I’ve Been Building Theanna for a Year. Here Are the 3 Things I Dreaded Most.

I was reflecting last night about what are the things I really hated in this experience. Shocker — not everything is sunshine and rainbows. But the things that made this list surprised me.

Before I get into the three things I dreaded most, I want to tell you something that shocked me. The two biggest things that actually impacted the company — the things that objectively hurt the most — did not make this list.

One was a DNS issue that wiped out $25,000 in ARR in a couple of months. That was devastating mentally. The other was hiring someone I should have never hired — I found out within three weeks that this person was a narcissist who was trying to steal my code. It was terrible.

Those did not make the list.

What’s in This Post

• #1: Waiting for the MVP
• #2: Holding Three Jobs While Building
• #3: Not Knowing Backend Development
• The Verdict: 9.9 Out of 10

Waiting for the MVP

I hated — absolutely hated — having to wait for my MVP to be built.

It took three months. And that is actually fast. But I built my product before AI was good enough that I could code it myself with confidence that it would deliver. So I had to hire someone. And waiting sucked.

Three months doesn’t sound like a long time. But when you’re a founder with a vision and zero product to show for it, every single day feels like you’re falling behind. You see other people launching. You see posts about building an app in a weekend. And you’re just… waiting.

Here’s the thing, though. I didn’t sit around. I went HAM on marketing. I talked about what I was building every single day. I got about 1,000 people on the waitlist before we even launched. I made sure people knew what I was up to. That waitlist became the foundation of everything that came after.

I cannot stress this enough: if I had not gone on social media during those three months, I would have had zero customers at launch. Zero. The product alone does not bring people to your door. Nobody is sitting around waiting for your app to exist. You have to tell them about it. You have to show up every single day and talk about what you’re building, why it matters, and who it’s for. Marketing is not something you do after you launch. It is the thing that makes launch matter.

The irony is not lost on me. Today, founders in our program are shipping landing pages and MVPs in a single afternoon using AI tools. A year ago, I couldn’t do that. The tools caught up to the vision. But I still had to survive the gap.

“The waiting taught me something I would not have learned any other way: you can build a business before you build a product. The product is not the starting line. The audience is.”

Holding three jobs while building

When I launched Theanna, I was making no money from it. Just like everyone else at the idea stage. And I have a family of six to feed. So I had to hold three jobs that gave me enough flexibility to build on the side.

I was consulting for one startup. I was teaching at a university. And I was doing one-on-one coaching with founders. I only actually enjoyed the building and the coaching. The rest was survival.

Every morning that I knew I had to work on someone else’s company — that consulting gig — I dreaded it. You know that Sunday scaries feeling? Imagine that, but it’s every single day. I was working 14- to 16-hour days total between all three jobs and building Theanna, and every hour I spent on someone else’s company was an hour my own company was sitting there waiting for me.

Here’s what I want every founder to hear: you will have to do things you don’t love so that you can step into the thing you do love. That’s the tradeoff. The consulting gig I dreaded every morning was the thing that kept the lights on while I built Theanna. That day-to-day work matters. It’s not glamorous and nobody posts about it, but it’s the bridge. The key is that you keep your eye on the prize the entire time. Every hour I spent on someone else’s company, I knew exactly why I was doing it and exactly when I was going to stop.

Thankfully, I worked so hard that I was able to quit all three of those jobs by May 31st. That was just three or four months after launching. I will never take that for granted.

“The difference between dreading your morning and loving your morning is not the workload. It’s whether the work is yours.”

Not knowing backend development

This one might surprise you. But I really don’t like that I don’t know how to do backend development.

I’m a product manager by trade. I understand architecture. I understand how to make decisions about systems, design patterns, all of it. And I’m curious — I want to know how things work. Ask my founding engineer Amish. I ask him a billion questions every single day.

But not being able to execute on that side really frustrates me. I’ve gone back and forth on it for a long time. Should I learn? Is it worth my time? And at the end of the day, the answer is no. I’m better served elsewhere. I’d be a D-player — frankly, probably an F-player — in backend execution. My time is better spent on the business.

What I did instead was solve the gap by building the support into the company. We now run engineering workshops and dedicated tech support for our founders. I surround myself with people who are strong where I’m weak. I know enough to guide. I know enough to make architecture decisions. I just don’t execute the backend myself. And that’s the right line.

The resolution I keep coming back to: it’s not worth me learning to be a solid backend engineer right now. But it is important for me to continually be curious, work on architecture, and make decisions based on the knowledge I have with the experts around me.

“You don’t have to be the thing you’re building. You have to understand it well enough to lead the people who are.”

The verdict: 9.9 out of 10

In general, the experience has been a 9.9 out of 10.

Even the mistakes I’ve made — don’t make me recall them — have been fun. It’s like I enjoy the struggle. I don’t know how to describe it. I think because when you believe in yourself enough, you know that no matter what happens, you’ll come out of it ok.

Would I choose anything else? Never. This is the best thing I’ve ever done, even on the worst days of entrepreneurship.

So if we learned anything from this post, it’s that I have control issues. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

— Nomiki