If you’re launching a bike or scooter sharing business, you already know the shape of the days. Fleet in the morning, permits at lunch, a rider support ticket at eleven at night. I’ve run ANIV for six years, and for part of that time I’ve also been building a second company that has nothing to do with mobility. This is a note about what that did to my sleep, and what I found there.
Two products means two sets of problems that never line up. A launch on one side lands in the same week as a hardware issue on the other. You don’t get to finish a thought, because the second company is always the interrupt. The cost showed up somewhere I wasn’t looking: I stopped sleeping like a person who was done for the day. I slept like someone who had paused.
I accepted that as part of the job. Then my dreams changed.
Most mornings the dream was gone before coffee. Building two things at once changed that. The dreams got stranger and they stopped leaving quietly. I’d wake from something that was obviously about work without being about work at all: a ride that kept going uphill and downhill, switching from bike to bike along the way. Some were easy to ride. Others were awkward and inconvenient.
For a while I ignored it. Then, mostly out of curiosity, I started keeping them. I wasn’t analyzing anything, just catching each one before it went: three or four sentences spoken into my phone before I got out of bed. It took under a minute, which is the only reason the habit survived.
An operator’s routine is full of instruments. Ride counts, utilization, battery levels, support volume, cash. Every one of them measures the fleet. None of them measures the operator. Nobody puts “how is the founder actually holding up” on a dashboard, so it never gets read. Catching the dream each morning turned out to be the closest thing I had to that instrument.
After a few weeks the entries started lining up with the calendar. Two scenes kept coming back. In one I was moving fast in something I didn’t fully control: a car being waved down by the police, a run I couldn’t stop, a trip where someone else had the wheel. In the other I was explaining to friends how things are supposed to be done. Stress I’d have described as “fine, busy” during the day was showing up at night as the same image, over and over. And the decisions I was least sure about turned up in dreams first, sometimes days before I admitted the doubt to anyone.
The habit only survived once it had a proper home instead of a notes app I never reopened. That home is the second company: UnderSelf, a dream journal. You speak the dream the moment you wake, and weeks later it shows you what keeps coming back. A pen on the nightstand does the catching part just as well; the app made the morning faster and did the remembering across weeks for me.
I didn’t become a person who sleeps eight hours. I run two companies; that isn’t on the table this year. But three things changed, and I’d suggest them to any operator in their first year.
First, I read my own mornings the way I read the fleet. A run of bad nights is data. It gets a response, the same way a run of low batteries does.
Second, I stopped treating the two companies as one list. These days about ninety percent of my week goes to the new company, and ANIV gets fixed blocks of time instead of every interrupt. The interrupts didn’t stop, but they stopped being the default.
Third, I gave the first five minutes of the day to nothing useful. No fleet map, no support queue. Just the dream, then coffee. It’s the only part of my routine that is about me rather than the business, and it has held longer than any habit I’ve tried.
This note is about the other half of the job. The fleet gets a dashboard and the person running it doesn’t, so you end up building one yourself. Mine turned out to be three sentences before coffee, and it took two companies to find that out.
Albert Manukyan, founder, ANIV
