The Year I Built Something That Made Me Come Alive

A year ago this month, at 5am after not sleeping all night long, with thoughts darting to and fro, I opened a blank document and started building something that didn’t exist yet. I didn’t have a team. I didn’t have funding. I didn’t have the technical know-how. I had two small boys, a full-time job in tech, and an idea I couldn’t stop thinking about: what if a child could open a book and find their world inside it — their name, their favorite toy, their kind of adventure — illustrated like it had always existed on a shelf somewhere, waiting for them?

That idea became Enchantably. And the year it took to bring it to life was the hardest, strangest, most creatively fulfilling year I’ve ever had.

I want to tell you about it honestly. Not the glossy version. The real one.

The founder’s dilemma nobody warns you about

There’s a well-known concept in startup culture called the founder’s dilemma. It usually refers to equity splits and control and when to hire your first employee. But there’s a version of the founder’s dilemma that nobody writes about in business books, and it’s the one that lives in your body.

It’s the dilemma of being a parent who is also building something from nothing.

It goes like this: every hour you give to your dream is an hour you’re not giving to your kids, your health, your sleep, or the version of yourself that remembers to drink water and go for a run. You know this. You feel it. And you keep building anyway — not because you’re reckless, but because something in you knows that this thing you’re making is also for them. That it matters. That it’s teaching them something they can’t learn any other way.

In the past year, I’ve traded sleep for late-night coding sessions. I’ve let routines I cared about slip — the workouts, the early mornings, the things that kept me feeling like myself. I’ve sat at my kitchen table at midnight, tweaking a single story arc for the fourth time, knowing full well that a 7am wakeup call was coming regardless.

It cost me something. I want to be honest about that.

But here’s the thing that kept me going, and it’s the part of this story I don’t think people hear enough:

It felt so good.

The joy nobody talks about either

We talk a lot about founder burnout. We talk about sacrifice. We don’t talk nearly enough about the moments that make all of it worth it — and I don’t mean traction or revenue or metrics. I mean the private, 11pm, nobody-else-is-awake moments when you look at what you’ve built and something in your chest just... opens.

The first time I generated a finished story and the illustrations actually matched the warmth I’d imagined — not generic clip art, not uncanny AI faces, but something that looked like it belonged in a real bookshop — I cried at my desk. Not dramatically. Just a few quiet tears and the thought: I made that. That exists because I didn’t stop.

The first time I read one of the stories to my boys at bedtime and my 4-year-old pointed at the page and said “that’s my Skoshy!” — not with excitement, but with certainty, like of course his dino would be in a book — I understood why I’d been doing all of this.

These books come to life. I don’t mean that as marketing language. I mean they have a pulse to them. Each one is a little world that didn’t exist five minutes ago, and now it does, and a specific child is the hero of it. A story where your child discovers a hidden city inside their own mouth where every tooth is a character. A story where they tame a dragon. A story where they save a lost puppy in the rain. That never stops being magical to me. I don’t think it ever will.

The joy of building in the details nobody asked for

Here’s something I haven’t told many people: I hide things in Enchantably.

Not in a sneaky way. In a delightful way. Little easter eggs tucked into corners of the site and woven into the stories — small surprises that nobody asked me to put there and that serve no strategic purpose whatsoever. They exist purely because building them made me happy, and I believe that a parent or child stumbling onto one of them might feel a tiny spark of unexpected joy.

I can’t tell you what they all are, because that would ruin it. But I’ll tell you why they’re there.

When I was a kid, my favorite things were never the obvious ones. They were the hidden things. The secret drawer in my grandmother’s desk. The tiny door in a garden wall. The moment in a book when the author seemed to wink directly at you, like they’d left something just for the person paying close enough attention.

I wanted Enchantably to feel like that. Not like a transaction — you pay, you get a book — but like a place someone made with love, and you can tell, even if you can’t quite put your finger on how.

So yes. There are easter eggs. There are small, unnecessary, deeply intentional details that I put there for no reason other than the pure joy of creating something that surprises.

That instinct — to add the thing nobody asked for, just because it delights you — is something I didn’t know I had a year ago. I thought I was the “strategic” one. The deck builder. The spreadsheet person. Turns out I’m also the person who will spend an hour on a detail that maybe ten people will ever notice, and feel more alive doing it than anything else on my calendar that week.

So this is for the parent who’s building something too

Maybe it’s a business. Maybe it’s a book you’ve been meaning to write. Maybe it’s a complete left turn from the career everyone expected you to stay in. Maybe it’s something so early you haven’t even said it out loud yet.

Whatever it is — the cost is real. The sleep you’ll lose is real. The guilt is real. The moments when you wonder if you’re being selfish are real.

But so is the joy. So is the feeling of looking at something that didn’t exist before you made it. So is the quiet, private, 11pm knowledge that you are more than what you do for a living, more than what you do for your kids, more than the roles you’ve been assigned.

You are also a person who makes things.

Don’t let anyone — including yourself — talk you out of that.