What I learned about procrastination while scaling my startup to 4.2 million users

Aytekin Tank
The Startup
Published in
8 min readNov 5, 2018

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Originally published on JOTFORM.COM

Cozy.

That’s how I felt.

Tucked beneath what may have been the world’s softest blanket.

I took a deep breath and rolled onto my side. It was a familiar moment — the moment when my 6 a.m. alarm clock sounded, after a night of tossing and turning.

The moment when my daily responsibilities had yet to beckon me. The moment when the clouds of my imagination felt more real than writing lines of code.

In a few minutes, I would answer the same question I had faced every weekday for the past year:

Should I stay in bed or should I work on my side business?

At the time, I was working as a programmer for an NYC media company.

Balancing a full-time job with the responsibilities of scaling my startup, JotForm, taught me a lot about myself.

Among other things, I learned that I was somewhat risk-averse.

The typical path of raising venture capital wasn’t appealing to me. Additionally, as someone who highly values personal freedom, I didn’t want to make myself beholden to anyone.

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Aytekin Tank
The Startup

Founder and CEO of www.jotform.com || Bestselling author of Automate Your Busywork. Find more at https://aytekintank.com/ (contact: AytekinTank@Jotform.com)