Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

Me neither and I work at a FAANG.

I think a lot of those serial entrepreneurs that have never worked in companies have a very skewed idea of what it actually looks like once you're in a decent company.

1. Build a hypothesis about how the world works

2. Build things to test the hypothesis

3. Figure out the world doesn't work that way

4. Alter hypothesis

5. Show progress as you repeat 1-4

I also want to call out that spending 18 months to build a landing page and your web app is an extremely long iteration cycle. I don't have all the context about your life, but that seems to be an area where you can get much tighter based off this post at least.

I'll go back to one of my all-time favorite pg essays:

If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.[1]

And truth be told, I don't know how much I even care about the "getting rich" part anymore. I mean, sure, all things being equal, I'd rather be rich than not. But at this point, I'm just happy to be still growing, still learning, still exploring. Just being in the game is its own reward in many ways.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

Serial SMBer here, looking back at the dozen entities that worked in the past 20 years -- every one of my projects with 7+ figure outcomes had clear successes to validate the idea 3 months in, and I would often times MVP it off a contract with one client/vendor. (A few examples: niche used office furniture circa 2006, iOS app circa 2010, ML-based investing circa 2011, Amazon store in 2013 - so... all over the place.)

Just adding a bit of anec-data since we have quite a few people sharing what worked (and what didn't), the top 3 learnings for me have been:

1) Know people with deep pockets who want a problem solved - this means networking and establishing a niche for yourself as the go-to execution guy for problem X. I went to school near Sand Hill so that made it convenient. This simplifies your customer #1 problem as well as your revenue problem.

2) Know people who are good at solving problems, esp ones you dislike or can't solve. This is how you scale from a 1-person weekend project to a 1M+/yr rev project. You want this because a) problems that need multiple people to solve are a natural barrier to entry for anybody else, which means your solution is more defensible and b) partnerships are fun and when built right promote accountability where the sum of work is greater than its parts.

3) Entrepreneurship is hard work and should only be done as a last resort, if you know what you're getting yourself into, because you ABSOLUTELY WANT IT for whatever reason, whether because seeing something inefficient drives you nuts, that sorta thing. It's absolutely not for glory-chasers which I find kinda frustating, as a lot of (US) society glorifies it as such and sets peoples' expectations totally wrong and I see tons of miserable entrepreneurs burning out all the time in the startup orbit.