Two days ago, I had 1,200 websites go down.
Cascading Docker failures, a swarm that refused to rebuild, datacenter capacity issues, and me sitting on my couch trying to hold it all together.
That's not what I want to write about, though. I already wrote the post-mortem on the Magic Pages blog. This is about something else, something more personal
Here's the thing about entrepreneurship: it gets glorified.
The "laptop lifestyle". You know, the cliché beach photos. 4 hour work week. Freedom. Someone on Twitter posting about working from a café on Bali. Their business runs itself, of course.
And there's this implication that you've somehow figured out life if you've built something of your own.
And look, some of that is real. I do make my own decisions. I truly am my own boss. When I want to change something about Magic Pages, I just do it. No meetings, no approvals, no waiting for someone else to decide. There's a real freedom in that, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.
But there's another side that doesn't make for good content.
A good day can turn into a terrible day in seconds. One moment you're working on a feature, feeling like you've got things under control. The next moment, 1,200 websites are down and you're watching Docker containers fail for reasons you don't fully understand yet.
And you're the one responsible.
Not a team. Not a company. Not some on-call rotation where someone else takes over after your shift. You.
I sat there on Thursday, stressed, debugging, trying to stay calm. And I knew my wife, Mariia, could feel it. She was in the same room, knowing something is up. The stress bleeds into everything. Into our day together, into our conversations, into the air between us.
On days like that, employment starts to look pretty good.
I don't mean that dismissively. I mean it genuinely. When things go wrong at a regular job, you go home. Someone else takes over. You come back the next day. Even working as a developer, there's usually an on-call plan.Other people that help you handle crises.
You're not sitting alone at your desk wondering if you should have made different decisions three months ago that would have prevented this.
On the bad days, I've caught myself thinking about throwing it all away. Going back to my day job, and letting the weight lift off my shoulders.
A year ago, I was pretty firm about one thing: I wasn't planning to grow the Magic Pages team. Just me. Solo. That was the whole point.
But something changed.
Next week, my first team member joins me at Magic Pages. It will be in a support role, for now. He won't be responsible if there's another outage. That's still on me. But I'll have someone to share the day-to-day with. Someone on my team. Someone to talk to about customer issues, about the weird bugs, about the small (and big) wins.
I used to think growing a team was scary. And honestly, I still have a lot of respect for what it means. The responsibility, the coordination, the fact that someone else's livelihood now depends on your decisions.
But I've realised it's the only way forward.
Not because I want to scale Magic Pages into some massive company. But because the panic that creeps in when you're alone with 1,200 websites down – that's not sustainable. You can only make it through so many crises before it starts to break something.
I'm not writing this to complain. I still love what I do. I still wouldn't trade it.
But the next time you see someone's beach photo, their laptop-and-cocktail lifestyle, remember that behind most businesses there is someone who's had a day like my Thursday. Someone who sat there, stressed, knowing they were responsible for everything.
The freedom is real. But so is the weight.