I’ve experienced the four stages of grief — denial, depression, anger, acceptance — but recently realized that there are four stages to shipping, too:

• Relief
• Exhaustion
• Fear
• Acceptance

In relief phase we are all just happy to be done. The product is out the door. There’s a little adrenal kick that goes along with it. This phase never lasts long.

Then exhaustion sets in. It’s been a long road and invariably the hours have been tiring. 6, 7 days per week, 10 plus hours a day, dreaming about code when asleep, awake early, asleep late. The exhaustion mutes the brain, though, and lets a day or so pass with some rest.

Once the brain starts to recover a little then fear sets in. What’s broken? If it’s broken am I going to be able to fix it? Is anyone going to care? Will we have downloads? Did I remember to do this or that? Did that last minute change cause a problem? I never did retest this one section. I’m sure that was broken! The reviews are going to be horrible.

Finally, with time, acceptance sets in. Well, it will do what it does. If there are bugs we will fix them.

And that’s when we start planning the next build.

It is nearly impossible to describe to someone else the emotional extremes that encompass the planning, building and releasing of something new. Most describe it as a roller coaster but a roller coaster does not give justice to the extremes, to the sudden ups and downs and the fact that the process smooths over time. I think starting a new product or new company looks more like this:

Time starts to the left and works its way to the right. On the positive side, all the stuff above the line, are all the good things. This includes the accolades, the re-tweets, the positive customers conversations, seeing code turn into a usable product and the plans turning into reality. On the negative side, though, all the stuff below the x-axis, is the negative feedback, the “why in the world would I use this” comments, the ignored emails and delays, server crashes and general human fears and frustrations.

It starts way on the left and juts up and down quickly and rapidly. Sometimes it feels like I go through 10 of these positive/negative swings in the same day and sometimes it feels like I’m wallowing in negativism or sailing on a sea of positive thoughts for weeks at a time.

I turned 40 a few weeks ago and now have almost 20 years of entrepreneurship behind me. One thing that gives me a sense of ease with this process is that I always know what goes down comes back up. (Of course the opposite is true, too, but I prefer not to focus on that.)

The second thing I know is that, over time, the ups and downs even out, the turbulence isn’t so turbulent. As we approach 0, I think that’s the point where we attain product/market fit, the point at which we start seeing a repeatable sales process and positioning that works with prospective clients. This also happens to be the inflection point where companies grow, the point where we share the ups and downs with others.

I’m going through this now. I’m somewhere around the mid-point in the chart, somewhere around -10, on the x-axis approaching a private launch in the next week. Two weeks ago I was mired in code that would break every time I made a change. Then I had some amazing customer conversations followed by some very negative ones. I was bogged down in that for a few days before a few phone conversations with “true believers” helped lift me up. My fears are numerous: where is the money to keep going, the energy to see this through, whether anyone will care and be interested. Can we keep servers up? Can we build something that people are really willing to pay for?

When people say building a start-up is hard, they don’t specify that building the product is only a small portion of the battle. Fighting off the negative demons that affect our dreams is the true center of the fight. What keeps me going, though, is that I know it will get easier in time.

Once upon a time, the story was all there was for a movie. Some of my all-time favorites: A Philadelphia Story, Maltese Falcon, The Godfather. None of these had special effects. But then Star Wars happened and suddenly special effects were good enough to add to a story instead of be a distraction. For the next decade and a half special effects and stories intermixed comfortably.

In 1991 Steven Spielberg released Jurassic Park. The world was never the same. I remember going to that movie opening weekend and being absolutely amazed at the special effects. It was the first time in my memory that the special effects were so good they were seamless. (More than 20 years later they still hold up.) The only limitation was physical, since that movie was made with physical dinosaurs, animatronic and stop-action. That lasted a couple more years as Toy Story came out and once again I remember being floored by it. Computer special effects that rivaled real life. That scene when Buzz loses his arm, the top view down to the tile floor… I swear I’ve been in that house.

That was 1995, almost 20 years ago. In those years it seems the special effects have only gotten better, often at the expense of a great story. The action directors we love the most, the J.J. Abrams’, the Josh Whedon’s, still instill good stories with awesome special effects but it seems like stories have been generally lost in the shuffle.

We’ve reached a point, though, where special effects have gotten so good and so prevalent that every movie has some special effects in it. Now when I see special effects I don’t get excited about the effects anymore. Special effects, in essence, have become commoditized. And when anything become commoditized, something else has to take hold to get consumers to buy.

And that’s why I think, over the next decade, we will see stories take center stage again. Special effects no longer pack in the customers. It’ll have to be the story that  drives customers to the theaters.