The app finally launched the week I stopped sleeping

I was one of the first six employees at a fintech micro-startup building a savings and micro-investment app aimed at people who'd never used a brokerage before — the pitch was simplicity, get regular people comfortable putting away small amounts regularly instead of leaving it all in a bank account earning nothing. I believed in it. I still do, actually, which is part of what makes this hard to write.

I was head of product, which at six people meant I was also doing customer support, writing half the copy in the app, and sitting in on every single engineering standup because we didn't have the headcount for me not to. We were racing toward a launch date that our lead investor had more or less set for us, tied to a funding milestone that determined whether we'd have runway past the next few months.

The eight weeks before launch are mostly a blur now, which worries me a little, honestly, that a chunk of my life just isn't clearly there anymore. I know I stopped taking weekends around week four. I know I started answering messages at 2 a.m. because the engineering team, working with a contractor in a different time zone, was most active then, and I didn't want to be the bottleneck. I know my meals during that stretch were mostly instant coffee and whatever was in the office snack drawer, because going out to actually eat felt like time I couldn't spare.

What I didn't notice, because I genuinely could not see it from inside, was that I'd stopped sleeping properly weeks before launch, not the occasional bad night but something more like four broken hours most nights, my mind still running through edge cases and copy revisions even lying in the dark. My girlfriend noticed. She told me later she'd started timing how long it took me to respond to basic questions, because the delay had gotten long enough to actually worry her, not annoy her — worry her.

We launched on schedule. It went about as well as these things go, a few bugs, a spike of signups, a nice write-up from a local tech blog that the founder screenshot and sent to the whole team with three exclamation points. I remember feeling genuinely happy for maybe an hour that day, the kind of happy that comes from finishing something enormous. Then, that same week, my body did something I'd never had happen before — my hands went numb and my chest got tight during a completely ordinary product meeting, and I had to leave the room and sit in the stairwell breathing in a way I'd only ever seen described in articles, not felt myself, until then.

I went to urgent care that night, expecting something was seriously wrong with my heart. The doctor, gently, told me it was a panic attack, almost certainly brought on by prolonged sleep deprivation and stress, and asked how long I'd been running on this little sleep. I did the math out loud for her, which was the first time I'd actually done that math for anyone, including myself, and hearing the number come out of my own mouth was worse than the numbness in my hands had been.

I took two weeks of leave, which the founder approved immediately and kindly, to be fair to him, he wasn't a villain in this, he was drowning too, just slightly less visibly. I came back and tried to reset my hours. It didn't really take. The startup's whole culture, six people trying to out-hustle much better-funded competitors, ran on exactly the kind of hours that had put me in that stairwell, and I couldn't find an honest version of my job that didn't ask for them.

I left three months after the launch, still proud of the product, still checking the app's growth numbers sometimes like a parent checking in on a kid who doesn't call much anymore. I'm better now, mostly, sleeping close to normally, though I still notice my chest tighten sometimes in ordinary meetings for no reason I can point to, like my body kept a copy of that night that my mind would rather not.