Dear me,
I’m writing this from a quiet day in early May 2026. We’re entering a critical phase with Billabex - the kind of phase where you look up from the work, take a breath, and ask yourself if you’ve understood what you’ve actually done. I took a day to walk back through the journey. I want to send a few things down the wire to you, the night before you press start.
Not advice exactly. Things I wish someone had told you, even though you wouldn’t have believed them.
Let me begin with a scene from less than a year after you launch.
You and the team are sitting in the office. The first customers love what you’ve built. You feel unstoppable. So you decide - and this is where I want to reach back through time and grab you by the shoulders - to leave the working application running in production while building a brand new one from scratch.
You’re experienced. You’ve read Joel Spolsky’s “Things You Should Never Do, Part I.” You know this is almost always a bad idea. The data is overwhelming. You do it anyway.
You plan three months. It will take nine.
The cost will not be in the code. Code is, somehow, the easy part. The cost will be in everything else: the strategy that drifts because every meeting becomes about the rebuild, the acquisition that stalls because you have nothing new to show prospects, the team confidence that fractures because the new app keeps slipping past every milestone, and your own mental health, which I will not describe here because you will find out soon enough and the description would not help you anyway.
I am telling you this not to stop you. You are going to do it. You are going to do it because the excitement is louder than the experience. I am telling you so that when it happens - and something like it will happen, even if not this exact form - you remember this letter and do not waste energy on shame. The rebuild is coming. So is the recovery.
Now five things I want you to carry with you.
1. The inner reality
You think you know what resilience is. You don’t. People use the word until they launch a business. Then they discover it.
You will often not have the answers. You will be afraid. You will wake up some mornings and ask yourself what the hell you are doing here. That is okay. That is the job. You will figure it out. Not because you are special, but because there is no other choice and you are stubborn enough to keep showing up.
You will feel small compared to all the successes you will hear about. The fundraising announcements, the hockey-stick screenshots, the conference talks given by founders ten months younger than your company. Don’t worry about that. There is no overnight success. Some companies hit hyper-growth early. That is their path, not yours. Maybe you reach €10k MRR in two years. Be proud of that. You will be one of the very few who landed there at all.
2. Decisions in the fog
You are going to ask everyone for advice. Mentors, friends, other founders, your old colleagues, eventually an AI you can’t yet imagine exists. You will come back from each conversation with a different answer. That is because every piece of advice is true for a specific context in a specific period of time, and none of those contexts are yours.
Most of the time, the right move is not to find more information. It is to make the call and move on so you can find out. You will have 30 to 50% of the information you wish you had. That is enough. That is the job.
The trick is one question before you decide: is this reversible? If yes, and the cost is low, do it. The decision and its outcome will teach you more than another week of deliberation. If no, slow down and gather more. But do not confuse “reversible at low cost” with “uncomfortable.” Most founders mistake their discomfort with risk. It isn’t.
3. The unsexy mechanics
You think your ability to build a good product depends on talent, taste, technology. It doesn’t. It depends on two things, repeated forever: listen to the people you talk to, get back to them with what changed since last time, listen again. That is the whole loop. Every time you skip it, you build something nobody asked for, and you will not understand why no one is using it.
You will also spend a long time looking for your ICP. It sounds basic. It is brutal. There is no one-size-fits-all. The wider you make your ICP, the more unfinished your product looks to everyone in it. The narrower you go, the more your product sings to a few people, and the more those few people pull you forward.
And one truth that hurts because it is true: distribution is the only thing that matters. “Build a great product and they will come” is the most expensive lie in our industry. There are tons of simple, niche products generating €1M ARR run by one or two people. Go look at Indie Hackers. Go look at the right corners of Reddit. The product was not the moat. Distribution was.
You will not want to believe this until very late. Believe it earlier.
4. Curiosity is the fuel
There will be highs and lows. Real ones. You will often want to leave. You will always be asking yourself whether you should keep going - this might be slow suicide - or stop and bounce. No one will have the answer. Not your co-founders. Not your therapist. Not me.
What helps is conviction. Not the cinematic kind. The boring kind: do you actually believe in this product, this customer, this problem? It is much easier to move fast on a business you believe in. In the worst weeks, that belief is what keeps the discipline on.
If you are not truly curious about the industry, the problem you are solving, the customers you are serving - you will quit. It is inevitable. The market can wait for the right founder. Your curiosity cannot be faked. So check that one before anything else.
5. No justice
Here is the last thing, and the hardest. There will be no justice. Some founders with worse products will raise more. Some competitors will copy your work and tell better stories about it. Customers who love you will leave because of internal politics that have nothing to do with you. A regulatory change you did not see coming will help someone else and not you. A press article that should have been about you will go to someone less deserving.
It is okay. It is the weather.
You would not argue with whether it should rain today. You would just bring an umbrella and step outside. Same here. Spend your time on what you control. The work, the listening, the next conversation, the next decision. Everything else is rain. Talking about the rain does not move the needle. Building does.
A last word, then I will let you go.
The rebuild scene I opened with - the one where we knew better and did it anyway
- is the right metaphor for the whole journey. Building a company is walking into fog you cannot see through, with people who trust you, holding equipment you do not fully understand. You will make decisions you would mock if you saw them in someone else’s deck. Some of those decisions will be the best of your life. Some will cost you a quarter of your runway. You will not always know which is which until much later.
The fog never fully lifts. You just learn to walk in it without losing your shoes.
If you are reading this and you are standing at the edge of starting something - excited, a little nauseous, waiting for permission - here it is.
Few will start. Fewer will keep walking. Be one of them.
Yours, Me, from a year and a half later