Startups and Type-2 fun

Ever have a bad day and wonder how you're gonna get over it?

Happens every day in startup land.

Just last week:

😵 Our entire browser infrastructure started crumbling under the weight of new users trying it out. There was a memory leak that went undiagnosed, and 20% of all new user requests timed out. Talk about a good experience!
🤯 Trying to build 5 demos at the same time to prep for some calls later in the week.. after spending 8 hours doing discovery calls all day
😵‍💫 Diagnosing really weird popup issues causing customer tasks to start failing at an elevated rate

But then I think back to the past few months and the other issues we've had... and I realized that I felt the same way a few months ago, at a smaller scale

It's bitter sweet in a way -- the chaos is a part of the startup journey, and I never expected it to continue to become more challenging

Nicolas (our YC Partner) mentioned off-hand once that it only gets harder as a company scales

I never realized how true it was.

In the future.. how can we do all of the above (fix issues, onboard customers) while also (scaling the team, raising money, making sure everyone is pointed in the right direction)?

But there is a silver lining here -- a huge motivating force that keeps you going: these problems are accompanied with success.

We would never see our browser infrastructure fail if.. people didn't use Skyvern
We would never have the opportunity to build 5 demos at the same time.. if people weren't excited about Skyvern
We would never get to diagnose complex popup issues that caused our customers failure rate to increase.. if we had no customers

This stress is just a symptom that we're on to something bigger

I guess this is just a part of the (type 2) fun 😄