The Trough of Despair  ## Metadata - Author: [[Alex]] - Full Title: The Trough of Despair - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [entrepreneurship, leadership, burnout] author: Alex source: alexstandiford.com reference: [https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/personal-updates/the-trough-of-despair/] date created: 2025-10-20 00:00 --- # 🏷️ Title: The Trough of Despair ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - Include links cited in or relevant to the article. ## 📝 Summary - What happened. - Alex resumed public personal updates, shifted from hands-on engineering to leadership, hit a financial crunch after poor forecasting during a slow summer, and is rebuilding systems and balance. - Why it matters. - Highlights the founder transition from “solution creator” to “problem solver,” the risks of seasonal cash flow, and the importance of process, communication, and mental health. - Key stakeholders. - Alex, team (Novatorius, Siren-related work), clients, family/children. - Risks and tradeoffs. - Short-term client delivery vs. long-term systems/process investment; burnout risk; reliance on a few large clients (“big rocks”). - Bottom line. - Despite a “trough of despair,” momentum, improved leadership, and better sales discipline suggest recovery; celebrate small wins. ## 📖 Main Content - Core arguments. - Writing publicly builds cadence and clarity. Leadership focus (communication, listening, asking better questions) scales the business more than coding. Cash flow forecasting failures—especially in slow summers—can endanger small agencies. Balance near-term delivery with building durable systems. - Context and terms. - “Trough of despair”: the low point in a founder’s journey marked by stress and uncertainty before inflection. - From “answers person” to coach: leading via questions to enable others. - Uncertainties. - Specific financial figures, exact process changes, and sales pipeline details are not disclosed. ### 🗒️ Notes - “Writing begets writing”; using public updates to reinforce habit. - Theme of the year: re-embracing visionary role; others writing most code; Alex focuses on PHPNomad libs to support the team. - Managed up to ~15 people—triple prior scope—prompting leadership upskilling. - Communication gains: - Better with friends/family/kids. - Clients happier; fewer over-promises. - Talks less; listens more; asks better questions. - Parenting/ops crossover: use non-leading questions to get better inputs (meal planning example). - Consequence: under-forecasted finances; hit a cash crunch; needed a family loan; wake-up call. - Seasonal reality: summer is slow for agencies; must plan accordingly. - Business fragility: few “big rocks”; losing any hurts; building systems to reduce risk. - Current focus: juggle high-touch client demands with investing in processes for future growth. - Mental health: burnout risk; relies on personal systems; stress acknowledged. - Label: “The trough of despair” (credit to Chris Badgett of LifterLMS). - Outlook: optimistic; small focused team aligned; steady momentum; celebrate small wins (homemade cake). ## 📚 References - “The trough of despair” in startup lore (context): The Gartner hype cycle’s “Trough of Disillusionment” offers a similar concept: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle - LifterLMS (Chris Badgett): https://lifterlms.com/ ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - Paragraph A paraphrase. - I’m restarting regular personal updates to build a writing habit and share more openly while shifting from coding to leading; my team now ships most code. - Paragraph B paraphrase. - Growing to manage about 15 people forced me to improve communication—listening more, asking better questions—which improved family interactions and client satisfaction. ## 📰 Newsletter - Founder’s Corner: From Code to Coaching - This week, Alex shares a raw look at the “trough of despair”—the founder phase where stress peaks before momentum returns. Key takeaways: write regularly to think clearly, lead by asking better questions, and plan aggressively for seasonal slumps. If you run a WordPress shop or product, consider a “systems week” each month: document client processes, set realistic SLAs, and trim over-promises. Also worth a look: LifterLMS’s community leadership insights and the classic “Trough” framing from the hype cycle. - Helpful links: - Seasonal planning ideas: https://www.shopify.com/blog/seasonality - LifterLMS community: https://lifterlms.com/ ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Developer advocacy: Publish a monthly founder update; host a Q&A on leadership vs. coding. - Education: Run workshops on “coaching via questions”; office hours on scoping and estimates. - Developer experience: Create internal templates for proposals, estimates, and postmortems. - Developer marketing: Case studies emphasizing process reliability; track MQL→SQL attribution. - Community management: Share burnout resources; set clear CoC enforcement. - Internal/external/cross-project: Establish feedback loops between delivery and sales; monthly SLA