It was a good life. Wake up, set your own hours, do some programming on the site and automation tools, take a mental break to communicate with users via email. All in our boxers. Our friends would call us to go out, one of us could handle the emails while the other was out, or hell, we would both leave, so long as people got a reply within 6 hours, everybody seemed to be happy.
Life was good, we were both getting laid and our apartments were clean. Every now and then, a customer here and there wouldn't get it and would request a phone call. We gladly called them up, and fixed in 30 mins what normally would take us 7-10 days of back and forth emailing!
This gratification encouraged us to put our number on our webpage. We did, and closed many sales over the phone. Our sales tripled, our company grew more. we were both earning 50k/year in profits compared to last year's 20, and growing more than linearly.
What happened next? The calls grew more frequent. We would leave them to answering machine and when we would call back, the customers would be angry. Eventually customers called us out on the fact that we only answered calls as of 11:00am and they made us feel guilty about not having a phone answered during business hours.
So we conceded. 9am - 6pm our lines would be answered. After all, we owe it to the customers who brought us our livelihood. 2 guys splitting the task; it was maintainable. All of a sudden though, we couldn't work when we wanted. We had to be up and in the office at 9.
We tried maintaining our lifestyles, coding killer features until 4am, going out when our friends would call us. Eventually there were consequences for these actions.
Gone were the days of coding in our underwear, gone were the haphazard productivity blitzes, gone were the days of our startup's spirit. We lost sleep because we had to be up at 8. Lots of it. If one of us would sleep in, the other would cover until eventually the person waking up early more often would fall to resentment.
Our product suffered, our relationship suffered, our productivity blitzes? Gone. We were canceling plans with friends because we had work to do at night that couldn't get done cause we were on the phone. Nobody would outsource our calls, most of our clients spoke french. Our website hadn't changed graphic design since we put our winter theme up. It was july and our logo was covered in snow. Our phone staff kept quitting. Our sales plateaued. We even started wearing pants. I eventually sold my half.
Trust me kids, don't put your number on your homepage. Stick to email support and get by. Find a way to get by without a filing cabinet and go travel the world while working.