Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. I'm early on the path, still unsuccessful. I'm 25, I had one failed product. for 3 years, followed by 2 years of limbo and 1 year back in the game thanks to the pandemic - I love it, I like it a lot and I want to keep pushing it.
I'm too early to yet have regrets about pursuing this path, but I feel like it will inevitably get to me too and I try to think of ways I could have the cake and eat it too ( to some minimal extent). I don't yet think about family, it's not on my priority list at the moment (I'm thinking about starting it in my 40s and I accept the drawbacks), but there are some things I would like to get out of my personal life - preferably while still in my 20s, rather than 30s that I care about.
I'm sorry because this is going to be a long post. Please feel free to ignore it. I hope it contributes something to the discussion in general.
I'm thinking about 3 scenarios I could play out:
A) Pursue a niche desktop app idea that is a spin-off from an earlier failed product. It's the scratch your own itch thing, I have a new vision for the product. It would take 1 year to ship and 2 years from now in total to evaluate. Potential 100k - 1M / year revenue after years in business. This could be the type of business I could work hard at now, and spend a healthy 50h/week later to be still able to enjoy my life and enjoy playing the game. It's also realistic given my current resources. If it fails, I "lose" 2 years.
B) Pursue another spin-off idea, but this one is not niche, it's big and I know I may come off as naive - but I'm certain this is something that people will want. The challenge here is more in execution and competition (there's no other product like this on the market, and the demand is there). I'm a little guy now, so I could get squashed by more experienced players however, I may still pocket a million before going out of business. To get started with it, I would have to get a full time job asap (I have a dead end freelancing gig now), work 1 year and then live off savings. So it wouldn't see the light of day until at least 2024. This plan would also require 5+ years working at intense startup, sacrificing a lot - all these personal goals I care so much about.
c) Focus on the big idea, but delay it by 2 years to get some things off my personal bucket list. So I get full-time job by the end of 2021, 2022 - 2024 I focus mostly on personal life, while working and making savings (I may have 10h/week to spend on building the prototype / v1 - which is very very little, but over 3 years is always better than nothing). Then 2025, quit job, work 70h/week full-time on preparing the business, launch it in 2026 or 2027. If it fails, I still should have enough savings to pursue another idea. Or if someone beats me to market and there's no point, I can pursue another idea straight away. Yes, it's 5 years, so there are big chances someone gets there first, but even if they get there first, they wouldn't get like a mainstream market adoption in 5 years, so there would still be place for competition and different variants of the idea. The real danger here is that these 3 years of focus on personal life may throw me off the path, I may not be able to come back once I lose momentum, but I like to think I would have the discipline to do come back.
Currently I'm most inclined towards option C - it has some certainity about it. The business may fail, but there's a lot of certainity I will have logistics to pursue another idea. I can also get personal goals to some extent (unless the pandemic restrictions last too long). So it's potentially big reward, less sacrifice and risk.
I put some work into option A however, so it's hard to not think about it. Maybe it could be really good opportunity at having a lightweight business, that's also achievable given my current resources and experience. But it can still fail - and it's a subset of the bigger idea (as I mentioned earlier, both projects are spin off ideas from my first failed product).And if it fails, I can't work on the next business right away.
I guess I self-answered myself here. I'm only torn because if I want to go for option C, I had this plan to release A as open source and use it for my resume, I think it would help the job hunt a lot and allow me to negotiate a better salary, as well as flex product-building muscles. The logic for this, is I want a remote job, and while there are full time remote jobs offerrings within the niche I'm freelancing in - I think it may take me some 6 months to get a job like this - so I think, I could take this time to release the app as open source to 10x my resume and not leaving the job thing to luck.
So because I work on product A day to day, it's challenging to not view it as a business. It will be even more challenging when I complete it and willingly not give it a try to sell it (though I know selling it is like 5x more effort than building it, but still).
It would be helpful to get an outside view on these plans. Maybe each plan is dumb either way. The plan I had 3 years ago didn't pass reality test. I suppose it could be similar this time. What would you do? Try to have a shot at the simpler product and accepting a 2 year delay if it doesn't work out, or follow the long term plan and have a go at a much more ambitious product with a backup savings plan?