When someone asks me how Nubyron is going, I find it difficult to answer in one sentence. I could say that we are moving forward, that we have built a solid proposition, or that we have a clearer idea of the kind of company we want to become. All of that is true. It would also be an incomplete answer.
There are days when building Nubyron is genuinely stimulating. An interesting conversation appears, we solve a difficult problem, or someone understands precisely why our work matters. Those moments make it easy to remember why I started. On other days, I spend ten hours at my desk, close a considerable number of tasks and still finish wondering whether the company has actually moved forward.
Both belong to the same process. This publication exists because I want to try to describe it without turning every difficulty into a tragedy or every small step into a success story.
From the outside, starting a company is often condensed into attractive words: freedom, growth, independence, vision and leadership. They are not necessarily untrue. The problem is everything that disappears when the experience is reduced to those words. Freedom coexists with responsibility that cannot be delegated to somebody else. Independence also means that many decisions end on your desk. Growth, when it comes, requires surviving a long period in which there are very few clear signals that it will come at all.
I am beginning to understand that part.
A small company concentrates too much in one person
In an established company, different functions absorb different problems. Sales works on opportunities. Administration follows invoices and contracts. Marketing maintains the company’s presence. Operations protects delivery. Finance watches cash. Leadership tries to decide where resources should go.
When a company is starting, those functions exist on paper, but they are often the same person changing context throughout the day.
At Nubyron I have to think about the services we offer and how to deliver them well. I also have to think about clients, proposals, suppliers, contracts, invoicing, tax, content, partnerships, strategy, cash and sales. Some tasks are supported by professionals or collaborators, but responsibility for making the whole system fit together still sits here.
The difficulty is not only the volume of work. It is the variety. Reviewing a cloud architecture requires one kind of concentration. Preparing a commercial proposal requires another. Checking a contract, writing an article or deciding whether a new tool is worth paying for requires another change of mental frame. Each transition looks small, but by the end of the day the cost is considerable.
There is also a strange hierarchy between tasks. An urgent technical problem takes precedence easily because it is concrete: something is failing, there is a cause, and it must be found. Building an important commercial relationship can take weeks of conversations without producing a task that can be marked complete. Urgent work creates visible movement. Important work often advances in a much less satisfying way.
I do not think this is exceptional. It is probably the reality for many small companies. But knowing it intellectually is not the same as living it every day.
Knowing how to do the work does not mean knowing how to sell it
Sales is probably proving to be one of the hardest parts.
I come from a technical background. In technology, we are used to work being demonstrated in relatively concrete ways. A platform deploys or it does not. A system recovers within the agreed objective or takes too long. An automation removes manual steps or merely moves the problem somewhere else. Even where uncertainty exists, we can investigate, test and compare evidence.
In sales, the relationship between doing things well and getting a result is far less direct.
You can have experience, understand a problem and propose a sensible service. The other company may even recognise that the problem exists. None of that guarantees that it will act now, that budget exists, that the person you are talking to can make the decision, or that Nubyron is yet a sufficiently familiar option for the perceived risk.
When a company is new, nobody owes it trust. There are no ten years of case studies behind it and no brand that automatically reduces the sense of risk. There is no large sales department capable of sustaining hundreds of simultaneous conversations until a few turn into projects. Trust has to be built one conversation at a time while the company continues delivering, learning and paying its bills.
This has been an uncomfortable lesson: being technically capable and being easy to buy are different things.
Technical quality matters, but a client cannot inspect it completely before buying. In consulting, they are buying a promise about future work. They assess whether you understand their context, whether you will respond when a problem appears, whether you communicate clearly and whether the risk of choosing you is reasonable. Selling consulting is not only about explaining capability. It is about building enough trust for someone to put part of their infrastructure and reputation in your hands.
I am learning how to do that. Sometimes I explain too much. Sometimes I start solving the problem before establishing whether a real decision exists. At other times, a conversation seems to be moving and simply stops. There is not always an explanation. It may be timing, budget, an internal priority or a proposal that was not good enough.
I still find it hard to separate the rejection of one opportunity from a judgement about the whole company. I know they are not the same, but knowing that does not automatically remove the doubt.
Working all day does not always produce a visible signal
One of the hardest feelings to explain is reaching the end of a busy day and not knowing whether you really advanced.
