By Victoria Loskutova – Host of The First-Time CEO podcast
It’s easier than ever to become a startup founder. Don’t get me wrong: running a startup and turning it into a real business is anything but easy. But creating one? From idea to landing page, social media accounts, incorporation, and even app creation – what once took months now takes a weekend. I recently vibe-coded my new AI SaaS app, Reclair, during the hackathon!
But what does launching and running a startup as a first-time CEO actually mean today? That question has guided me for the past two and a half years and led me to launch The First-Time CEO podcast – a space to explore how new CEOs navigate the challenges. Through the adrenaline of creation, the chaos of growth, and the quiet reckoning when the hype fades, you are confronted with your own leadership – your decisions, resilience, and capacity to evolve.
As a founder, eventually you’re left one-on-one with yourself.
In 2023, I co-founded my first tech startup to solve a problem I faced: building a better copywriting workflow. We created AI-driven teams to help solopreneurs and small teams streamline operations. The thrill of being early in the AI wave was intoxicating – but so was the pressure. As a first-time CEO, I had to learn business, leadership, and AI in real time, all while navigating the emotional complexities of working closely with someone I trusted.
The first-time CEO MBA
That experience became my real MBA – a brutal, intimate education in what it means to lead when the world is spinning around twice as fast.
I see tons of success stories on LinkedIn, but I rarely see the ones on hardship, failures, blood, sweat, and tears that may or may not lead you to success. Because not every startup founder becomes a successful entrepreneur. Or they may fail hard three times and reach their success on the fourth. The nature of startups is always unpredictable.
No matter what, I was determined to make it work. I utilized all the knowledge on business, project management, and communications I accumulated through the years, and launched an organic marketing campaign, executing it as fast as I could to reach our goals and KPIs.
One of my decisions was not to hire a sales rep, but to do founder-led sales myself to hear what current and potential customers had to say about our product matching their needs. That data became key for product development, and for the core of our customer-centric business.
Listening, empathy, and desire to solve our users’ problems became my religion.
That helped me grow our revenue from $0 to nearly $8K MRR almost entirely organically in the first year. And I wrote an article about our growth journey on HackerNoon. Our team was small but synchronized, and the most important hire as a customer-centric business we had was our Customer Support Representative.
The arc of the founder’s journey
At the beginning of this piece I wrote that as a founder eventually you’re left one-on-one with yourself. Let me explain.
The founder’s journey has three emotional stages:
1. The adrenaline rush of creation – everything feels possible. Vision, novelty, energy—it’s thrilling, even addictive.
2. The chaos of growth – things start working, but messily. Product decisions, customers, team dynamics, investors—you’re juggling it all. Exhilarating and overwhelming at once.
3. The quiet reckoning – hype fades, setbacks appear, and suddenly it’s just you. No external validation, no adrenaline masking fatigue.
And that’s when the real CEO work begins. You face the parts of you that led, pushed, ignored, or sacrificed. You must answer hard questions about why you started, what you’re building, and who you’ve become in the process.
Without hype or chaos to distract you, you have to lead from a place of clarity instead of motion. It’s the confrontation every founder eventually has – when you realize that the company is a mirror. Whatever is unresolved in you will surface, and no spreadsheet or OKR can manage that part for you.
Being a first-time CEO today isn’t just about building a product or raising money. It’s about managing your own transformation.
What every first-time CEO should remember
By the end of 2024, my health declined, and I had to step back from work for a while. During that pause, structural gaps in how we’d set up the company became clear: we hadn’t formally incorporated, and many decisions had been made from trust rather than legal clarity. That experience became a hard but invaluable lesson in founder responsibility: trust is vital, but structure protects it.
The hardest part of running a startup as a first-time CEO is knowing what you’re actually doing. When you’re in the hype fog, running on adrenaline and excitement, you can miss the practical details that make a startup a real business.
So, alongside the vision, hustle, and fun (all of which matter), I’d offer this advice:
- Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. Attend to the unglamorous things – incorporation, documentation, advisory boards, legal agreements. Treat your startup like a future successful business from day one.
- Be especially thoughtful when starting a company with people close to you. Blurred lines can test relationships in ways you might not expect. Clear agreements preserve both the partnership and the relationship.
What it really means to be a first-time CEO today
When I think about what it means to be a first-time CEO today, it’s not about speed, funding rounds, or viral launches. It’s about resilience.
To run a startup now is to live in a paradox: you have more tools, resources, and opportunities than any founder before you, yet you also carry more noise, pressure, and uncertainty. There is no playbook – you’re writing it as you go.
As a first-time CEO, you build both the company and yourself as a leader – in real time, in public, and under pressure. Traction doesn’t always equal stability; what sustains you is clarity and self-awareness.
Leadership isn’t about holding everything together. It’s about knowing what to evolve – an idea, a strategy, even a version of yourself – and trusting that what remains is stronger and more aligned.
And maybe that’s the quiet truth behind all the hype: instead of ruling, become the person who can adapt, rebuild, and keep creating with integrity.
About the author:
Victoria Loskutova is an entrepreneur and storyteller exploring what it really takes to build a company for the first time today. With 15+ years in media, communications, and PR, she now hosts The First-Time CEO podcast and writes a newsletter for emerging leaders. Her reflections – drawn from the “messy, human side” of entrepreneurship – alongside the first 50 podcast episodes are now becoming a book written in public.
Featured image: Victoria Loskutova, host of The First-Time CEO podcast (Photo courtesy of Victoria Loskutova)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in contributed opinion pieces are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Portugal Startup News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.
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