What Three Hours a Day Taught Me About Leading Under Constraint
- Jun 7
- 2 min read
By João Cypriano
I started Abastio as a side project. I was planning my own wedding, hiring a wedding planner and watching him juggle Excel sheets, calendar notes, and physical notebooks. I kept thinking, "there has to be a better way to do this." That thought turned into a SaaS platform for event professionals managing sub-contractors.
I still work a full-time job as a Data Engineer. Abastio gets my evenings, my weekends, and whatever focus I have left after a workday (when I'm not also worrying about my own wedding). That constraint has taught me more about leadership and decision-making than any job I've had.
You Don't Get to Hesitate
When you have maybe three good hours each day to put into your company, you learn fast that hesitation is a luxury you can't afford. I don't get to spend a week thinking about a feature decision or a pricing change. If it's reversible, I decide and move on. If it turns out wrong, I fix it the next session.
That might sound reckless. It's actually the opposite. Sitting on a decision for days when you only have a handful of usable hours each week is what's reckless. Every day you spend wondering what to do is a day your limited time produced nothing.
One thing I'd recommend to any founder: write your decisions down with a short version of why you made them. Then check back a week later. You start to see where your instincts are sharp and where they're not. That feedback loop is more valuable than any leadership book I've read.
My Biggest Mistake So Far
For the first few months I just built. Like a lot of engineers, I kept adding features, polishing the UI, putting one more thing on the roadmap. I was shipping fast and the product was getting better every coding session.
But nobody was using it. Because I wasn't selling it. I wasn't talking to potential customers. I wasn't putting it in front of the people it was built for. I was hiding in product work, because building is comfortable and selling is not.
When I forced myself to spend my available time on getting users instead of adding features, things started moving. The product didn't need to be perfect. It needed to be in front of people who could use it.
If you're a founder spending every night coding, ask yourself one question: when was the last time you talked to a potential customer? If you can't remember, that's the problem. Not the missing feature.
Fewer Decisions, Not More Time
You don't need more time. You need fewer decisions to make each day. Build a routine, stick to it, and spend at least half your energy on the work that feels uncomfortable. That's usually where the growth is hiding.
Constraint isn't a problem to solve. It's a teacher. It strips away the luxury of indecision and forces you to figure out what actually matters. Three hours a day is enough to build a company, if you stop wasting them on the wrong things.
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