I am done. I give up

Thanks for sharing your story, I see where you're at and have had similar thoughts throughout my career.

It definitely is not a fair game: I literally started my first company because I knew my parents wouldn't let me starve and I could just crash at their place for years before I 'made it'.

~13 years in, still haven't made it but I can make a living. Every time I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs I make sure to highlight all the crap you have to go through to counter the media doing a great job at highlighting the good stuff.

Cold email is a hit and miss approach. Just go talk to people face to face. Initially it seems like a non-scalable approach but it works wonders. The silicon valley, VC preached mantra of hyper scale is what muddles the minds of most entrepreneurs. Everyone starts thinking of million of users rather than 100s of users. There is a very interesting presentation from YC startup school 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

You will recognise the speaker :)

Sweden actually is one of the favourite destinations for immigrants.

Perhaps high skilled ones would prefer a country with better climate ... :-)

I think you’re right there is a lot of luck, but as they say, luck is effort plus opportunity. You need to put in the effort and position yourself for unique opportunities.

OP: My personal advice is to stick with a part/full-time job and continuing to explore your business ideas on the side until they are generating enough revenue to cover your expenses. Focus on businesses that sell something practical and don’t need lots of marketing or engagement (at first).

This seems to be the toxic end result of “hustle porn”.

The promise that you “Yes even you!” Can start the next unicorn, or even just bootstrap to ramen profitable & gain the attention of some VC money, maybe find a lucrative graceful exit if your runway runs out.

It’s a subtle lie, because it directly or indirectly says “everyone could be…” when in reality it’s “anyone might be…” in the sense of “anyone might be the next lottery winner!”

Anyone might, but not everyone can, and a significant amount of the outcome (sure, much more on the lottery) is determined by luck.

Only with hustle porn the themes pervading it all, unlike the lottery, is that if you fail, it’s because you did something wrong. You didn’t work hard enough. You didn’t network in the right places, that fundamental something is wrong with you

Most who have studied the progression of Christian religion throughout the history of colonizing the North American continent may recognize here the trappings of the Prosperity Gospel, itself a pernicious offshoot & watered down version of Predestination as found in some Protestant sects, that boils down to the belief that the unsuccessful, the sick, the poor, are all that way because it’s their own fault, because they have failed to achieve some vague notion of god’s grace.

Predestination is a complex topic with multiple interpretations, but the strong Calvinist version basically says that god not only knows who is predestined to heaven and hell, but that we might see that destiny here on earth in the trappings of a person’s life. The successful and healthy must surely have god’s blessing while the sick and the poor are clearly among the damned. As you might imagine, theological explanations and biblical references supporting this are complex, but that’s the nutshell.

You can see it’s roots in the concept of the American Dream among other attitudes that seem have been popular in the US— a sometimes, among some people, disdain for the poor who surely are there by some form of choice.

That is hustle porn. Modern repackaging of and stitching together of bits & pieces of the worst pieces of theology found in early (and some recent) groups of protestants. (See Joel Osteen for recent incarnations)