Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

1.) Selling to a customer is hard.

2.) Selling to a customer that must then sell your product to its customer is at least an order of magnitude harder, and may be one of the hardest tricks for a new business to pull-off successfully.

Simply put, you don't have the branding to convert the end customer nor the control over that second sales process. Compounding this is that your product is not a priority for your direct customer and is not mission-critical to them in addressing their actual priorities. Thus, they will not engage nearly the focus required to address item 1 above in selling your product to its customers (i.e. end-users).

This last point can't be stressed enough. As entrepreneurs, our products are our focus and we tend to project that priority onto others.

The only way this model will work is if:

a.) The product is extraordinarily compelling/valuable to the end user in the same sense as would form the basis for building any viable business

AND

b.) The product is easy for your customer to sell to the end user in a frictionless manner (easy to communicate, requires no onboarding or support from your customer, etc.)

AND EITHER:

c.) Your product were mission-critical to your direct customer (preferred)

OR

d.) There was an immediate value to be had for your customer from introducing the product to the end user (monetization, good will, etc)

It seems that you have achieved only b (perhaps) and d in this equation, and then only to varying degrees. If you cannot pivot to solving the other variables then you should shut it down now.

[flagged]

if you have still 100K and if you really believe in your product (or at least if you think market needs something similar to what you are offering), take a risk and outsource technical part of product, do sales by yourself, focus on sales, marketing.

Contact me if you wish to find remote outsource team for ~6k/month, this will give you another 1 year of development time. email: {myusername} at google's email service

Cruel? What about the other people with an actual useful project who didn't get a chance to raise money because OP was distracting the same investors with a silly idea.

OP used their pitch presentation skills to divert opportunities away from other actual hard working people who might have used the money to do something useful for society.

It is advice. It means "You've had your shot, you failed, now let someone else have a go."

Some people make it sound like raising investment is as trivial as buying a burger from Macdonald's.

I haven't been to America yet but it sounds hard to believe.