In March 2020, Vulpine Creations was in full summer. Revenue climbing. Products selling. Our 4.9-star rating holding steady across hundreds of reviews. I was sleeping well for the first time in two years.
By April, we were in winter. Not the gentle kind with hot chocolate and fireplace light. The brutal kind where the pipes freeze and you’re not sure the heating will come back on.
A pandemic will do that.
What I didn’t understand then — what took me another four years and an exit to fully grasp — is that the seasons aren’t something that happen to your business. They’re a structural feature. Every business cycles through them. The founders who survive are the ones who can name which season they’re in and act accordingly.
Spring: The Energy of the New Beginning
Spring is intoxicating. Everything feels possible. The idea is fresh. The first customer says yes. The product takes shape under your hands. You work sixteen-hour days and don’t notice because adrenaline is doing the heavy lifting.
I’ve had four distinct springs in my career. The first was in my early twenties, when I tried to bring a product to market with all the naive confidence of someone who doesn’t know what they don’t know. The second was leaving consulting to start building on my own. The third was Vulpine’s founding. The fourth is now — writing, building a new platform, starting again.
Spring’s gift is energy. Its danger is overcommitment.
In spring, you say yes to everything. Every partnership sounds exciting. Every market seems accessible. Every feature request feels reasonable. You plant seeds in every direction because the soil feels so fertile, and you can’t imagine a scenario where you’d need to choose between them.
But you will. Because summer always comes, and summer is when the real work starts.
The discipline of spring is subtraction. Not adding more seeds. Deciding which three things you’re actually going to grow. The subtraction audit exists because I made this mistake — specifically, during Vulpine’s spring, when we almost launched eight products simultaneously instead of the three we could actually support.
What to do in spring: Pick fewer things. Set clear metrics for what “working” looks like before you get emotionally attached. Build your weekly review habit now, while energy is high, because you’ll desperately need it later.
Summer: The Grind Behind the Growth
Summer looks like success from the outside. Revenue is growing. The team is expanding. The product is shipping. You’re getting invited to speak at things. People use words like “momentum” and “traction.”
From the inside, summer is relentless.
At Vulpine, our summer lasted roughly from late 2021 to mid-2023. We were shipping twelve products across two continents. Our Amazon rankings were climbing. Reviews were pouring in. And every single day, there was a fire to put out. A supplier who missed a delivery. A customer service issue that needed personal attention. A competitor who copied our best-selling design. A cash flow gap between paying manufacturers and receiving payment from Amazon.
Summer is when the founder’s body starts keeping score. The sleep gets shorter. The exercise gets skipped. The diet becomes whatever is fastest. You tell yourself you’ll fix it when things calm down, but things don’t calm down in summer. They accelerate.
The discipline of summer is systems. You cannot personally handle every decision in a growing business. You need systems that produce results without your constant attention. You need to protect your energy because summer will drain every drop if you let it.
I learned this the hard way. By mid-2022, I was the bottleneck in my own business. Every decision ran through me. Every quality check required my eyes. Every supplier relationship depended on my presence. The business couldn’t grow past my personal capacity, and my personal capacity was shrinking.
What to do in summer: Build systems before you need them. Delegate before you’re forced to. Track your owner dependency ruthlessly. And for the love of everything, sleep.
Autumn: The Signal Before the Shift
Autumn is the season most founders misread. Because the numbers might still look good. Revenue might still be climbing. The product might still be selling. But something has shifted underneath, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll mistake autumn for a permanent summer.
The signals are subtle. Growth slows. Not stops — slows. Customer acquisition costs creep up. The excitement you felt in spring has been replaced by something that feels more like obligation. You’re not building anymore. You’re maintaining.
At Vulpine, autumn arrived quietly. Our growth rate flattened from 40% quarterly to 15%. Still growing, technically. But the effort required per unit of growth had doubled. New products weren’t hitting the same way. The market was more crowded. Our advertising costs had risen 60% while conversion rates dropped.
I see this in the startups I work with too. Across the 44+ startups at Startup Burgenland, the founders who recognized autumn early had options. They could pivot. They could acquire. They could double down on their strongest product line and cut the rest. They could prepare for an exit.
The founders who didn’t recognize it kept planting summer seeds in autumn soil and wondering why nothing grew.
Autumn’s discipline is honest assessment. Not pessimism. Not giving up. But looking at your numbers, your energy, and your market with clear eyes and asking: is this a temporary plateau or a structural shift?