review. #### OSPO - Policy & Governance: Define contribution guidelines and decision rights for internal libs. - License Compliance: Quarterly license scan cadence; review third-party use in PHP libs. - Security Management: Create vuln intake and embargo policy; sign release artifacts. - Software Inventory: Maintain SBOM for client deliverables; freshness SLOs. - Developer Support: Offer compliance/training office hours. - Community Engagement: Small upstream sponsorships for critical dependencies. - Strategic Alignment: KPIs for bus-factor reduction; quarterly exec report. #### Community - Maintainers: Release hygiene checklists; roadmap clinics. - Contributors: First-issue rotations with pairing sessions. - Sponsors: Publish budget and milestone reports. - Ecosystem: Incident coordination tabletop twice yearly. #### WordPress - Core: Performance budgets and triage rotations. - Core Performance: Profiling and perf dashboards. - Core AI: Guardrails and red-teaming pilots. - Core Program Team: Biweekly syncs, dependencies, retros. - Mobile: Offline UX backlog; telemetry review. - Playground: Repro labs and education modules. - Community: Meetup kits; speaker mentorship. - Training: Lesson paths; certification pilots. - Marketing: Narrative on sustainable agency ops. - Support: KB gaps; escalation paths. - Design: UX audits; design tokens. - Documentation: Examples-first patterns; style guide. - Photos/TV: Submission and caption quality guides. - Polyglots: Glossary alignment; locale coverage. - Accessibility: WCAG audit cadence; tooling. - Meta: .org roadmap; API reliability. - CLI: Command coverage; plugin scaffolds. - Hosting: Cross-host reliability telemetry. - Tide: Scoring transparency; review loops. - Openverse: Ingestion reliability; moderation policy. - Themes/Plugins: Review throughput; security liaisons. #### The WPCC - Programs: Fellowships, microgrants, maintainer stipends. - Projects: Governance clinics; doc sprints. - Funding experiments: Matched grants; milestone payouts. ### FAIR - Technical independence: Signatures and provenance on releases. - Policies and covenants: Funding transparency; anti-capture clauses. - Governance artifacts: Shareable charters and scorecards. ## 🧪 Hypotheses - Coaching-style leadership reduces client over-promising and increases satisfaction. - Seasonal forecasting buffers (3–4 months runway) reduce founder stress and churn. - Process investment during busy periods increases delivery reliability within 2 quarters. - Diversifying top clients decreases revenue varian - Summary: I hit the “trough of despair,” rebuilt my systems, and somehow kept the lights on. Here’s how this year has reshaped me as a founder, a leader, and a parent. - URL: https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/personal-updates/the-trough-of-despair/  So, I finally decided it’s time to get back to some kind of cadence of publishing my personal updates. I want to publish more thought leadership on my website, and I have found that [writing begets writing](https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/tutorials/how-to-write-blog-content-consistently/). Besides, it’s *really* healthy to journal more-regularly. I’m already doing that in a private context, but I think it would be good to also share some of those moments on my blog. [That’s the spirit of this damn thing, after all.](https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/speaking/presentations/reclaiming-authenticity-building-your-personal-hub-in-a-post-twitter-era/). So, here’s to new habits. Or is it just old habits made new again. Or maybe it’s the habits we made along the way. Either way, let’s get caught up on the goings on for the past several months. Hopefully future updates won’t be so…broad, and I can hone-in on specific aspects a little closer moving forward. The last personal update I published was in last December, and I talked a lot about [re-acquainting with being a visionary in my business instead of the developer employee](https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/personal-updates/re-acquainting-myself-with-being-a-visionary/), and honestly that’s been the overall theme of this entire year. Over the last 6 months, [Novatorius](https://www.novatori.us) has committed thousands of lines of code for various clients, as well as updates to [Siren](https://www.sirenaffiliates.com). Most of that code’s been written by others. What I write these days is mostly to make life easier for the team. [Usually PHPNomad libraries](https://phpnomad.com/). But other than that, almost everything in my life lately has been all about leadership, team dynamics, organization and processes. There’s been a lot of professional growth for me in that regard, with Novatorius peaking out earlier this year during a busy time with about 15 people reporting to me, or reporting to someone on my team. Which, for me, that’s about 3 times the number of people I’ve ever managed on projects before, and it was a lot. So, since then, I’ve been focusing on leveling myself up to become better at communicating and leading people. Unsurprisingly enough, that focus has paid off in dividends in areas I didn’t even realize needed improvement. 