There is a lot of startup advice out there, mostly from founders who already made it and forgot what the early days were actually like. So here is a version from someone still in the trenches, 1 year after launching Sliplane.io and getting our first paying customer. This is by no means a "do this and you will be successful" guide, because I am nowhere near successful. Still, I wish someone had told me these things before I started (and I would have ignored them anyway lol).
1. Everything should be a job. Seriously. Everything.
No, not the employee-employer kind of job. I mean the kind of things you need to run in your backend in the background.
In the beginning, I just spun up Go routines like it was no big deal. Need to send an email? Goroutine. Billing retry? Goroutine. Provision a server? You guessed it, goroutine.
And it worked... until it didn’t.
Stuff failed silently. Logs disappeared. Things crashed. I didn’t have proper retries or visibility into what was going on. Eventually, I built a proper job queue backed by a database. Suddenly, everything became observable, retryable, and way less flaky.
Do yourself a favor: treat every background task like a job. Invest early in something like Sidekiq, BullMQ, Faktory, or a custom solution with retries, logging, and persistence. Your future self will thank you.
Does this make me sound like a Junior Developer? Probably. I just thought I was smarter than that and a proper background job system was a waste of time. Don't be like me.
2. It gets really lonely.
I do have a co-founder (he is great), but we work remotely. And when you are working sixteen hours a day, mostly alone, for weeks or months on end, it still gets lonely.
My girlfriend and friends don’t do startups. They care, but they do not really get it. So I had to find new people who did.
Eventually I connected with a few like-minded founders through online communities, coworking spaces, and local meetups. They were not in the same industry, but they were dealing with the same stuff. The long quiet stretches. The early customers. The chaos. The slow growth. The self-doubt.
You dont need 500 Linkedin connections. You need one good founder friend who is going through the same stuff.
3. Growth is painfully slow until it suddenly works.
It took us twelve months to get a single paying customer. Another twelve to get one hundred. And then things started to click. We still have no idea what we are doing, but its suddenly moving much faster than it ever did.
Everyone says “build it and they will come.” But the truth is this. You will probably build it, wait six months, feel discouraged, try some SEO, rewrite the landing page over and over, and then they might come.
Be patient. The slow grind is part of the game. It feels like you are losing right up until the moment you are not.
4. Being small is a superpower (for now).
Big companies cannot move fast. They cannot talk to every user. They cannot ship five times a day. You can.
Early on, I did anything to make users stay. I jumped on calls, had 30 email long chats, and literally went in their codebases to fix bugs that prevented them from deploying. These are things that do not scale, but they build trust. I still do that, just not as much. A support team of 1 (the founder) can outperform a real support team of 10.
Your speed and personal attention are your biggest advantages. Use them as much as possible while you still can.
5. If it is not fun now, it will not be fun later.
Startups are supposed to be hard. But they should also be fun. If you dread checking support emails, hate talking to customers, or feel sick when you open your tools, that is not just burnout. It means something deeper is wrong.
(if it wouldnt be fun, there would be no way that my Github contributions would look like that)
You are probably not going to build your startup in one year. More likely, this will be your full-time work for the next five to ten years.
So it needs to be something you enjoy. If it is not, figure out why. Change something. Or pivot to a new idea you actually want to wake up to.
Conclusion
Well, that's it. I hope this might help you in the future. See you next year, assuming we're still alive then:)
Cheers,
Jonas, Co-Founder of sliplane.io
Top comments (23)
Golang is always marketed as easy to learn until you start building products with it and realise you have to unlearn to learn. That's why I use elixir for everything backend and golang for CPU intensive stuff.
Hey Jonas thanks for this. I'm actually an intermediate Node.js backend dev.
And I'm just getting the hang of OOP, I use TypeScript tho still at the fundamental level.
So I know how hard it is for junior dev like me to enter into the tech industry. So instead of trying to start job hunting, I caught an idea of building a hyperlocal social networking app with E-commerce features, since I'm in a student environment.
But I know I have alot to learn. I don't know if you can be a mentor and a guide for me.
Please 😌
Nice! Social Networks are hard to build, wish you all the luck and persistance :)
But should it be that hard since I'm just building for my locality here???
I'm just asking.
Bro it doesn't matter if it's localised, it's still hard else there could be many social network apps.
Hmmmmmn n... It's okay
I will still forge ahead with my plan, I will use AI where necessary.
The locality of it only affects advertising and marketing. Local or global, the project will be the same, only difference is WHO signs up. It's just as hard to build a global social network as it is to build a super local one. The login, encryption, security, framework, etc is all the same, only the hosting server specs and marketing target audience differs. Your development skill doesn't matter for social platforms, the marketing and sign up plan does
Isn't that something you do to yourself? I understand there are people that live for their work. But if you are not one of those people you should pace yourself.
I understand the passion you can feel for a project, but the most important thing is to care for yourself along the way.
Oh yeah of course. I should have worded it differently, the loneliness doesn’t come from the hours worked but rather from the fact that nobody in my close proximity understands what I’m doing I think
This is such a solid breakdown of the startup experience! The point about background tasks is so true, I definitely learned the hard way too that simple solutions like goroutines can only take you so far. Investing in a job queue early on is a game-changer!
And I couldn’t agree more with the loneliness part. It's easy to feel isolated, especially when working remotely and grinding day after day. Finding a few like-minded founders is invaluable.
Growth definitely is a slow burn. Those first few months feel like you’re just pushing a rock up a hill, but once things start gaining momentum, it feels amazing. Also, love the reminder that being small is a superpower. It’s the personal touches and flexibility that really set startups apart.
Lastly, if it’s not fun, you’re right, there’s no point in continuing down a path that doesn’t spark joy.
was that chatgpt?
haha not really, asked it to rephrase my words ;)
"Not really but yes" 🤣
Wow, much respect. This is the very reason I dread building products.
I come up withh great ideas, try to build them, or nowadays analyse them with chatgpt, and when I see how much of a grind it is. I archive my code and continue job hunting
Great article! I especially liked "Being small is a superpower' idea. It gives us hope that it is possible to create something and not be killed by the big guys. Thanks!
This is so insightful I amust say. Thank you for sharing this.
This is incredibly relatable! The honesty about the lonely grind and the unexpectedly slow growth is refreshing and helpful.
Dude!!!
You got a new follower!
Happy to read, good article
thank you!:)
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