Will the Startup Gods smite us?

Each Wednesday, we bring you another piece of The Hum’s story as it unfolds. The goal is to bring you, our readers, an unfiltered, no-BS account of what it is like to start a company, as it happens. We will be honest, vulnerable, and relatable in hopes you will learn both from what goes wrong and what goes (occasionally) right.

When we started The Hum, we would have said we have an advantage over some startup founders. Not one of talent, but of time. None of the 3 of us are married, none of us have kids, none of us need to keep up a house. We could, in theory, dedicate our whole lives to The Hum and work those romanticized 100-hour workweeks that are so often a part of startup lore.

That sounds really great, but it is in ignorance of a harsher truth. The truth is that the rest of your life doesn’t stop. It doesn’t matter that we have seemingly fewer responsibilities than some older startup founders. We are finding this truth out the hard way and it keeps us up at night.

We are 3 people and we produce content 5 days a week. That is inherently difficult. Especially because we are trying to put out stuff that doesn’t suck.

This becomes even more difficult when 1 of us cannot contribute. Losing 1 person is losing (math alert) ⅓ of our team. When someone has a doctor’s appointment in an office of 50, or 25, or even 10, you barely notice. That is simply not the case at this stage of our crying toddler of a company. When one of us needs to do something that isn’t The Hum, we notice.

This shit is about to get too real. Dave (⅓ of the company) is hopping on a plane on May 24th to visit a friend in Budapest for a week. This would not be the end of the world except for the fact that I, Tim (⅓ of the company), am boarding a jumbo jet on May 27th for 2 weeks to help facilitate a leadership program in Colorado.

For those of you keeping score at home, that means Bo (⅓ of the company) will be holding down the fort, fending off monsters King Leonidas-style, while he is outnumbered.

We’ve talked a lot about how to handle this specific situation and also how to handle similar occurrences moving forward. Most pressing, what do we do about generating content for the combined stretch of 11 days while Dave and I are away? We pride ourselves on writing stories as they happen. That’s hard to do if you now have to write about the future.

Do we take a week off? Do we resend some early emails that only a fraction of our audience has seen? Do we get as far ahead as we can, change our style when necessary, and hope we can still deliver quality content?

We’ve decided to go with the last of these routes. We value our 5-day-a-week interaction with our subscribers too much and sending repeat content seems far too disingenuous. That’s not our style.

Now, we are in the middle of this — getting creative with the content of our pieces and working longer hours to bust our butts so we have no worries once the calendar strikes May 24th.

But we have also asked ourselves a lot of questions about the emotional side of this issue. Should we feel guilty about taking time away from The Hum? Will the Startup Gods (pretty sure these exist) smite us for taking time off so early in our company’s journey? Would the Elon Musk’s and Marc Cuban’s of the world look down on us?

The answer to all of these is probably yes. And that’s pretty scary, whether those Startup Gods exist or not.

But part of telling our own and others’ stories this way — vulnerable, honest, in real time — is that we are finding the romanticized tales of 100-hour workweeks and eating only Ramen noodles for 6 weeks straight aren’t always true. In fact, I would say they rarely are. And that’s fine.

It doesn’t mean that this shit isn’t really really hard; that there aren’t uncomfortable times, late nights, and tight budgets.

But we aren’t here to contribute to the glorification of busy. And we aren’t here to share some exaggerated tale to appeal to your empathy. And we certainly aren’t here to scare away other would-be entrepreneurs because we humble brag about how impossible doing this thing seems.

If we do turn into a success story, the 3 of us won’t be able to say that we put in 6 months of non-stop 100-hour weeks to get this thing off the ground. Or that we ate PB&J and plastic noodles every day. I had a $9 roast beef sandwich today that I still need to Venmo Dave for.

And that’s okay. We think the honest truth is interesting enough.