I believed these 3 lies when I started my business

★ signal-weak r/entrepreneur · ↑ 866 · 💬 183 · 2025-07-16 · kw: hours every day · open on reddit ↗

Tool

none

Issue

Entrepreneurs juggle unplanned tasks (marketing, taxes, customer support, tech fixes) alongside core work, forcing 12-hour days to stay afloat; emergency support requests (e.g., bug fixes at 2AM for paying clients) interrupt sleep and create constant panic.

Cost

unstated

Recommendation

Delegate and automate whatever you can

extracted with

anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5 · 2026-05-08

Body

Nobody really talks about the three biggest lies of entrepreneurship until you’re too deep to back out. First, the whole “be your own boss” thing. Sounds nice, until you realize your new boss is just you; burnt-out, second guessing everything, and pulling 12-hour days just to stay afloat. Then there´s the classic "do what you love and you´ll never work a day in your life". Right. Except now, I´m juggling stuff I never signed up for: marketing, taxes, customer support, fixing random tech issues... all while pretending I have it together. And don´t even get me started on "passive income." Yeah, totally passive, if you consider panicking over a bug at 2AM while your one paying client is waiting for a fix. It´s not bad at all, but damn, some of this stuff should come with a warning label. What´s the most ridiculous thing you were told before starting your business?

Top comments (4)

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[score=449] nappingrhythm

"Be your own boss" is such an illusion. The customers are now my boss and hours are erratic.

[score=66] PersonoFly

That’s a negative view on these issues. Sure they are a possible outcome but here’s how it landed with me: “Be your own boss” complete control and liberation from anyone else to do what I want to do, albeit I replaced the boss with customers but I have a choice now when I felt I had little choice before. “Do what you love and never work a day again in your life” well sure some days are more tedious than others but I love the diverse skill set of running my own business (although perhaps far from the best in each discipline admittedly). I run music distribution businesses and build apps and distribution services has been a lot of fun.. so much fun sometimes I forgot to prioritise revenue admittedly. I’ve done long hours to achieve quotas but avoid doing that stuff nowadays, I only needed to do it to get where I am today (I hope!). Passive Income ? Well I built a service and stopped developing it for around six years and had that time 99% passive although clearly you out the work in to get to that point but when you have that money coming in with no work it’s good but you don’t know how long it’ll last for of course.

[score=86] the-craftpilot

Delegate my friend. Automate and delegate whatever you can