Dear founder,
This week taught me an unexpected lesson about entrepreneurship. After the Christmas and New Years festivities — that annual tradition of sharing joy, memories, and apparently germs — I found myself running a fever of nearly 40°C (104°F). For someone who rarely gets sick, this hit particularly hard.
🎧 Listen to this on my podcast.
As I lay in bed, barely able to function, I realized just how crucial it had been to build my businesses the way I did. Both my software company, Podscan, and my media business continued to run smoothly without my active involvement. This forced pause became a powerful reminder of why I chose the entrepreneurial path in the first place: to have control over how I spend my time, what I do with it, and who I work with.
The beauty of being an entrepreneur is having the freedom to say, "Today, I'm not working because I need to take care of myself." Yet paradoxically, it's also one of the hardest things to do. When you're running your own business, if you don't show up, often nobody does. That's why I've invested significant effort into making my software business as independent of me as possible.
Every feature, every piece of infrastructure in Podscan has been built with self-healing in mind. I've put automations in place that handle everything from service restarts to scaling resources up and down as needed. The system is grounded in resilient architecture, designed to operate autonomously.
During my two days of being completely out of commission, all I did was occasionally check my email for reports of abnormalities — of which there were exactly zero. Every usage spike, new customer sign-up, subscription change, and routine operation continued without a hitch. The system just worked, validating all the time invested in making it robust.
The key to this reliability lies in comprehensive error reporting. While it might seem annoying to receive notifications for every single error, timeout, or disconnect in your software stack, this granular monitoring is essential. As you scale, these issues naturally increase — the internet is, after all, a series of leaky tubes. Not every connection will work perfectly, and not every service will run indefinitely without needing a restart. That's just the nature of technology.
Being aware of how your system operates is crucial for peace of mind when you're not operating it yourself. That's why I built performance monitoring into my software stack from the beginning. I'm particularly excited about the upcoming Laravel Night Watch tool, which was introduced at Laracon Australia a few months ago. It integrates directly with Laravel applications hosted anywhere, promising to make application performance monitoring and error tracking even more accessible.
By tracking even the slightest deviations, you gradually build a more stable and reliable system. Each error notification becomes an opportunity to address a potential issue at its root, ensuring it won't cause problems in the future. When something does slip through, it's usually a novel problem that, once solved, strengthens the system further.
Even in my current state, I felt compelled to record this update — not because of sponsor obligations or analytics concerns (this episode has no sponsor, and I honestly couldn't care less about the ratings), but because maintaining my weekly episode streak matters to me. It's an accountability measure, both for myself and hopefully for you. While the easy path would be to just have some tea (I am very German, after all) and go to bed, taking these few minutes to share these insights felt important.
So, consider this a gentle nudge to think about how you can set up your business to function without you. Whether through delegating responsibilities to reliable team members or implementing robust automations, building a self-sustaining system allows you to step away when life demands it — whether for health, family, or any other reason. When you can take care of yourself without worrying about your business crumbling, you've built something truly valuable..
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