Raising money fucked me up

> It's much more comfortable to be the person that "could be X" than to be the person that tries to actually do it.

Brilliant insight.

Reminds of me this, from Theodore Roosevelt's Citizenship in a Republic:

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Good luck, and go get 'em.

Well written. One interesting pattern in founders I've been thinking about recently is how early you encounter major blockers, and how that shapes your self worth.

Having a strong product and being unable to raise feels like shit, early users may validate you're solving a problem but it may not make sense to investors.

Having an early raise is a very positive signal, I can only imagine you're perceived trajectory coming out of that. Being unable to settle on a problem also sucks in a different way.

Regardless of what camp you're in I feel the take-away is you need to focus on reflecting inwards. Be better than you were yesterday, not better than someone's projections on LinkedIn.

Some feedback from me (not a likely user though):

- It was easier to find a link to where you worked at than your repo (https://github.com/skaldlabs/skald?tab=readme-ov-file), you should have linked it visibly

- I had no idea what / why I should use it so I looked at the demo video and it didn't seem to solve any particular use case for any particular problem, it was more a ,,config'' video instead of a demo video

- From reading the (quite interesting) article it seemed like you are focusing on pivoting instead of iteration speed. Have you tried for example to just query an LLM to build the whole project that you have done? How much time would be to vibe code it?

I know that HN is mostly against vibe coding, but if the project could have been created in 1-3 days and you took 3 month, that's a bigger issue than growth itself. In that case the metric that should be looked at is iteration speed instead of just growth (both are super important though!)

I used to have problems like this and then I almost died a couple of times. I no longer have problems like this.

> The thing is: it's a lot easier to live your life thinking you could have done X if you wanted to, than to "disappoint" these people that believed in you by trying and failing. You can always lean on this idea in your head of what you could have been, and how everyone believed in you so it must be true, but you just chose not to follow that path.

sometimes the best decision is the one you don't take.