The days started merging together sometime around month six. The excitement that once kept me awake until 3 a.m. slowly gave way to a dull tension behind my eyes. Building alone meant that every idea, every bug, every unanswered email, fell on me. The world didn’t slow down to make room for my vision.

I used to think solitude was an advantage — fewer voices, fewer compromises. But as the product grew, silence became heavy. Decisions echoed in it. Should I pivot? Raise money? Ship half-finished? There was no one to sanity-check the answers. Every choice was a coin flip between progress and burnout.

Co-Founder calls blurred into polite rejections. Friends asked, “How’s the startup going?” with the kind of cheer that hurt more than indifference. I wanted to say, I don’t know. Some days the traction metrics gave hope; other days they mocked me for trying.

Still, there was something quietly sacred in the grind. Each small win — a cold email, a working feature, a new insight — felt like a spark in the dark. The hardship wasn’t just a test of endurance, but of identity. Was I doing this because I believed in the mission — or because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else?

And yet, each morning, I reopened my laptop, unready to quit. There’s a strange peace in perseverance — the kind that only a solo founder truly understands.