[mrkurt]

I have not built a successful company like yours, but I can't imagine the decision to hire employee #1, or health care options, or drama related to a bad hire, or any of the other things that can cause ulcers have been stress free for you guys.

I have unsuccessfully attempted to build an company like yours ... and it was stressful.

[ahoyhere]

Yup, getting started with healthcare was stressful (so we used an agent) and hiring our first employees wasn't stressful but firing them both was. So was getting our (personal) mortgage — that tied my guts in knots for weeks.

But then, like the mortgage, the healthcare and hiring/firing was over and life went back to normal. We didn't have to keep up "a good front" so people wouldn't jump ship, or worry about whether we could make salary, or any of those things. Nobody was breathing down our neck to do any of this, either -- we did them because we chose to. And we were able to make decisions on our own, without having to consult or sell anybody, to change the way we did these things so it wouldn't be stressful next time. For example, shutting down a product which would require us to hire too many people to run effectively, rather than take that on.

That's the power of ownership -- the bad shit passes, and you have the power to avoid it altogether in the future.

Now if you're not making any money, that is another kind of stress, but because we served a hungry market with a product that delivers value (and did a good job of marketing it), we didn't have that problem.