What I told the children
I am not an entrepreneur | Post 2
I built BeforeYouSign in the evenings, alone, for eight months. I told the children the day after I registered the company. This is what happened next.
The day after I told Jerry, I told the children.
It was an ordinary evening, in the way every evening is ordinary until you change what is in it. The kitchen. After homework, before bed. The kind of moment when you can either land something carefully or rush past it, and what you do next decides how they remember the conversation.
They are ten and thirteen. I told them what I had built. I told them what it was for. I told them I had been working on it after they were asleep for the last eight months. And then I waited.
What they said is the reason this post exists.
“Mummy, you’re amazing.”
“What does it do?”
“Have you really built this yourself? When?”
“I am so proud of you.”
And from the older one, last and best:
“Can I be a Founder50 member?”
I had told my son about Founder50 before. The structure. The idea. He had stored it. And the question he asked when I told him about BeforeYouSign was not will it work, not what is it called, not who is it for. It was: can I be part of it?
And from the other end of the table
While I was still absorbing my son’s question, my ten-year-old daughter was thinking about it too. She is a budding entrepreneur in her own right. She has strong views on business, spends her pocket money on inventory for small ventures she runs at school, and has been known to give unsolicited pricing advice to adults.
She asked what BeforeYouSign cost. I said it was free while I was building it. She thought about it for about four seconds.
“Mummy, why don’t you offer a loyalty card promotion. Buy 10 reviews, get 1 free?”
I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because she was not wrong. She had, at ten years old, in the space of one conversation, worked out that a repeatable service needs a repeat-usage mechanic. She had picked the exact intuition that most SaaS founders take a year of user research to arrive at.
I have not built her loyalty card in. Yet.
But I have written it down. And when BeforeYouSign has a paid tier, and it will, one day, there is a version of her idea that will be in it, because she is the second person in my family, in the space of ten minutes, to have understood BYS before I had finished explaining it.
What the questions were really saying
I had told my son the truth about Founder50. The fifty people I had invited were people I trusted to use a half-built product in the real world and tell me, honestly, what worked and what did not. He listened. Then:
“I am thirteen. I don’t sign contracts. But I am your son. And I want to help you build it.”
Both children had done the same thing. They received what I told them and immediately reached for the version of it they could be useful in. Not a perk. Not a certificate. A role.
That is, it turns out, exactly what BeforeYouSign is trying to do for the people who use it. Not sell them a legal service. Put them in the room. Give them the same information the lawyer would flag, so they can walk into their own contract negotiation as a person whose voice counts.
I told my son that Founder50 was full, but that his job was different. His job was to remind me that the work I was doing was not just for the people whose names were on the list. It was for him, one day, when he signed his first employment contract. For his sister, when she took her first freelance job or launched the pricing model of whatever she builds next. For every person who would eventually be handed a piece of paper they did not understand and told to sign it before they could start.
He said “okay Mum,” which is thirteen-year-old for a lot of things, and this time meant “I got you.”
The evening I did not expect
I had spent eight months alone with this. I had told no-one because I was protecting it from the well-meant observations that would have ended it before it began. The evening I told the family was the evening I had been quietly dreading, because it was the evening I lost control of the story.
What I had not expected was that losing control of the story would be the best thing that happened to it.
I sat on the living room sofa after they had gone to bed and I cried. Not from grief. Not from stress. From the specific and unfamiliar feeling of being witnessed by the people whose witnessing mattered most, and finding that what they saw was not what I had feared they would see.
They did not see a mother stretched too thin. They did not see a woman taking on too much. They did not see the corporate escape story.
They saw something I had built. One wanted to help build it. One wanted to help sell it.
What I am still doing
I am still rewriting prompts based on what those first fifty people tell me. Still working at the day job. Still publishing this newsletter in the hours nobody else can claim. Founder50 is closed. Cohort 2 is open for a small group of readers who want to shape the product before it launches. Join here.
The midnight founder hours have not stopped. They have just become less lonely.
If you are reading this and you have been building something on a sofa, after the children are asleep, with two laptops and a reading lamp and the whole world quiet around you, I see you. The work you are doing in those hours is real.
And if there is someone in your life who might one day ask to be part of what you are building, tell them. Maybe earlier than I did. They may surprise you. They may name what you have built before you have found the words for it.
The story stops being yours alone the moment you say it out loud. That turned out to be the best thing that happened to a story that started in silence.
Louise