What I learned about procrastination while scaling my startup to 4.2 million users

Cozy.

That’s how I felt, tucked beneath what may have been the world’s softest blanket. It was a familiar moment , waking up to my 6 am alarm after a night of tossing and turning.

In a few minutes, I would answer the same question I had faced every weekday for the past year: Should I stay in bed or should I work on my side business?

Balancing a full-time job with the responsibilities of scaling my startup, JotForm, taught me a lot about myself. I learned that I was somewhat risk averse and that raising venture capital wasn’t appealing to me.

This meant two things:

1. I had to prioritize profitability from day one.
2. In order to experience consistent gains, I had to beat my arch-nemesis: procrastination.

I want to share my experience of overcoming procrastination while scaling a side project into a company that now employs more than 130 people. But before diving in, it might be interesting to take a look at how two types of founders handle procrastination: VC-backed founders vs bootstrappers.

Are bootstrappers more likely to procrastinate?

VC-backed founders may have a slight psychological advantage when compared to their bootstrapping counterparts: the pressure that comes with taking someone else’s money.

But that’s not all. Another reason is because once a company has grown accustomed to a certain level of spending, scaling back becomes next to impossible. Should the company fail to gain traction within 12 to 18 months, it could very well mean the end.

Conversely, the bootstrapper must learn how to push through procrastination  without these motivating forces.

I encountered this while building JotForm in 2006. While I loved what I was building ,  the temptation to procrastinate sometimes got the best of me.

The real reasons we procrastinate

Why do we delay doing the tasks that get us closer to the things we want?

Through self-observation, one thing became clear: There was always a reason for my procrastination. Whenever I noticed the urge to put something off, I tried to ask myself why. Sure enough, my mind always answered.

Once I had identified the real problem,  I could develop an appropriate plan to reclaim my productivity.

Here are the most common reasons that I figured often lead us to procrastinate: