I quit my job 14 months ago to start a company. It's still alive. Here's what I wish someone had told me — not the LinkedIn version, the actual one.

1/ Your runway is not 12 months. It's 6. The first 3 months you ship nothing because you're "setting up infrastructure." The next 3 you burn cash on mistakes you didn't know you were making. Plan for 6. Hope for 12.

2/ The hardest part isn't the product. It's being the only person who cares. At your old job, someone else worried about payroll, legal, the broken thing in prod. Now it's you at 11pm deciding whether to fix the bug or sleep. Every decision is yours. That loneliness is the actual job.

3/ Don't build what customers ask for. Build what you notice. I spent 4 months shipping requested features. Zero moved retention. The features that worked came from patterns in usage data nobody had complained about. Complaints are loud. Behavior is truth.

4/ Hire slow even when it feels urgent. I made two panic hires in month 4. Both left by month 9 and cost me ~$80k + the time to rebuild. The "we need someone yesterday" feeling is almost always wrong. A bad hire at 3 months is worse than a missing hire at 6.

5/ The thing nobody says: you won't feel like a founder. You'll feel like a fraud faking it while everyone smarter than you is busy. That feeling doesn't go away. You just get better at working while it sits in the background. If you're waiting to feel ready, you're not.