Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

Consulting has gotten me here and I've had up to 4 direct hires with me, but my dream has always been to run a product business. I must have attempted 3 dozen different ideas by this point.

But on Friday last week, we reached our 100th subscriber. Combined with other free products, we now have over 130k daily active users which sounds more impressive than it is. The MRR is still tiny and we still rely heavily on consulting projects that have been more and more difficult to line up.

It's been difficult, sometimes extraordinarily so, but we have such happy customers with huge amounts of positive feedback. It feels like this could really go somewhere. The fire still burns brightly within me though I don't know how. I'm determined not to let opportunities pass me by again.

I have never shared this anywhere.

Here's what I learned via trial and error.

A long time ago, when investors and accelerators and MBA programs began to dominate the startup scene, founders got distracted.

I saw (and sometimes created) half-baked apps and websites, useless market research, chasing trends, chasing vanity metrics, investor pitching contests, startup theatre, and "build it and they will come" BS.

Build something people want and will pay for.

Not just say they want.

Not just say they'll pay for.

Make something that they see and will immediately take out their cash/cc/paypal/venmo and pay for on the spot.

If you can get that far, things start to fall into place. As others have noted, consulting may be necessary to keep things going.

This may not be applicable to capital-intensive fields, regulated industries, enterprise SaaS, but it works for a lot of B2C and even B2B startups.

I share your frustrations, but I see things from a different perspective when doing side projects for a few reasons:

1. I treat innovative ideas as potentially growing to something amazing and see them more as passion projects that help me to grow in many ways, including learning new technologies, learning other trades (e.g. marketing, sales).

2. I use my skills learned in side projects as bolsters to my resume. I can testify that I've been approached by employers and been seen as a better candidate than others based on the side project experience I've done. Further, I've gotten other side-gigs that are paying as a result of the side-gig skills I've acquired. Adding these hard and soft skills to your resume makes you a better candidate overall and opens opportunities otherwise unavailable without.

3. I still work a main gig that I (mostly) enjoy, which enables me financially to be able to spend my off-hours working on and funding my passion projects. This to me feels safer than going all in, although it could be argued things inevitably develop more slowly this way.

4. My reward for hard work is similar to open source development in that I'm creating something for humanity that wasn't available before, which may or may not make money, but benefits me for the reasons stated above.

Perspective helps here, and if it grows into something bigger then all the better. If it doesn't, then there are other benefits to doing it that help shape you and your skillset.