1. I’ve become much better at talking with friends, family, and my children. 2. I’ve found that my clients are generally happier, and I’m not over-promising. 3. I’ve learned to generally speak less. (lol that sounds so bad but stay with me) Most of this has come from learning to listen, and leveraging better questions to prompt people to think for themselves, and allow me to either guide them to the best answer, or to gather more information before I suggest a solution. I’ve been saying that [I am becoming an actual problem solver instead of a solution creator.](https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/are-you-a-problem-solver-or-solution-creator/) This has been one of the biggest changes for me, because my entire career I’ve been looked at as “the person with the answers”. It comes with the territory of being an engineer your entire adult life – you just assume that you’re the one who has to have an answer to every problem. That’s a hard habit to break. Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much of these skills have allowed me to become a better coach for my children. I always thought I was pretty good at this, but I’ve been able to drastically improve this, and have been able to do better at asking more non-leading questions that get answers from my kids. For example, I’ve been able to much more-reliably meal prep during the week because I’ve stopped asking “what do you want to eat for dinner” and instead asking things like “what did you enjoy last week?” and “look at this cookbook and pick 5 things that look good for next week”. The unfortunate consequence of all of this learning is that I *utterly failed* this Summer at forecasting my finances and my sales, and the result is that I have been dead ass broke for the last couple of months. I’m honestly in a respectably-sized hole right now, and I don’t love that. I’m diggin’ my way out, and I have a pretty good-sized shovel, but needless to say I’m going to be doing a much better job of keeping my eyes on my sales process in the future because asking your parents for a loan so you can pay your bills *is just not something anyone wants to do*. I don’t feel *shame* in this, necessarily, but it was a real wakeup call. I’m still a very small, fragile, business [full of a few big rocks](https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/the-big-rock-problem/), and if any of them leave my jar I’m going to be hurting in a big way. Fortunately, I have the things in place to improve that, and have a path moving forward to ensure that we do better next year. The simple reality is Summer is *always* slow in the agency world, and I need to expect that next year. The most-painful part is that *we have absolutely made enough this year for me to not be in this position* – I just didn’t forecast well-enough to realize that I needed to slow my roll. So that’s where things stand now. My biggest focus at the moment is playing the balancing act between balancing the demands of my high-touch clients that pays me now, with investing in processes and systems in my business to allow me to carve out some more time to work on the future growth of the business. It’s a ludicrously delicate balance, and the target moves from month-to-month, but the opportunity to make the transition is one of the biggest reasons why I left my job to work for myself in the first place, so I’m going to keep doing it in the meantime. Overall this year has been a constant roller-coaster. Some days, I’m having nightmares that my kids won’t have anything under their Christmas tree. Other days I’m fulfilled, excited for the future, and jumping headlong into this journey. I’m mostly concerned about my mental health and maintaining my levels of burnout, which thankfully [I have a few great systems in place to maintain that](https://www.alexstandiford.com/tag/work-life-balance/) because otherwise I’d be totally fucked. I’d be lying if I didn’t say this put a pretty big toll on my stress levels. It’s been *a lot*, and I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been *okay* all the time. One of my dear friends, Chris Badgett of [LifterLMS](https://www.alexstandiford.com/go/lifterlms/) mentioned to me in a recent phone call that I’m in what he calls “The trough of despair” and I’ll tell ya what, it’s a pretty good articulation. But in-spite of all of that, I’m still optimistic about where I am, where the business is heading, and where the coming months will take me. I’ve managed to assemble a small, focused team of people who are helping me grow the business, and fulfill the promises we make. We’re not exactly putting a dent in the earth right now, but we have dreams, a vision, and every week we’re rowing in the same direction more often than last week. That momentum is why we survived this past summer *at all*, and I believe that upward trajectory will continue in coming months. Until then though, I’ll be celebrating the small wins with homemade cake., The Trough of Despair, Alex, 01k81xak7w593qmm0s3gwqepb4.