I haven’t written for awhile. To be honest, I haven’t done much of anything for awhile. I haven’t spent much time talking with friends and colleagues, I haven’t really had any energy or original ideas, I haven’t built any side projects, and I haven’t had much fun. I’ve gotten up every day and gone through the motions, but it’s been a largely fruitless pursuit that left me feeling pretty empty.

I’m not sure when it started, but somewhere along the way the fire inside of me — the force that made me push myself to expand my horizons and do bigger things — dimmed and started to flicker a little. Until a few weeks ago, I was concerned that it was going out, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it.

We sold AgileZen to Rally Software two years ago this March. Rally is honestly a fantastic company — the best I’ve ever worked for — but to be honest I don’t think I ever was fully at peace with us selling to them. The primary reason behind starting our own company was to be in control of our own destiny, and to succeed or fail based on the merits of our own actions. I was never in it for the money, and while we profited financially from the acquisition there’s always been a nagging sense of guilt that in selling the company we lost the most valuable thing we had gained.

My stress hasn’t come entirely from the acquisition, though. Moving to Raleigh has been great, but at times it’s also been trying. We rented a house when we first moved down, and just before renewing our lease we discovered that our landlord hadn’t been paying the mortgage and that the house was being foreclosed upon. Fortunately, we had the luck to find another house available for rent in an even better location, and the means to lease it, but the stress of the situation and the actual act of packing all our shit up and moving (again) was taxing.

We also hadn’t taken a real vacation since 2007. We’d tagged on a couple days in Vegas after a conference, and stayed with some friends on the beach for a few days in summer, but we hadn’t really been “disconnected” from our work for far too long. Also, since Niki and I work together, it makes unplugging that much more difficult; when we go home, we still find ourselves talking about work. As a result, we never really get to leave the office. When things are going well that can be a great experience, but when you have bad feelings associated with your work, not being able to escape them is trying. We’d talked in vague terms about taking a vacation several times, but never actually booked anything.

In retrospect, I’d probably been on this path for years. I knew all along that I shouldn’t feel the way I did, but that just made me feel guilty for not appreciating what I had. I recognize how fortunate I’ve been in life, and not being happy makes it that much more difficult.

I’ve talked about “burnout” before like I knew what I meant, but I can say with confidence that until recently I was full of shit. It’s kind of hard to describe… kind of like the entire world is slowly turning grey around you. Food tastes bland, music is out of tune, and you lose your ability to do things that make you happy. It’s a subtle change that happens over time, and since you can only compare experiences to what you can remember, if you aren’t paying attention you won’t recognize it’s happening. If it goes on for long enough, you forget how you’re supposed to feel, so you don’t realize how bad you’re feeling.

Finally, Niki and I decided that after spending Christmas with our families, we’d take a real vacation. We decided to travel to St. Lucia, which being a different country meant that we’d be completely off the grid. No internet, no phones, nothing.

On the trip down, our flight was delayed, causing us to almost miss a connection, and the airline lost our luggage. More stress. We made it, but the first two days on the island were surreal. There we were, staying at an opulent resort, surrounded by beauty and waited on hand and foot, and all we did was talk about how shitty we felt and how much we wanted to leave.

Burnout is a sneaky bastard. It creeps up slowly and attaches to you like a parasite and starts to suck your lifeblood. Once it gets its fangs into you deep enough, you need a major jolt to the system in order to shake it off.

For me, it happened on the third day of our trip. By the end of the day I realized something had changed in me, and over the next few days I started feeling better and better. I know now that I had shaken my burnout.

For whatever reason, our trip to St. Lucia — both the trial of traveling there and the experience once we made it — was precisely what I needed. I’m embarassed to say it, but for the first couple of days after coming home I looked at simple things like the trees around our house in absolute fascination. I had forgotten how beautiful the world was, and it was like I was seeing it all for the very first time.

Things are bright, colorful, and interesting again. To be honest, moreso than I can ever remember. My fire is rekindled, I’m much more at peace, and I have an energy coursing through me that I haven’t felt in a very long time. 2012 is going to be a great year.

When we launched AgileZen, Niki and I made a deal. We’d earmark $20,000 — almost all of our savings at the time — for launching and running the business. We promised ourselves and each other that we would only spend this money, and no more, on our crazy attempt at entrepreneurship.

In retrospect, this was one of the best decisions we made as we launched the company. It allowed us to think of the business as an investment — and since we suffer from a certain level of egotism that seems to be necessary in entrepreneurs, we considered an investment in ourselves to be a good one. Being a bit of a control freak, I’m most comfortable with situations where my success or failure is largely determined by my own actions. The worst situations aren’t ones where you fail because of your actions, but because of the actions of someone else. But I digress.

We devised a bare-minimum budget, and after doing the math we determined that we could get our burn rate low enough that our twenty grand gave us somewhere around 16 months of runway at zero revenue. As it turned out, AgileZen generated enough revenue to cover our operational costs in the first 24 hours after launch, and was profitable enough to cover all of our living expenses in four months. Since we generated revenue from day one, we only spent about $700 of the $20,000 that we’d earmarked.

Having limited resources made us approach the endeavor much differently than if we had raised outside investment before we launched. Because we didn’t have the money to do any significant pre-sales work for individual customers, we were forced to focus on building a product that our customers would sell for us. A great salesforce can amplify your product’s ability to sell itself, but early on this amplification can mask deficiencies in your product. There’s certainly a level of company and product maturity at which a salesforce makes a great deal of sense. However, if you hire a great salesforce before your product has stabilized, you risk building a mediocre product and not realizing it since it’s selling so well.

The lack of a salesforce also meant that we typically couldn’t sell to large organizations, at least through large-scale “enterprise-wide adoption” sorts of deals. Even before we were acquired by Rally, we had plenty of customers who are small groups inside of large organizations, but we never flew out to meet with CXOs to convince them that AgileZen could make them more efficient. Because we designed our business model to sell organically to small teams, we could design our product the same way.

Just as you have to have your audience in mind when writing a book, you need to understand your end-user when you build software. If we had the potential to sell to both small and large organizations, we’d have been forced to design software that could be used by both. That’s much more difficult, and maybe even impossible.