Everyone shows the highlight reels "built my business from scratch!" “six figures by 25!”
No one mentions how quiet it gets in between. It’s 2AM, the house is silent, and you’re tweaking a landing page that no one’s going to see for weeks. You start questioning everything. Last week I was deep in that spiral and ended up jumping on a stream just to hear people talk about literally anything else. Random chatter, dumb jokes it pulled me out of my own head for a while.
I love building, but yeah, it’s lonely as hell sometimes. How do you stay sane during the grind?
Nobody talks about how lonely the early grind phase actually is
byu/BrashMortality inEntrepreneur
Posted by BrashMortality
13 Comments
That’s literally all anyone talks about lmao
Then you post your free app and hear crickets lmao
Disagree, this is widely-discussed?
But yeah, it’s hard.
Moreover, the psychological stress.
I remember sleeping in a spare bedroom in my mum’s house aged 35, having sacked off a corporate job, wondering if I was mentally ill or delusional.
Spoiler: last month alone I earned around half of my previous annual salary, while waking up next to the ocean in Portugal. It fucking paid off.
totally feel this, building jenova ai has the same 2AM silence, and what helps us is pairing real-time research sprints with hard stops, then letting jenova auto-summarize and save everything so we can actually shut the laptop guilt-free. we also rotate “lonely tasks” with “live search” tasks across Google, Reddit, YouTube to keep momentum, and ship one tiny artifact per night, a doc or outline, so progress is visible not just felt. hang in there, the quiet hours compound.
I had this exact experience. Back when I started my business in 2020, I started a group – Entrepreneurs Anonymous – and we talked about how much the early part of the process sucks. At the time, it was super helpful to know that I wasn’t the only one feeling lonely and on an island.
With classical music, when I can’t focus anymore or need a time-out, I listen to Paganini.
This is so true. The early stages are always overlooked.
how do you overcome it ?
Everyone does
I like listening to podcasts during this phase just to feel like Im conversing with someone. But yeah, its almost disorienting. For the first time in my life, I dont have to report to anyone my work achievements, activities, challenges.
Meanwhile I’m grouchily doomscrolling on the couch waiting for everyone to go to bed so that I can get to work without feeling like I’ll get interrupted at any moment.
Really? All my friends except one are entrepreneurs and we vent to each other and hype each other up.
I met my entrepreneur friends at networking events and from my former business coach. 🤷🏾♀️
I can definitely see it being lonely if I never participated in those things.
You have to get to know yourself and love being your own company (solitude). Everybody don’t understand your gift and calling (entreprenurship) and that puts you on an island sometime by yourself. But you need more solitude in the beginning as oppose to noise and unsolicited ignorance for a lack of understanding from everybody who don’t see it your way. Once you arrive then you can carefully pick and choose to diversify your company. But in the beginning, keep your inner circle tight as you can even if it’s just you.