What type of products? Can you give any examples? If you rather don't publicly (as you created an account for this), my email is in my profile.
I am done. I give up
51–60 of 1001 posts
Re: I am done. I give up
#52Curious to know what you have been building?
Re: I am done. I give up
#53Starting any business is very very very hard work. Creating a new product from nothing, is very very hard work. Combining the 2 means you have an insane amount of work to do. That leaves you to be CEO and R&D and manufacturing. How do you think marketing and sales fits into that? And finance and strategy? Those are the pitfalls and a reason to better not do startup alone. There are freelance sales people that will se…
> There are freelance sales people that will sell your product for a fee, with the advantages of using their network and their feedback in an early stage of development
Can you elaborate on this please?
Re: I am done. I give up
#54It's not defeat, it is the expected outcome. Out of 20 or so of my projects two have been break-out successes and the rest (commercially) complete failures, and I'm very lucky to have two out of those 20, with very small variations in timing it would have been a big fat zero. So don't beat yourself up about it, some people win the lottery and the majority don't. There is absolutely no recipe that will work every time…
What rate is the cutoff at which people give up entrepreneurship altogether? I wonder how big has the opportunity cost of monopolies been in the past decade
That depends on the person, really. When you are younger or have rich parents you can afford yourself larger risks and that in turn has a positive effect on your chances of success. When you get older and have more responsibilities unless you have a prior success you tend to become more risk averse and so less willing to start new companies and/or make the kind of decisions that would lead to either success or complete failure. Playing it safe is an excellent way to lose against a crowd of others that can afford to take risks: some of them will get lucky and beat you, even if most of them fail.
There are older, successful entrepreneurs, one guy I knew started his first company in his mid-50's and had a massive success but he's definitely the outlier. But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's. And most unsuccessful entrepreneurs have the exact same demographic...
A couple of things that I've seen really do help, but they still require a substantial investment in time and have an opportunity cost as well: work for one of the large, well paying companies for a while, save up a nest egg and use that as a jump off point if you weren't born into capital (though the risk of becoming addicted to that income stream is real and letting go of it will not be easy). Another is to first start a regular career in order to identify pain points in some industry or other and then later use that knowledge to create a product that addresses those pain points.
But that's not the kind of thing that you can spin out far enough for a book or a TED talk. I do believe that those two will increase your chances.
Re: I am done. I give up
#55A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. The basic fact is that most startups and most entrepreneurial dreams fail or get consumed by another for their talent/clients. And as an entrepreneur you fight against all odds. Most will fail…
> A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. And for anything with bigger ambitions than a lifestyle business, don’t forget connections. Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford. Just look at the “PayPal mafia” to see how inbred tech investing can be. Not that most entrepreneurs need or should expect VC funding, but this is HN, run by a VC. You can totally run a business and be…
> Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford
Is that also true for YC startups? I felt like YC (while still playing the capitalist's game) was providing a more equal opportunity to start-up "luck" by just looking at the numbers :)
Re: I am done. I give up
#56Sorry to hear that. How long were you trying for? A lot of these guys were at it for years and years before they found success. It can be brutal in the beginning. I think it's unfair to characterise the "digital nomad influencers" on Twitter as making it seem easy. I know a few of them personally and they work incredibly hard. You can tell by the speed at which they ship new products. They work a lot. That said, buil…
Exactly. I started building stuff at 17 and found "the one" (doing over 1 mil/year) at 27. I can't count how many failed projects I had.
Re: I am done. I give up
#57You got a lot of good advice here. So I'll keep it short. I'm 32 now. I spent my last 12 years building companies. They all failed; I didn't earn a penny, and I didn't even get venture capital, and it made me feel like a failure. And I'm talking serious attempts. 6 years, 2 years, 1 year and in between a lot of research & freelancing to evaluate other ideas.
I'm leading a 40 people team, and it's going well. How did I get there? By chance. Another hackathon resulted in the right industry at the right time.
But also 12 years of exercise in pitching, structuring information, data, setting up on organization, addressing all kinds of different technologies and all of that.
You are learning so much and you feel treated unfairly by not being able to show it off. Keep on going. Maybe go back to work for 10-12 months for some stability and to take a break, but then try again.
Re: I am done. I give up
#58>3 x failed attempts => spending time institutionalized
>anyone can do it with the right mindset
Those are contradictory, I would guess the right mindset is one where failure doesn't destroy you to the point you get institutionalized.
Here is my stupid advice (won't work, it's a case of someone who knows less giving advice to someone who knows more, I have never started a company or anything, but as Gandalf said "Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps it is because I am afraid... and he gives me courage."): Buy a copy of a souls game (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring), play it with no summons and no over leveling, you'll eventually get to a difficult boss that will kill you many times, now the first Souls game I played was Bloodborne and I just gave up after a week, came back then gave up, came back again and it clicked and now they're my favorite series of games, I died like 50 times against some bosses, it would drive anyone crazy, the stupid mistakes I keep repeating, the unfairness of some of their moves, etc. doesn't matter, I chose to play the game and it's just a game so why get affected?
This will obviously not help you in anything related to startups, but it's a light way to learn to accept failure, is it the same kind of acceptance? I don't know...
Also you failed, maybe you're just 5 feet 6 and can never ever become a professional basketball player no matter how hard you try, does it mean you're less of a human being to the point you get institutionalized for it? of course not, you tried, you failed, maybe the 4th time's a charm, maybe not, if you become comfortable enough to try again without affecting your mental health sure, if not don't try again, a decent job, a family, a couple friends, couple hobbies, and you can live a meaningful life and maybe even be happier than many people who succeeded at what you tried.
Re: I am done. I give up
#59Yesterday I thought about a metapher for it:
A small tree that grows in the shadow with minimal sunlight. If it just would get enough sunlight for once, it could grow high enough and reach direct sunlight, it could get the energy for real sustained growth. But as long as its in the shade, it will simply never get that energy, no matter how much it is told by other plants to just grow a little bit more. When there is no more energy, there is no more energy, even if the goal is close.
Maybe an old tree will fall down, then suddenly there is enough air and light, until then you can only grow with what energy you have avaiable. Not everyone makes it and not everyone had even the chance.
Re: I am done. I give up
#60It's not defeat, it is the expected outcome. Out of 20 or so of my projects two have been break-out successes and the rest (commercially) complete failures, and I'm very lucky to have two out of those 20, with very small variations in timing it would have been a big fat zero. So don't beat yourself up about it, some people win the lottery and the majority don't. There is absolutely no recipe that will work every time…
I was an engineer at a successful startup.
We grew, we went bankrupt, we laid off most the company, the founders kicked in enough to keep us going and we restructured to give the remaining people larger shares. We became profitable and finally sold to another company.
My payday was about $70k, which was a nice bonus, I was happy to get it. I moved on to big tech. The company withered away, the company that bought it withered away too. I think the company that bought that company might also have disappeared. The domain keeps getting renewed, but has been broken for a couple of years, and for half a decade before that was just a WordPress site hosting a scrape of some of the content that used to be on the website.
And we were one of the lucky ones.