Nobody warns you about the silence.
Nobody warns you about the silence.
For years, my phone was a problem I kept trying to solve. Slack notifications were my dopamine hits. Projects to tackle. Emails to answer. A calendar so dense it was proof that I mattered.
Then I left.
The next morning, everything had disappeared. No invites, no fires, no red bubbles on my Slack app to whisk away. The spaces I used to point to as who I was were now silent, empty.
And now, when people ask what I do, I hear myself fumble the answer, and I watch their face make that small, polite gesture it does when someone tells you they “left to figure out what’s next.”
I used to make that face at other people. Now it’s pointed at me.
I think a lot of people stay in jobs they’ve outgrown to avoid that exact feeling, and I understand why. It’s not pleasant to discover how much of you was tied to the pace. the demands. the status. the way it feels to be needed.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. I’ve been five weeks into the quiet. Some of it is easing, some remains. I wanted to write it down before I forget how it felt, because if this process succeeds, I might be tempted to skip this chapter, and that would be a lie.
Daily Log
8:01 AM. En route to an event. I’m sending myself notes about design partners, and a question falls out that I haven’t asked this way before. Thanks, Whispr Flow, for accommodating my compulsive need to move my ideas forward.
8:08 AM. Email back to the engineer I’ve been circling since May. He had a $5K proposal on the table for a version of this product that no longer exists. I tell him the truth: the product changed, there are VCs circling, and I’m not sure equity is the right path yet. Then I ask him to come build something more ambiguous, alongside design partners, before we know exactly what it is. I sent the deck so the word “ambiguous” has edges. No reply yet.
8:30 AM. A room of vertical SaaS people and investors. Same reason every Indy tech room earns the calendar slot: you bump into the people you’d otherwise have to engineer a way to meet.
2:00 PM. Screen-share with my first (potential) user, a keynote speaker and stress physiologist. We walk through her v2 launch funnel. Cleaner, simpler, her edits baked in. She shows up with the good kind of questions: two offers at once, or back-to-back? How do I keep the waitlist crowd off the generic push? Should there be something for the people who don’t buy? Her message after we hang up: “copy all ready....thank you!!!! LFG.”
3:00 PM. In person with a VC Firm. Two hours in a room with both investors, the whole company on the table. I walked in with one version of Milkcrate and walked out with a sharper one.
We killed the line I’ve been leaning on — “too many tools.” That’s the symptom. The real pain is that none of the tools drives sales.
However, this feels more like a side hustle than a real business. Need to go back to the drawing board. I want to build something I can get behind.
What you can steal
Take the expensive version of yourself off the table before the other person has to.
In today’s fractional pitch, I wrote, in plain words, that I don’t think it’s justified to pay me a full salary at this stage. That isn’t modesty. It’s a reframe. The question stops being “can we afford him?” and becomes “is this the fastest path to Series B?” Name the costly option, remove it yourself, and you usually get the next conversation. Works in a sales seat. Works in a pitch. Works anywhere you’re asking someone to trust you with something that matters.
Until tomorrow,
Foley