STAGE 1 - THE GAPS YOU ARE ABSORBING Right now you are personally holding four jobs, and each one is quietly costing you. Gap 1: Sales. You close every deal yourself, so pipeline stops the week you are heads-down on code. Cost: revenue that stalls whenever you build. Breaks within a quarter as deals stack up unworked. Gap 2: Customer support. You answer every ticket, which means support quality drops exactly when usage grows. Breaks at the next traffic spike. Gap 3: The product roadmap lives only in your head, with no system. Cost: nothing ships when you are pulled into sales or support. Already slipping. Gap 4: The first engineering hire you have postponed twice. Cost: you remain the only person who can build. This is the one underneath all the others. STAGE 2 - WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING You can do all four jobs, and that is the problem. Each one, on its own, feels like something you can cover for a few more weeks. So none of them gets filled. What that hides is that your money runway, your one builder, and your missing systems are all thinning at the same time. You are not behind because you are slow. You are behind because you are the single point of failure for four functions at once, and capable people convince themselves that is sustainable right up until it is not. STAGE 3 - WHAT TO HAND OFF FIRST Ranked by what threatens the business most if it fails, not by what is easiest. Handoff 1: The engineering hire. If you are the only builder, every other gap is downstream of your hours. This is the highest-leverage fix even though it is the hardest and slowest. Handoff 2: Support, because it is the cheapest to delegate and frees the most daily hours. Handoff 3: A simple written roadmap so work continues without you. Sales stays with you longest, because founder-led sales is still your edge at this stage. The default move is to start the engineering hire now and bridge support immediately, rather than spreading yourself thinner across all four. STAGE 4 - ONE MOVE FOR TOMORROW Tomorrow at 9 a.m., before opening your inbox, write and post the job description for your first engineering hire and send it to three people who could refer a candidate. That starts closing Gap 4, the one every other gap depends on, with a thirty-minute action instead of another month of covering it yourself.