You may have answered emails, reviewed documentation, prepared a proposal, spoken to a supplier, updated a page, resolved an incident and organised the week’s priorities. None of that work is imaginary. All of it was necessary. Yet from a certain distance, the company can appear to be in exactly the same place it was that morning.
Part of the problem is that many results have a long latency. A conversation started today may become an opportunity in two months or may never become one. An article may help somebody understand Nubyron long after it was published. A partner relationship needs several meetings before it produces anything tangible. Even a good decision may offer no immediate confirmation.
Technical work accustomed me to shorter feedback loops. You run a test and receive a signal. You deploy a change and observe its behaviour. When building a company, some of the most important decisions are made with incomplete information and evaluated only after weeks have passed.
That creates a constant temptation to fill the day with tasks that can be completed. Fixing a page, adjusting an automation or reviewing a tool offers a sense of progress that an uncertain sales conversation does not. The problem is that a company can become very efficient at doing things that do not yet generate enough business.
I am trying to distinguish activity from progress more clearly. I do not always succeed.
Every decision feels larger when there is little margin
In a small company, every euro matters in a very concrete way. Not because any individual expense will cause a crisis, but because there is little room to accumulate mediocre decisions.
A monthly subscription looks small until it is added to fifteen others. A supplier can save time or introduce a dependency that is expensive to reverse. A campaign can open conversations or consume budget without teaching you very much. Hiring help too early puts pressure on cash; doing it too late can limit the ability to deliver and grow.
There is no clean formula for deciding. You have to estimate return, but also opportunity cost, risk and the time a decision might release. Sometimes paying is sensible. Sometimes you build something internally that you should have bought. At other times, you pay for a tool that appeared to solve an important problem and discover that the real constraint was somewhere else.
Cash turns abstract decisions into physical ones. It forces prioritisation and acceptance that not every good idea can be pursued at the same time. It also makes the relationship between sales and time more visible. A delayed opportunity is not only a future number: it changes how much you can invest today, which help you can bring in and which risks you can take.
I do not want to dramatise this. Nubyron is not living through an exceptional story, and I am not the first person to discover how a company works. But I do not want to hide it behind words such as “growth” and “strategy” when the daily reality often consists of deciding where not to spend, what to postpone and which bet deserves another month of attention.
Responsibility carries a different weight
Working for another company also involves responsibility. I had important projects, systems and decisions in my hands before founding Nubyron. Even so, responsibility feels different when no larger structure can absorb a mistake.
A poor commercial decision affects cash. A bad estimate affects the person collaborating with you and the client who trusted the proposal. A week spent on the wrong problem does not dissolve between several departments. Not everything literally depends on one person, but during this phase many consequences return to the founder.
This can lead to overthinking some decisions and, paradoxically, making others too quickly because there is no energy left. It can make switching off difficult: even when you are not actively working, your mind continues resolving conversations, scenarios and risks.
I am learning that leadership does not mean feeling certain before deciding. It often means accepting that information is missing, choosing with the context available and preserving the ability to correct course. Changing your mind does not always mean the previous decision was foolish. Sometimes the company, the market or the information has changed.
I do not have an elegant conclusion about this. I only know that the external image of “making your own decisions” omits the weight of not being able to ask somebody else to make the difficult decision for you.
I still believe in Nubyron
None of this is intended as a complaint. I chose to build Nubyron and I still believe in the idea: a small, close and senior technical firm can help companies that need judgement and operational capacity without creating another layer of dependency.
I also believe it is worth trying to build a company around a way of working we can defend. Being clear when we do not know something. Not recommending technology because it is fashionable. Documenting. Responding. Saying no when a project is not a fit. Building professional relationships that do not depend on exaggerating what we are.
The difficult part is that believing in the idea does not remove the uncertainty of executing it. Conviction and doubt can exist at the same time. You can be proud of what has been built and concerned about what is missing. You can know where you want to go without knowing which route will work.
I want Building Nubyron to document this stage while it is still happening. To write about sales before I feel that I know how to sell. To write about building a team while we are still discovering how to do it. To write about mistakes without waiting for time to turn them into perfectly ordered anecdotes.
Perhaps some of these concerns will look small in a few years. Perhaps others will still be exactly here. For now, this is what exists: a company moving forward, a considerable amount left to learn, and the intention to describe the process without pretending it is always beautiful.