Struggles of a Solopreneur? Or is it Founder? Or Freelancer?

Struggles of a Solopreneur? Or is it Founder? Or Freelancer?

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from spending two months building something that, in your head, was supposed to be much simpler.

August and September were basically me, my laptop, an unreasonable number of tabs, Claude, GitHub, Cloudflare and a growing list of things I apparently needed to understand.

I started out thinking I was building an assessment platform.

Somewhere along the way, I became the product person, project manager, tester, debugger, systems thinker, researcher and technical translator.

I used to joke that I was an idea person. I could think through a problem, figure out how I wanted something to work, map out the process and then hand the execution to someone else.

This time, there was nobody to hand it to.

I was building something for ACE-VSS, the business I am developing to connect clients with vetted Virtual Support Professionals (VSPs) and I wanted the assessment process to actually mean something.

I didn't want the usual “fill out a form, upload your CV and congratulations, you're vetted” situation.

I wanted to assess how people think, how they communicate, how they handle situations, whether they understand confidentiality, whether they can exercise judgement and whether they can actually function in a remote client environment.

Which meant I needed a system that could support all of that.

And that is where my two-month adventure began.

I had to get back into GitHub after being away from it for a long time. I started using Claude Code and Claude Chat in ways I hadn't previously used them. I had to understand what was happening inside the application, not just describe what I wanted it to do.

Then came Cloudflare, deployments, domains, authentication, environment variables, integrations and all the tiny things you don't think about until one of them decides to stop cooperating.

There were plenty of moments when I thought, “Surely this cannot possibly be my problem.”

It was my problem.

And I had to figure it out.

That experience has made me think differently about what it means to be a founder, solopreneur, freelancer or,frankly, whatever label I am supposed to be using at this point.

Because when you are building something yourself, you don't always get to stay in your strongest lane.

Sometimes you have to learn just enough about something completely outside your usual work to keep the business moving.

Not enough to become a developer overnight.

Not enough to suddenly call yourself a technical expert.

Just enough to understand the problem, ask intelligent questions, use the tools available to you and know when something is actually working.

AI has helped tremendously with this.

But one thing I have learned very quickly is that having AI available does not remove the need for human judgement.

Claude can write code.

It cannot decide whether the thing you are building actually makes sense for your business.

It can suggest a solution.

It cannot tell you whether that solution fits the experience you want your applicants or clients to have.

And it can confidently tell you something is fixed when you are about to discover that it absolutely is not.

So I still had to think, test, question, break things and test again.

Ironically, building this platform has also made me appreciate operations even more.

Because when you are responsible for making a system work, you start noticing all the invisible decisions behind things that look simple.

A form that collects the right information.

A process that doesn't confuse the person using it.

A database that is actually useful.

A client onboarding experience that feels seamless.

A support professional who understands what needs to happen without needing instructions for every single step.

Those things don't happen by accident.

Someone has thought through the details.

Someone has tested them.

Someone has noticed where things could go wrong.

Someone has fixed them.

Sometimes that someone is a whole team.

Sometimes it is one exhausted woman sitting at her laptop wondering why she voluntarily chose this life.

For the past two months, I have been that woman.

And yes, I am tired.

But I am also proud because I can look at the platform now and say:

I built this.

Not alone. Not perfectly. And certainly not without asking for help.

But I stayed with the problem until I could get it working.

Maybe that is one of the less glamorous parts of building a business.

Eventually, you have to become more than the person who had the idea.

You have to become the person who can move the idea into reality.

Sometimes that means strategy.

Sometimes it means operations.

Sometimes it means learning GitHub.

And sometimes it means staring at an error message for 45 minutes before discovering that the problem was one tiny thing you overlooked three times.

Apparently, this is my life now.

Anyway, back to testing and feature updates..