed over those past two years.
...which is what I said last week. In truth, I've tried and failed a few times to sit down and write this essay. My most successful writing comes from when I have a breadcrumb into a maze that I can follow to its logical conclusion; introspection of this particular vintage does not lend itself neatly to single tracks.
So instead, like that preceding essay, I will eschew any sort of flow and just try to touch on the salient points in listicle form.
Two years ago, I struggled with the idea of referring to myself as a founder. Now, I find myself struggling with the inverse — it is surreal, a word I am using with increasing frequency, that Buttondown has a larger profile than I do, and rather than its identity being subsumed into mine, I feel the opposite happening. It is gratifying and somewhat disorienting to have the majority of your users not know that you exist; it is gratifying and disorienting to have a majority of your users on a first-name basis with someone at the company who is not you.
It is hard to pretend otherwise, as many other people do, how thoroughly fatherhood has permeated my role as a founder (and, thankfully, not vice versa). Jason Cohen writes a good essay about only being able to do two big things well, and this has been my exact experience. I am deeply proud of the fact that I can say, without reservation, that I spend even more time with Lucy and Haley than I would in a more conventional job. I can also say, earnestly, that the business has probably not grown as fast as it could if that weren't the case — and I'm happy to have a life where I have the agency to make that choice. Both running a company and being a father are infinite vessels. There is no point in the day in which you can truthfully say to yourself, "Job's done, there's nothing left to do." One of the things that has been hardest for me — and you can see it in the months in which I publish rarely — is to let all of my oxygen be swallowed up by those two things alone, which are wondrous things but in of themselves insufficient for sustaining the life I wish to live.
Over time, all apertures expand. Two years ago, I had a lot of justifiable anxiety around disconnecting. Every missed email or push notification could be a meaningful dent in company health. Today, that is not true: other people read the emails, other people get paged. But the ambient demands of a growing company mean that I still spend a lot of time reacting to inputs and engaging in rituals, and instead of struggling with turning off my phone I struggle with turning off my brain. Buttondown's default velocity is upward; when I return from a weeklong trip to France, I delight in seeing that revenue has grown and dismay in seeing that a hundred little things are blocked on my input.
I underestimated how gratifying impact could be, in both positive and negative ways. Twelve months ago, I had to consciously train myself to unlearn some of my bad habits from when Buttondown was smaller and single-digit minutes of downtime were a non-issue. Now, if we're down for ten minutes, we get a hundred or so emails and social mentions. The twin of this, though, is the positive: we push changes and see thousands of usages in the first week. Strangers email me thanking me for features that someone else on the team wrote, because it saves them hours a month. People have left their jobs and changed careers due to Buttondown. People cite Buttondown in essays and think pieces about software design and bootstrapped businesses — even ones published on our competitors.
All of the above is true, but it does not really communicate what my days feel like; the above is retrospective, not sensate. The reality is a maelstrom.
I wake up at 6 a.m., prep breakfast for the family, wake up Lucy and get her dressed, take Telly for a walk, bring Haley her coffee, and bike to the office around 9. Then, suddenly, regardless of my plans for the day, I am awash. KYC. A new acquisition channel has emerged that increases our net user growth by 30% but doubles our KYC burden. Someone has tried to send an email with a payload of 21MB. A firm is interested in using us, but only if we become SOC 2 compliant. A longtime user wants to hop on a call to catch up. The support team has seven escalations, three of which appear urgent. There are five new pull requests to review, two of which feel scary to merge. There are seventy new emails through which I should probably sift. There is a single bug I can knock out during lunch while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And then there are some one-on-ones and demos. Then I am biking back home and having dinner with Haley and Lucy and taking Telly for a walk, but letting Lucy hold the leash this time. And now Haley is putting Lucy to sleep and I am cleaning up the house a bit — a welcome task, because it is mechanical and physical and does not require anything beyond two legs and a smooth brain. And now it is 8 p.m. and I am very tired, but I know my body and soul are happiest when I am working out: so I chug a Celsius and bravely wade into Linear and Plain for thirty minutes while the caffeine begins to course through my veins. And then, after the workout and the protein shake, my head hits the pillow and I think to myself that I honestly could not tell you what I did today.
You repeat that around three hundred or so times, and then suddenly the business has doubled in size.
This is what life is like these days: exhausting and gratifying, both on scales that have retrospectively trivialized any prior sense of exhaustion or gratitude. I cannot physically conceive of spending my time any other way, having lucked my way into this infinite maze; and when I end my day, head on the pillow, with some level of dissatisfaction regarding the ten things I wish to have done but failed to do, I am buoyed by two things:
- Almost everything I did was the right call, or at least made with the right intentions;
- The first three faces I will see tomorrow are Telly's, and then Lucy's, and then Haley's, and I am doing right by them.