Solo, technical founder here. I started a very niche EdTech company 5 years ago, non-venture funded, grew it (code+users) while having reasonably demanding full

Solo, technical founder here. I started a very niche EdTech company 5 years ago, non-venture funded, grew it (code+users) while having reasonably demanding full-time jobs, and now operate it FT. In short: it's tough; you're never off. Our errors either surface by way of user emails or monitoring (shoutout to BugSnag), and to this day I still have anxiety going places without my laptop for fear of a critical error coming up and not being able to fix it. I can recall running out of conference talks, being at shopping mall with my wife, and SO many other incidents where I'd hop onto the floor of a hallway, pull out my laptop, and frantically try to figure out what's wrong (and fix it). On the support side, we have a small number of large clients. In this regard, there's no such thing as completely disconnecting. I have a shortlist where if I get an email from _____, it doesn't matter what I'm doing, I'm responding within an hour. Outsourcing to "watch the shop" is quite difficult; I find that some businesses can do this more easily than others. For something highly niche, it's more challenging. On the tech side, I use managed services wherever possible. Heroku is wonderful (IMO), BugSnag is fantastic, we recently switched to Postmark which helped with deliverability of emails. I've loved building this business. Control over my time each day is a reasonable trade for having to occasionally (rarely now) drop everything. At the same time, I miss big tech and the community of being at a larger company. Hope that helps :)