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I am done. I give up

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Re: I am done. I give up

#431

Post by thealchemistdev »

Archipelagia wrote: post #323

This might sound a bit assholish, but I'm writing this to hopefully help others spot a crucial mistake: Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing? Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed. And this stuff is hard! There's a reason…

I 100% agree. I've been hacking away at my project for about 5 years, and it went absolutely nowhere until I found my co-founder. In a span of 4 months, she quadrupled the eyes on our product in comparison to what I was able to before our meeting.

Sales & Marketing is just as complex as the tech stack. Yes, we techs can learn that side of the fence, but it takes a bit of humility to recognize that it'll come at a cost.

Re: I am done. I give up

#432

Post by asah »

jacquesm wrote: post #24

It'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'm not sure defeat needs to be "expected" anymore...

I have friends with a string of successes under their belts. My own track record is ~half the companies I advise get from garage to series A, and I've had three IPOs and numerous acquisitions.

My rules of thumb:

- do something with big impact. "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." - Daniel Burnham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham

- answer this question honestly: "why now?" i.e. why couldn't this have been done last year or last decade.

- answer this question honestly: "why me?" i.e. am I really the best person in the world to do this?

- check that your competitive position or margins are strong enough you won't have a zillion competitors causing margins to compress. For example, 15 minute food delivery is tough. For example, don't launch a CPG product on Amazon without a strategy to deal with knockoffs!

- check that your regulatory position isn't so crazy that you'll get shutdown before demonstrating outrageous value.

- create an elevator pitch of one or two sentences and see if a majority of legit prospective buyers get excited.

hope this helps!

Re: I am done. I give up

#433

Post by philippz »

joenot443 wrote: post #324
philippz wrote: post #57

You 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…

Thanks for sharing. Always encouraging to hear stories of someone grinding for years and finally making it. Is your 40 person team for a venture of your own, or are you working with a larger org now?

No, my own company, started last year in April during a Hackathon and then got a first seed round started in July, closed in October. Currently even able to do a massive Series A, despite market conditions. From the 40 people, >50% are developers.

Re: I am done. I give up

#434

Post by Mountain_Skies »

mnky9800n wrote: post #389
pavlov wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail. Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and pref…

Unfortunately another component of the Nordic model that makes it work is that everybody trusts the government. This is what makes the Nordic model hard to translate to other settings in my opinion.

They're high trust societies in general, partially because they're small monocultures. As Robert Putnam's research shows, in multicultural societies, especially large ones, trust rapidly declines, surprisingly even within cultural groups. Trust in government falls even more rapidly as each group starts to perceive those in power as being more favorable to one group or another, even if those in power are from their own cultural group.

Re: I am done. I give up

#435

Post by quarantina »

WA wrote: post #138
jacquesm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks. I know quite a few stories like that. I'm more active as an investor these days than as an entrepreneur, the projects I still run are more for fun than for income (or even potential income) and I can't tell you how happy I am that that pressure has abated somewhat. It's annoying that even the successes tend to screw over the employees and more often than not the founders as well. Typical dilution by the t…

Do opportunities like these still exist?

The corporate world is littered with them (esp. at medium-scale), but you can't magically discover them by reading on the internet.

Re: I am done. I give up

#436

Post by koobe »

defrost wrote: post #356
pclmulqdq wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their total tax burdens are much higher than US citizens' tax burdens unless you're making 7 figures of W-2 income. The top marginal tax rate kicks in an order of magnitude lower in those countries, and hits most of the middle class. In the US, it hits very few people. Also, the military is 20% of the discretionary budget, but 10% or less of the total budget.

For a full picture factor in outgoings for world class health and education per person (and other benefits that are free | much cheaper than US); these are very low cost for individuals and offset higher taxes by offering better value for money.

If this is indeed the case, shouldn't there be an influx of skilled professional and entrepreneur immigrants into all of these nordic welfare states?

Something doesn't quite add up, as there's appears to be a constant shortage of such talent.

Re: I am done. I give up

#437

Post by dSebastien »

Take care of yourself.

Letting go and giving up is okay. Sometimes even the best/only option. I failed to recognize that for too long in 2019 and ended up victim of the sunk cost fallacy: https://www.dsebastien.net/2021-01-04-20-months-in-2k-hours-...

Now I prioritize my time, happiness and well-being way above MRR, success and whatever else ego related.

Re: I am done. I give up

#438

Post by Annatar »

IronIvan wrote: post #300
xvector wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos would not have kept Amazon in the US if it adopted Nordic welfare levels of taxation. The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.

Can confirm. Lived a very frugal early retirement lifestyle in Austria because it was practically impossible to build wealth (high taxes, comparatively very low tech salaries, little entrepreneurial support/incentives). Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifesty…

[dead]

Re: I am done. I give up

#439

Post by LastTrain »

3pt14159 wrote: post #415
opyate wrote: post #320

Succeeding in the startup world reminds me of the funfair analogy: The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon. The middle class kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and also miss. Then they will walk away, saying…

I don't think this way of looking at it is helpful either. Sometimes the rich kid was abused by his dad and it ate him up inside and he turned to drugs and died of an overdose at 25 years old. Sometimes the middle class kid came from a father that survived as a child in WW2 with undiagnosed metal scars to prove it. Sometimes the poor kid learns plumbing from his dad then starts and scales a business up to millions in…

“Sometimes the rich kid was abused by his dad and it ate him up inside and he turned to drugs and died of an overdose at 25 years old. Sometimes the middle class kid came from a father that survived as a child in WW2 with undiagnosed metal scars to prove it. Sometimes the poor kid learns plumbing from his dad then starts and scales a business up to millions in sales.“

That is adorable, and plumbers aren’t poor.

Re: I am done. I give up

#440

Post by pcl »

dkga wrote: post #371
jliptzin wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up taxation in Norway, it looks very similar to ours. Personal marginal tax rates cap at 48% and corporate taxes are 23%. What am I missing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Norway

It has nothing to do with taxation - or else the Arab Gulf or Cayman Islands would be entrepreneurial hubs, not California or the Toronto area. It’s all about the price of quality labour. It’s about access to long-term risk capital (aka venture funds) + high quality labour at affordable prices. As in, entrepreneurs having cash to fund projects and being able to actually hire people that will help build them. Try hiri…

> Try hiring a hundred software engineers in Norway: your hourly cost would probably blow up.

Depends what you’re comparing to. Total comp for great engineers in Oslo is lower than for their peers in Silicon Valley.

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