i shipped everything and broke myself

In August and September, we shipped a massive backend refactor, a frontend overhaul, ISO27001 compliance work, and a database performance optimization that gave us a 65,000x improvement. By any output metric, the sprint was a success.

By mid-December, I was getting chest pains.

what actually happened

I absorbed all the coordination cost. Every decision flowed through me. Every customer issue was my responsibility. Every engineer needed my context. Code reviews, architecture decisions, customer calls, sprint planning, debugging production issues. Simultaneously.

My co-founders recognized it. In a team check-in, Jorim actually had to defend me to the rest of the team, explaining why I was stretched thin. That’s a sign things have gone wrong: someone else has to explain your burnout because you’re too deep in it to articulate it yourself.

The numbers: I’m making 2,900 EUR gross per month as CTO with 7% equity in a company approaching 10k MRR. That’s junior developer money in the Netherlands. The equity might be worth something someday, but right now, dramatically undercompensated for the weight I’m carrying.

the pattern

Sprint hard, ship everything, absorb the coordination debt, crash, need recovery, repeat. Each cycle works in isolation. The output is real. But the recovery between cycles gets shorter, and the crash gets harder.

The team executed well during the sprint. That’s not the problem. The problem is structural: there’s no one to share the coordination load with. Hiring would help, but there’s no budget for senior hires when the CTO is making 2,900 EUR and the company is still pre-profitability.

what I’d do differently

Set boundaries earlier in the sprint. Block four-hour focused chunks where I’m unavailable. More productive in four focused hours than eight fragmented ones. The team doesn’t need me online all day. They need me for clear decisions at specific moments.

Push back on scope sooner. Not every interesting feature needs to ship this sprint. The verification feature was cool. The report editing was useful. The skeleton loading UIs were nice. But did they all need to ship simultaneously? No.

Force the hard conversation about resources before the burnout, not after. The team watching me burn out and feeling bad about it doesn’t fix anything. Having an honest discussion about sustainable capacity does.

the uncomfortable part

You can’t “work smarter” your way out of a fundamental resource constraint. If you’re the only person who can do architecture, customer support, sprint planning, and senior-level debugging, no amount of time management fixes it. Either you get help, reduce scope, or burn out. Those are the actual options.

I went back to work in January. Chest pains stopped after the holiday break. I’m being more deliberate about what I take on. But the structural issue isn’t solved. It’s just managed.