After losing my savings as an indie hacker, I can't do it anymore. I quit.

I've been working (with a co-founder) on a side project that's about to pan out for the past 2.5 years. About 1.5 years of that was working after hours, then about 10 months or so of 6 hours at my day job and 2 hours in my company, then just recently I quit my job with about a years worth of savings and am full time in the company.

The risk I took, until recently at least, was almost nothing, since I had a job all along and was actually saving money at a quick pace.

You too can start a company without going bankrupt with a bit of planning and a bit of frugality.

nb. I'm counting my project as a success if it brings me >= 1x median wage on the side, which is a low bar. Also, I am not rich.

1) The "Maker" Path: you slowly improve your own skills and reputation as a developer (or designer) until they give you a big enough advantage that you can translate them into a successful product. This usually means first growing an audience through blogging, conferences, courses, etc.

2) The "Marketing" Path: you become so good at the "business" part of your business that the you're able to launch new products from scratch without a preexisting audience. It's tough to know if this really works or not but I assume with all the money spent on Google Ads some of it has to work… right?

3) The "Idea" Path: you have an idea that you believe in so much that you'll basically stop at nothing to make it work, even if it takes years (which it probably will). You usually pick up the other skills along the way.

I feel like the poster here suffers from not quite fitting in any of the main paths: they did not seem to have a large pre-existing audience or network to launch to, hate anything related to marketing by their own admission, and their ideas –while perfectly good products, such as https://nomadmail.io/– do not seem to be the kind of project that would inspire the kind of passion necessary to sacrifice years of your life.

Yeah, that sucks. I'm sorry you had a bad experience.

I think one thing for the community to take away is you need to be in a good position financially before you can start a startup - unless you can get funding. Especially for indiehackers who don't usually take outside investment, $12k in savings is not enough. It is not normal to have to stop going out at all or to be pinching pennies. Not everyone can afford to start a startup. For some reason, this concept is almost never talked about in the startup community, but it's really important.

- was this a problem-driven product? Because this seems like a crowded market, which means you probably need to be able to outcompete the existing products

- startups aren’t for everyone; those gut feelings could have been identified by spending a few weekends doing market research and validation.

- so it took a year, a year is nothing. You learnt you don’t want to do startups and probably learnt a bunch of stuff that would be useful in the future. You challenged yourself. And you’ll be more grateful for that regular pay check in the future.

It’s not a disaster, it’s learning and experience and those things are valuable.