There's a special kind of madness that hits when you're running on four hours of sleep for seven nights in a row. Somewhere between day five and full zombie, your brain starts negotiating with your soul. "Let's just hit the deadline, then you can sleep. Forever, if necessary."
So there we were, one step away from hallucinating, staring at a countdown timer we'd set ourselves. 5:00 PM — Launch. We were ready. Steady. Awake-ish.
Well. Not quite.
Reality check: the night before, we were still pushing code until 3 AM. Slept a generous three hours, then back at it by 6 AM. Classic founder self-care. By 2 PM, things were semi-wrapped, so I ran home for a speed-run lunch, dreaming of beers and serotonin.
Came back… and found out we'd forgotten one small, minor, government-mandated thing.
Fiscalisation.
In Croatia, that's not optional. Every bill has to go through the national fiscalisation system. Otherwise, you're not a startup — you're a crime scene.
So we cracked our third Red Bull in two hours and went full DEFCON-1. Found a third-party solution, duct-taped it to our payment gateway, ran test transactions like mad scientists, and by some miracle, it worked. The clock? 4:45 PM.
We jumped on a video call with the team. Beer chilling in the fridge. Eyes twitching from sleep deprivation. Ready.
We tried to wait for 5:00 PM, we really did. But coding makes you thirsty. The beers were opened at 4:59. At 5:00 PM sharp, we all clicked the launch button together — very ceremonial, very "Sheldon and Leonard publish a physics paper" energy.
We were live.
Cheers all around. High fives over video call. The beer was cold, the repo was clean, and life felt weirdly good. I remember thinking, "Nice. No one's gonna book anything today. We can actually sleep. Reset. Breathe."
Ah, the sweet, sweet naivety of a tech founder.
Because at 5:43 PM — forty-three minutes later — someone booked a session. Not visited the site. Not clicked around. Booked. Paid. Confirmed.
The scream that came out of our apartment shook the entire neighborhood. Like, dogs were barking. It was a weird mix of joy, fear, and existential nausea. Someone was going to use our platform. For real.
Now the big question: would it actually work?
Sure, we ran a thousand tests. But nothing simulates real-world chaos like… well, the real world. What if it crashed? What if payments failed? What if the session got stuck in some fiscal black hole?
Then came session day. Naturally, the first booking was at 9:00 AM. Not afternoon. Not lunchtime. 9-freaking-AM.
We were online by 6:00 AM. Just in case. Laptop glowing. Nerves crackling. Caffeine flowing like a VC's money in 2021.
9:00 AM: server traffic spikes. Console's active. Our stomachs are doing death metal solos.
9:15: nothing. 9:30: still nothing. 10:15: ping — email from the customer.
"Everything was great. The platform's actually super smooth. Well done!"
We stared at each other in stunned silence. We built something. It didn't crash. Someone used it. And they liked it.
Time to sleep? Damn right.