I Think I Finally Stopped Being My Company's Biggest Bottleneck ( I Will Not Promote)

My Dad got sick 2 years ago, and my company nearly shut down. The dependency on me was huge. Maybe this is because as founder & CEO of a bootstrapped startup, the buck ends with me in nearly all departments.

That is when I decided, I will make myself redundant, and finally after nearly 2 years today was my last day doing customer support.

Which sounds like a tiny thing, but it was actually the last operational job I still had.

Over the past 2 years and a half, I've slowly handed everything off. Customer support was last.

Design. SEO. Product. Social. Support. Everything else.

The idea was to hire someone who will be way better than me in the department. Easy to say, difficuly to implement.

Looking back, I think I kept doing everything because it made me feel useful (True story).

If there was a fire, I could put it out.

If someone emailed, I'd answer.

If something broke, I'd fix it.

The problem is... every fire steals time from the stuff that actually grows the business.

I spent weeks away from work helping my Dad, and parts of the business basically stalled. Customer support, growth, blogs....quite literally, it felt like we were suddenly at a standstill. I had to choose between family and my life's work. A choice I wish no founder has to make.

That was a pretty uncomfortable realization.

If the founder disappears for two weeks, the company shouldn't stop functioning.

So we've spent the last 18 months trying to build something that's less dependent on me.

We're still a tiny team, but today was the first time I looked around and realized there isn't really a day-to-day function that absolutely requires me anymore.

Ironically, that's probably the most useful I've ever been to the company.

Now I get to spend my time on things that are hard to delegate, finding opportunities, testing ideas, launching new stuff, talking to customers before they become customers.

I know it isn't a big $1M ARR kinda milestone but it makes me feel happy and just wanted to share it with you all.