What a 37-Hour Power Outage Taught Me About Building

The storm didn’t ask if I was ready

Monday night the power went out. Not for a few hours. For 37 hours.

My town got hit hard. And my homelab, my home office, my sites, my entire operational setup runs out of that house.

I had a choice. Pack it in, declare force majeure, and wait for the power company. Or figure it out.

I dragged a generator into position, ran extension cords, made some decisions fast about what was worth powering and what wasn’t. My NAS stays up. My networking gear stays up. The workstation stays up. Everything else can wait.

By morning I was at my desk, remote-connected to my 9-5, pushing code updates, and still showing up in conversations on X.

I’m not telling you this to flex. I’m telling you because I didn’t know I’d do that until I had to.

Pressure reveals priority

When you’ve got limited generator capacity, you stop guessing about what matters. You know. Immediately.

The homelab stays up because my sites run on it and my clients depend on those sites. The rest of the house can be warm tomorrow. That clarity is something I’ve been chasing in planning sessions for months. A storm handed it to me in about four minutes.

There’s a version of yourself that only shows up when quitting is the easiest option. When it would’ve been completely reasonable to just say “storm knocked me out, back tomorrow.” That version shows up and either steps forward or doesn’t.

I didn’t want to find out I was someone who steps back. Turns out I’m not. That’s worth knowing.

The myth that solo founders should do it all

I had a call earlier this week with another founder. Good conversation. Real one. The kind you can’t manufacture from a content thread.

We talked about the “bootstrap everything” mythology that runs through builder culture. The idea that if you can’t do it yourself, you’re not really building. That marketing is just coding with words and you should figure it out. That needing help is a weakness to outgrow.

That’s not a philosophy. It’s a trap.

I’ve been inside SaaS teams for 15 years. I’ve watched what happens when technical founders try to handle every function themselves past the point where it’s teaching them something. You stop growing the product and start maintaining your own limitations.

Solo building is one of the best learning environments I’ve ever put myself in. Building RoleNavigator with Claude Code, managing the backlog myself, running UAT, shipping and iterating, that’s genuinely taught me things I couldn’t have learned any other way.

But it’s not the path to a $1M business on its own. At some point you bring in people who specialize. People who are better than you at specific things. That’s not a concession. That’s the actual plan.

Knowing your strengths and saying so out loud isn’t arrogance. It’s the prerequisite for building a real team.

Networking isn’t just information. It’s fuel.

I’m going to say something that sounds obvious but I think most people don’t actually believe: talking to other founders is one of the highest-leverage things you can do.

Not for the tips. Not for the connections, though those matter. For what happens to your thinking when you’re in a real conversation with someone who’s in it too.

That call earlier this week sent me back to work with more energy than I’d had all month. We covered things I already knew, some of which I’d read, some of which I’d lived. But hearing someone else work through the same questions makes the ideas real in a different way.

Working alone compounds. So does the isolation that comes with it. A conversation breaks the seal. You remember why you started. You get ideas you weren’t chasing. You find out someone else is stuck on the exact thing you solved last month.

X has started doing this for me too. Not the broadcast side, but the reply threads. Genuine back-and-forth with people who are building things or thinking hard about them. It’s not a replacement for a real founder conversation, but it’s warmer than nothing and it’s daily.

What this week actually taught me

Three things I’m carrying out of this week:

Pressure is a diagnostic tool. You find out what you actually value, and how you actually respond, when the comfortable option is available and you don’t take it. Manufacture that pressure on purpose or wait for a storm to do it for you.

Knowing what you’re good at is a competitive advantage. Say it out loud. Stop performing “I do everything.” Know your zone, staff your gaps, and move faster.

People are the accelerant. The right conversation at the right time is worth more than another hour in the code editor. Invest in those deliberately.

The power came back on Wednesday. I was back on grid, generator back in the garage, homelab running clean.

But I kept working the same way I had been.

That felt like the point.

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Building in public, weekly. Follow along on X @justinhammon_ or connect on LinkedIn.