Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

What are some good courses/books for understanding marketing and business?

Especially interested in anything that focuses on tech or SaaS specifically.

Prioritizing and learning about marketing is important.

But I think it is a leap to go from there to taking formal business courses.

Many MBAs (I suspect most) will tell you that what they learned there doesn't remotely make up for the cost in time or money of attending. (Most of those pleased with their experience will focus on the networking and career opportunities that opened up to them).

In my experience, most business knowledge is acquired much faster by combining actual practice with learning and a good feedback loop (and in many cases, practice and a feedback loop alone outperform formal education).

I believe that this is especially true of many aspects of marketing. You learn things when you are ready to learn them. Important marketing lessons that are found in textbooks will go in one ear and out the other without experience that allows you to recognize their importance.

I suppose this is why the case method remains popular in many business schools, although I have no confident opinion about its effectiveness.

Bottom line: Its is important to prioritize marketing. But taking courses on it has far lower returns that teaching yourself: so low that I do not recommend it at all.

he says in the post. Consulting

Just my personal anecdote. I find it much less tenuous and stressful compared to most jobs. The key may be that I'm doing consulting and not trying to market a product.

Day to day I'm not really a part of the team. If the project ultimately fails I don't have to deal with the aftermath, or the project has already failed by the time I'm brought in and I'm just cleaning up a mess. Regardless, it's not really my neck on the line. It's ultimately the company's fault and I will do my level best to help them, but that's the end of it. Switching to consulting REALLY helped my mental health in this way: If the company makes a bad decision, I don't care anymore. I feel like many (most) employees feel a lot of negative emotion when they believe management is making a bad decision. That's totally gone now.

Regarding tenuous, I feel like I have much more job security compared to a regular employee. More people want my time than I have time. So if one of them bails on me, I just go down the list of relationships. In effect, I have multiple "employers." Worst case scenario I just get a regular job somewhere for a few years. If you're a person who doesn't interview well or is otherwise not confident in your ability to go back to a regular job easily I can see why this would be stressful.

I know extremely successful people and all of them made huge mistakes in their lives. But I don't believe you are using a good strategy here and find your advice is bad:

1. You should quit as soon as possible is you are getting nowhere. We don't need more miserable entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is probably not for you if you fail consistently. Don't waste your live doing something you are miserable at.

2. Each failure can really hurt you, no different from making a mistake while skiing or driving. It can destroy your life: Your relationships, your wealth and health.

3. You don't automatically improve as time passes. Specially if you learn on your own without good teachers. You will acquire "bad practices" or "vices" like if you try to learn to play tennis on your own: It will take you longer to "unlearn" your vices than if you learned from good teachers.

The first thing I would recommend is that you make friends that are entrepreneurs so you learn from each other and support each other.

I sense a very individualistic behavior from your writing but I see customers as friends and that helped me a lot. I give them way more value that what I extract to support my business, and that is the secret. People are not stupid, in the same way children "sense" who really loves them fast, customers could sense very fast the value you give them.

You also develop over time a good intuition on the value you are creating if you know how to listen to your custommers. You don't need 12 years for that, 1 or 2 years is enough.

I understand that "what does not kill you makes you stronger" but I have experienced what failure feels, and it really can kill you, emotionally, mentally, socially and finally physically.

The way to success is making mistakes frequent and small, so small that it can't hurt you: Instead of risking a million dollars you risk a thousand and escalate.

Instead of making mistakes you meet the people that have done what you want and you learn from THEIR mistakes, so you don't need to repeat them.

They will help you and love to do so. Dozens of entrepreneurs have helped me when I just asked them and some of them are good friends now.