I checked Stripe this morning. I hadn’t opened it in months.
Three days ago, a payment cleared. Not a friend testing the checkout button. A stranger. A lawyer in a Louisiana parish too small for the Weather Channel. Twelve dollars a month, billed annually.
I’d waited two years for this. Not the coding—the wanting. The specific hallucination: someone unknown, magic, trust arcing across fiber optics while I slept.
You rehearse this scene. You’re talented, determined, convinced of the arc: first customer, then a hundred, then the ARR milestones, the term sheets, maybe the opening bell. You know the narrative.
But the narrative omits the biology. The hit isn’t a gentle ascent; it’s a spike. Like other firsts you anticipate for years—imagined precisely, rehearsed mentally—yet still impossible to predict until the dopamine floods your synapses. One hundred forty-four dollars feels heavier than the bloated corporate paychecks I collected for years. Those arrived on schedule, their value leached away by the thousands of hands dipping into the same payroll pool. This is concentrated. One person. One problem solved. No quarterly review, no Slack notification, just a stranger deciding you’re worth the gamble.
Then the drop. The body knows this rhythm—the hollow after the high. You stare at the dashboard glow and realize the mountain has shifted. The view looks identical, but the air is thinner.
Here’s to the void. Here’s to the next ledge.