Ask HN: My startup is running out of fund. What should I do?

You should establish what that would actually look like. How long would you guys realistically run like that? What would you need to accomplish to make it work? How much time would you have to accomplish your goal?

But I am feeling guilty. He left his job to join me, and we are cofounder for a couple of years.

He told me I am wasting his time if I don't keep working with him. That makes me feel very bad.

Former fintech co-founder: I boot-strapped (VC and incubators expressed interest but wouldn't give term sheets because of Bitcoin's 'gray zone' reputation) and with this current tech-apocalypse afflicting the entire Industry I fear you will have a very hard-time raising anything without showing revenue right now. The fat is being trimmed even on the most established of companies, and I fear you will have to enter the work-force if you are in such dire need of money.

> My cofounder is telling me if I don't keep working on this startup (using the money out of my cofounder & me's pocket after the company die), then I am being guilty to him, guilty to current investors and guilty to employees, because I am not all in.

I self-imposed this on myself, and to be honest had I not done it would have never gone anywhere, whihc had a cascade of effects downstream to the entire cannabis Industry; but ultimately I personally feel I paid too high a cost to do it in the end--it was my most daunting Pyrrhic victory which seemed never ending until I decided to step down and go Corpo for a bit.

As someone who went through this and had a decent exit I think that if you thought it's worth doing, you probably wouldn't need external validation, but if I were you I'd really consider what your physical and mental health is worth to you because you will be sacrificing both for the foreseeable future.

I'd say start with what other skills can you leverage in this market and start from there, and have a brutally honest assessment with your team as to what it will take to keep the lights on.

> But the business we are in require millions of dollars to launch (after the code is ready). Without that much of money, the product provides 0 value.

Why? Are you having to comply with lots of legal issues/regulations in various markets?

In my time friends were getting sent to prison for non-compliance of nebulous KYC-AML laws and were deemed money transmitters when it was classified as property and not money depending what agency you asked in the US; my question is why would you enter a market that requires that much in run-way and think that this is a viable option let alone that could succeed given the current incumbents?

Fintech's appeal is in how well it scales with limited resources, which ultimately is the only thing that allows it to compete with legacy payment processors like Visa/MC who dominate the Market for a reason.

>> To answer your question, we enter this industry as completely new-comer. If we know what we know now, we agreed we should have never started this business in the first place. Also we have 0 founder-market fit, and that should be a big reason why no VC funds us.