Design for joy, not just revenue

Sometimes I wake up before dawn, wide awake at 4:45 a.m., head full of ideas.

My kid’s still asleep.

The city quiet.

And I’m at my desk with a cup of coffee, writing, designing, thinking.

Not because I have to — but because I want to.

Because these days, I love what I do again.

Working with founders, architecting their operating systems, creating resources that actually help people breathe again.

Refining my own flagship product.

Sharpening my message, my craft, my purpose.

It feels alive.

But it wasn’t always like this.

I had to lose that feeling completely before I could rebuild it.

‍

When the dream turns sterile

‍

When the dust of the early years of my agency settled, and everything finally worked, the machine was running smoothly, and the numbers made sense.

We had offices across continents, hundreds of active clients, and teams I was proud of.

‍

Systems built. Teams humming. Revenue predictable. For the first time in years, I could exhale.

By every external measure, I’d “made it.”

And yet, inside, I felt something I couldn’t name.

A kind of quiet sadness — the kind that hides behind spreadsheets and OKRs.

‍

We tried so hard to keep it human, to keep the soul intact across all those offices.

We even had cameras on the walls — real-time windows into other spaces.

A TV in each office streaming another team’s world, so you could wave to people thousands of miles away.

It was our way of pretending the distance wasn’t real.

And for a while, it worked.

‍

But behind the warmth, I could feel it slipping.

We were growing, yes.

But growing where?

And for what?

‍

We chased clients that didn’t inspire us.

We built projects that paid well but drained the soul.

We scaled because the market demanded it — not because I did.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the business I’d once loved began to hollow me out.

‍

The soul of the company — that sense of creation, of craft, of doing something meaningful, was dissolving under the weight of “growth.”

We chased numbers, not ideas. Rates, not purpose.

And though everyone looked busy, something essential was gone.

‍

The Basecamp effect

‍

For years, I idolized 37signals.

Their simplicity. Their philosophy.

The idea that a business could be small, calm, opinionated — and still world-class.

I devoured Rework and It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.

I wanted that kind of company: deliberate, creative, human.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I built the opposite.

‍

We became what I once swore we’d never be, an efficient production machine, optimizing people into “resources.”

Outsourcing, scaling, selling hours. Humans reduced to lines on an invoice.

The money was good, the systems worked, but there was no pulse.

Even our best months felt like well-oiled emptiness.

Revenue climbed, but meaning plummeted.

And that’s what broke me — not exhaustion, but cynicism.

Because when your business stops feeding your spirit, every success feels like someone else’s win.

‍

The illusion of freedom

‍

People tell you that systems equal freedom.

That if you automate enough, delegate enough, remove yourself from operations, you’ll finally be “free.”

What they don’t tell you is that freedom without meaning feels like exile.

Yes, I’d escaped the daily grind.

But I’d also escaped the reason I started in the first place.

‍

The creative spark that used to drive me — designing, solving, building things that mattered — had been replaced by spreadsheets, forecasts, and margins.

We’d become efficient, profitable… and spiritually bankrupt.

That realization broke me in a way burnout never did.

Because burnout at least means you care.

This was worse — it was apathy disguised as success.

‍

When growth stops feeling like progress

‍

There’s a cruel trick founders fall for:

We mistake expansion for evolution.

More clients, more staff, more zeros.

But if the why behind it doesn’t evolve, the business outgrows your soul.

That’s exactly what happened to me.

Every quarter, we followed where the numbers led.

And like any ship without a compass, we ended up somewhere profitable — but far from home.

‍

The slow unraveling

‍

It didn’t happen overnight. There wasn’t one “moment of clarity.”

For almost two years, I drifted. I had time. I had money.

‍

But I couldn’t shake the hollow feeling that nothing I was doing mattered anymore.

Selling another developer’s time to another faceless client for a slightly higher rate, what was the point?

‍

Everyone in the industry was doing the same thing, buying and reselling human potential like it was a commodity.

And I realized: I hadn’t built a company, I’d built a mechanism.

So I walked away.

Not because I had a new vision, but because I couldn’t live inside the old one anymore.

Then came a year and a half of searching. Reading. Thinking. Talking.

‍

Trying to answer a question I’d somehow avoided for twenty years:

What do I actually want to build?

What do I believe in enough to dedicate my life to again?

‍

Rebuilding the soul

‍

The answer didn’t come quickly. It emerged slowly — from long conversations, quiet mornings, and work that started to feel alive again.

I began to see that what I loved most wasn’t just “operations.” It was architecture. Designing clarity. Turning chaos into calm.

Helping founders rebuild meaning in what they already have, so their business serves their life, not the other way around.

‍

And that’s when the spark came back.

Now, when I wake at 4:45 a.m. with ideas, it’s not anxiety, it’s energy.

‍

Because I can finally see the impact.

It’s not about selling time. It’s about giving people back theirs.

Not everything needs to be joyful.

But something must be.

And for me, this is it.