How We Run Startups Without Losing Our Minds

This week on Work, Rewritten, we’re handing the mic to Fab and JY — the brains behind BuddiesHR and veterans of the startup grind. They’ve co-founded six startups (yes, six), gone through YC, raised capital, bootstrapped, and somehow managed to stay sane through it all.

This one’s for the founders, builders, and indie hackers trying to do it all without burning out. Let’s get into it.👇

Building and growing a startup isn’t just about great ideas or hard work. It’s about how you organize your time, protect your energy, and make the right decisions every day. Over the years (and multiple startups later), we’ve learned a lot about what works and what definitely doesn’t.

Before we dive into how we structure our days as entrepreneurs, here’s a quick intro about who we are.

Who are we?

Hi 👋 We’re Fab and JY co-founders of BuddiesHR. We’re both software engineers (No you don’t need a co-founder with complementary skills 😇).

We co-founded 6 startups together in the Martech, Salestech and HRTech. We went through YC in 2021. We went through the fundraising path as well as in the bootstrapping one. We’ve also been working remotely for as long as we can remember.

In this article we’ll try to share how we organize our life as entrepreneurs and share what works for us hoping it can help some of you.

How do we organize our time as entrepreneurs

The problem

As entrepreneurs: Founders, CEOs, bootstrappers, indie hackers:

• There are always a million things to do. You spend your days trying to prioritize and asking yourself if you shouldn’t be doing something else.

• Your mental and physical health is constantly at risk. Days are long, sometimes painful, bad news is hard to digest… It’s easy to be eaten by the business.

• Spending time with your family/friends/exercising can’t wait for “when my startup will do X in revenue.” We fell into this trap too, but you soon realize that work won’t get stable any time soon. So you’d better call it the new normal and integrate sport, friends, family, and other priorities into it. You can’t buy family time back. What’s lost is lost.

Don't leave anything to chance, here is how we work:

Here are the rules we don’t negotiate on to be the best version of ourselves and ensure we perform well as entrepreneurs. You’ll notice we sometimes mix personal and professional, that’s on purpose. We believe that, as entrepreneurs, you can’t treat your work life and personal one separately, the way an employee does.

1. 💰 Work on what makes money

Let’s state that first, this is THE golden rule: "Work on what makes money" This sentence should resonate in your head every time you make a decision about what to prioritize. No kidding, we repeat this sentence a few times a day, EVERY DAY.

2. 🏋🏻‍♂️ Get basics done
   

The basics are: Eat clean, sleep well, Exercise often (Both endurance and force are recommended by experts).

Healthy mind resides in a healthy body

The impact on our work days is that you need to plan a sports session during your day. We used to schedule it around midday. It works well even when you have kids. But it’s really up to you and when you feel like exercising.

• Regarding sleep: track it, optimize for it.

• A few tips we follow: eat dinner early (about 3 hours before sleeping), keep the room dark and quiet, and maintain a temperature of 18-19 degrees.

• Prioritizing sleep also means that you may need a nap. Make time for that too. It’s better to spend 30 minutes on a nap than to have an unproductive afternoon.
  

This will help you maintain a clear mind, have foresight, think things through, and stay sharp in your work.

3. 🎮 Have personal goals
   

Running a startup can easily consume 100% of your time and mental space. That’s why we always keep a second "thread" open, a personal goal or project that has nothing to do with work.

Think of it like a secondary quest in a video game. It gives your brain something else to focus on, helping you recharge and prevent burnout.

This personal goal can be anything: training for a marathon, completing a video game, finishing a Lego set, reading a stack of books, or anything else that excites you outside of business.

What matters is having that other mission running in parallel. It reminds you that your identity isn't just tied to your company’s ups and downs and it keeps your motivation and creativity fresh for the long haul.

4. ⏰ Productivity time is sacred
   

Are you productive in the morning? Then protect this timeframe at all costs. At BuddiesHR, we have almost no meetings — we just sync when we need to debrief or make decisions. If it can wait, we simply stack topics to discuss during our next call. Simple, yet efficient.

These are 2 weekly meetings we keep every week:

• Monday sync: Useful to catch up after the weekend and plan the goals of the week

• Friday retrospective: Great to debrief the week by sharing positive and negative points. We also do a revenue analysis to check if we're on track and update our forecasts.
  

📌 Flexibility works both ways: You can work on weekends if you feel like it, if the business needs it temporarily. Need an afternoon off for family time on weekdays? Go for it.

6. 🏠 Family time is always a priority
   

We occasionally have late calls due to time zones and that’s okay. But 6 PM to 8 PM? That’s family time. Non-negotiable.

📌 Become a 'notification ninja'. Silence them when you don’t need them, it’s easy to do these days. If the idea feels uncomfortable, try it for a few days; you can always add back the ones you truly miss.

7. 🧠 Health > Grind
   

Always prioritize quality sleep over late-night grinding. On our end, we take more pride in our sleep scores than in the number of hours worked. Startup life is a marathon, not a sprint. It might sound obvious, but it’s a reminder worth keeping top of mind.

Final thoughts

✨ Remember the golden rule: Work on what makes money ✨

If you liked this article, follow us on LinkedIn and shoot us a message, we build in public and share no BS lessons on entrepreneurship. (JY Linkedin, Fab Linkedin)