Every Sunday I tell myself this week will be different. Every Friday I’m shocked it wasn’t. Month eight, no revenue, and I’m still saying “we’re close.”
Not to investors. Not to advisors. To myself. In the mirror at 3:30am when I’m rewriting the same Substack intro for the fourth time because engagement’s been flat for three weeks and I’m wondering if anyone actually cares about gut health or if I’ve built an entire business around a problem only I have.
The manufacturer who promised compliance-ready formulations in four weeks? Ghosted after I wired AED 12,000. The lab that said turnaround would be ten days? Seventeen days and counting. The friend who said she’d intro me to her supplier contact? She forgot.
And every single time, my brain does this thing where it recalibrates reality into “This is fine. This is normal. This is part of the process.”
That’s not optimism. That’s gaslighting.
Here’s what founders don’t tell you: the job is lying to yourself until reality catches up or calls your bluff.
You gaslight yourself into thinking rejecting manufacturers for using fillers is “non-negotiable standards” and not just burning time you don’t have. You gaslight yourself into thinking writing 4,000 words a week is “building a moat” when your subscriber count barely moves. You gaslight yourself into thinking regulatory delays are fine when they’re the only thing between you and revenue.
Stop lying to yourself for five consecutive minutes and you’d quit.
I keep a running list of things I’ve convinced myself of in the last eight months:
- Rejecting three manufacturers for wanting to add fillers was “setting a quality standard” and not just expensive stubbornness.
- Writing 4,000 words a week on Substack with 6 subscribers is “building infrastructure” and not screaming into the void.
- Posting behind-the-scenes content on Instagram to 200 followers who definitely aren’t reading captions is “audience building” and not performance art for an empty room.
- Regulatory delays are “giving me time to refine the formula” and not just... delays.
- Not having revenue yet is fine because I’m “prioritising getting it right” when actually I just don’t have a finished product to sell.
Every one of these is technically true. Also completely delusional.
The delusion has layers.
Timeline lies: You say “three months” when you mean “six months if nothing goes wrong,” which it will. You say “soft launch in Q1” when you haven’t locked a manufacturer. You tell yourself you’ll have samples by end of year and then January hits and you’re still negotiating MOQs.
Probability lies: Every meeting feels like the one that’ll crack it open. Every intro feels like the connection that’ll change everything. You know most leads go nowhere. You still have to believe this one is different or you wouldn’t get out of bed.
Identity lies: You call yourself a founder when you don’t have a product. You say you’re “building a brand” when you have a logo and a Google Doc. You update your LinkedIn to CEO when your revenue is zero and your team is you, alone, at 3:30am, refreshing Substack analytics between bites of cold dinner.
This is the job.
Most people can’t sustain this level of cognitive dissonance. They need a salary, a title, a boss who says “good work.” You get radio silence, ghosting, polite “let’s circle back” emails, and your own brain whispering that maybe you’re wrong about all of it.
So you gaslight yourself. You reframe rejection as redirection. You call failure “iteration.” You tell yourself the reason you’re not succeeding yet is you’re doing it the right way, even when the right way looks identical to the slow way.
You have to believe your own bullshit or you drown in everyone else’s doubt.
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The math is brutal when you think clearly:
Eight months. Zero revenue. AED 12,000 to a manufacturer who vanished. Another AED 8,000 on lab testing that’s still pending. The opportunity cost of a corporate salary I walked away from.
I could’ve been promoted twice by now. Could’ve banked another AED 250,000.
Employee math is linear. Time for money. Certainty for stability. You know what you’re getting and when.
Founder math is chaos. You burn savings on things that might not work. You invest time in outcomes you can’t control. The ROI is binary: either it works and the math makes sense retroactively, or you’re the idiot who spent eight months on a protein powder nobody wanted.
Right now, I’m losing. Every morning I wake up and recalculate with different variables. Maybe the market’s shifting. Maybe gut health is about to boom. Maybe being early is the same as being right if you hold on long enough.
That’s not math. That’s faith disguised as spreadsheets.
There’s also the invisible work nobody counts.
The 3:30am writing sessions. The Instagram content that gets 11 likes and zero comments. The networking coffees that go nowhere. The Substack posts that take six hours to write and get skimmed in two minutes.
I’ve written 32,000 words in the last eight weeks. Some of it’s good. Most of it disappears into the algorithm. I keep writing anyway. I’ve convinced myself it’s compound interest for attention, that someday someone will find the archive and everything will click.
That’s the gaslight. Treating every action like it’s an investment when most of it’s just noise.
There’s a line in Atomic Habits I think about constantly:
“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
You vote for “founder” every time you wake up at 3:30am. Every time you rewrite the same pitch deck. Every time you say “we’re close” when you’re not.
Cast enough votes and the identity sticks, whether the business does or not.
I don’t know if GUTSY will work. The market’s saturated. Most brands fail. I’m eight months in with no revenue and a formulation I can’t legally sell yet.
I also know I’ll wake up tomorrow and tell myself it’s going to work. That next month will be different. That this is all part of it.
The delusion is the fuel. I just hope it lasts longer than my savings.
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