I am done. I give up

I think a lot of us have been there.

There's a big difference whether your service:

- is B2B/B2C;

- uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth;

- targets a broad market or a niche (the more niche it is, the better it speaks to your target market, f.e. coaching vs developer coaching vs coaching Java developers VS coaching Java developers in machine learning vs coaching Java developers that use machine learning in the agricultural world...)

- uses different pricing models;

- ...

I've been on this route for 8 years with some consulting stints in between to pay the bills, and it wasn't until this year that my sales pitch finally started to land. Refining my target audience has been a big part of this...

There's a lot of nuance in how to present your offer, and you need to get everything exactly right to convert someone. You have to make someone an offer so good it would feel stupid for them to refuse.

In my opinion a lot of the "snake oil sellers" try to pitch the universal product-led growth approach to a very broad market that works for everything and that you can do from your computer.

In reality, they are most likely optimized to sell as much courses as possible, coming with very generic advice, and don't really care about the results for their target audience.

Another point: unless your target audience is on indie hackers, you should not be spending your time there at all.

I feel for you, so if you want to have a short chat, I might be able to give you some pointers. Feel free to reach out.

In the end, there is a lot of survivorship bias going on, and as the world is in constant flux, what works today will probably not work tomorrow, so you have to find your own path...

And, there's no shame in having tried and failed; by trying you're already within the minority that took action.

By the way, in my experience, people pay way more for an IT consultant that has lived and experienced the bigger picture of running a business, so even if you failed, you should be better off that someone that didn't try...

Update: formatting

Anyway, as someone who failed a number of times and then eventually succeeded in building a stable (what is derogatively called "lifestyle") business, I'm not sure if I have good advice to offer, apart from perhaps one thing: don't do B2C, a B2B business is the only way to go.

Otherwise, it's just hard. And I agree about caring for mental health: this is important.

I don't quite understand. You wrote that you offered a product which solves a problem for an audience. That's an achievement! Maybe even a great achievement, depending on what the product is and how many people use it and for what. I don't mean to belittle the sting of not enough people caring, following, upvoting etc. - but if people are using your product, then you've bettered their lives, and that is commendable and admirable.

Building a successful startup is not just not-easy, it is nearly impossible, in the sense that the vast majority of start-ups fail. Indeed, some people might be in a social echo-chamber where they get a distorted sense of what's feasible and what's easy. I would say the point is not just "pushing forward", but thinking about both the future of success and the future of - quite probable - failure of a start-up initiative. Also, considering whether what you want to produce will better help humanity if you promote it via a commercial enterprise or a free/public-benefit initiative instead.