What to do in autumn: Run a full subtraction audit. Kill the products and projects that are coasting on momentum rather than producing real results. Have the honest conversation with your co-founder, your team, your advisors about what the numbers actually show. And start thinking about what the next spring might look like.
Winter: The Crucible
Winter is when most founders quit. Not because winter means failure — it doesn’t — but because winter requires a different kind of strength than the other seasons, and most founders haven’t built it.
I’ve been through three winters. The first nearly ended my career. A consulting project went sideways, a client relationship collapsed, and I spent six months wondering if I was cut out for any of this. The second was the pandemic winter at Vulpine, when our entire supply chain seized up and our primary sales channels went dark overnight. The third was the months after exiting Vulpine, when the identity I’d built around being a product company founder evaporated and I had to figure out who I was without it.
Winter strips away the optional. It burns off the excess. It forces you to look at what’s left and decide whether it’s enough to build on.
The thing about winter that nobody tells you is that it’s where the best ideas come from. Not because adversity is romantic — it isn’t, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But because when everything nonessential is gone, what remains is usually the thing that matters most.
During the pandemic winter, with our physical supply chain frozen, we were forced to think differently about our business model. That thinking led to the velocity principle that later became central to everything I teach. We couldn’t move big, so we moved fast and small. We launched digital products in days instead of physical products in months. Some of those experiments became our highest-margin offerings.
What to do in winter: Survive first. Cut expenses to the bone. Protect your cash. Then, when the immediate crisis has passed, pay attention. Winter shows you what you actually care about, because it’s the only season where caring is a choice rather than an inevitability.
The Season Most Founders Get Wrong
There’s a fifth season that doesn’t have a clean nature metaphor. It’s the gap between winter and the next spring. The thaw.
The thaw is messy. You’re not frozen anymore, but you’re not growing either. The ground is soft. The old structures are gone but the new ones haven’t formed. You have energy again but no clear direction for it. This is the most dangerous period because it feels like spring but it isn’t. It’s preparation for spring.
After I exited Vulpine in 2024 — selling off the product rights and inventory to respected magic companies — I was in the thaw for nearly six months. I had ideas — dozens of them. I had energy. I had capital. What I didn’t have was clarity about which direction to run. And every time I tried to force clarity, I made it worse.
The thaw is where the strategic pause matters most. It’s where rest without guilt becomes not just acceptable but necessary. It’s where you do the slow, boring work of figuring out what you actually want before you start building again.
Reading the Weather
The practical question isn’t “what season am I in?” You probably already know. The practical question is “am I behaving correctly for this season?”
Spring founders who act like they’re in summer burn out before the product ships. Summer founders who act like they’re still in spring never build the systems they need. Autumn founders who pretend it’s still summer waste resources on strategies that no longer work. Winter founders who try to force spring end up deeper in the cold.
Here’s a quick diagnostic:
You’re in spring if: everything feels new, your biggest problem is too many options, and you’re working on energy alone. Act by narrowing your focus and building habits that will sustain you later.
You’re in summer if: growth is real but exhausting, your days are full of operational decisions, and you’re the hardest-working person in the company. Act by building systems and delegating ruthlessly.
You’re in autumn if: growth has slowed, your best efforts are producing diminishing results, and you feel more like a manager than a builder. Act by assessing honestly, cutting aggressively, and exploring what’s next.
You’re in winter if: something broke, revenue dropped, the plan isn’t working, and getting out of bed requires an act of will. Act by surviving first, observing second, and trusting that spring always follows winter.
You’re in the thaw if: the crisis is over but the direction isn’t clear, you have energy but no target, and you’re tempted to launch six things at once. Act by pausing, reflecting, and choosing one direction before you start moving.
The Long View
I’m 44. I’ve been building things professionally for over twenty years. In that time, I’ve been through every season multiple times. The winters didn’t kill me. The autumns taught me to pay attention. The summers built my discipline. The springs gave me purpose.
The thing I wish someone had told me at 25 is that the seasons aren’t failures. They’re not signs that you’re doing it wrong. They’re the natural rhythm of building anything that matters. Your business isn’t broken because it’s in winter. You’re not lazy because you’re in the thaw. You’re not invincible because you’re in summer.
You’re just in a season. And knowing which one changes everything about what you do next.
