He started a business in 2017, and closed the doors in 2018. What?
Recently, I was contacted by a person who told me he saw one of my videos on YouTube about Ycombinator (it had 50 views!!!), he had to meet me in person. We met a couple days later. He was a very smart guy with an impressive resume.
He quit his job in equipment manufacturing to pursue entrepreneurship. He was a former USC student, so naturally he traveled back to California, rented a small room where him and his business partner churned on their idea. It was a sort of classified for colleges.
Not a terrible idea in anyway. He knew the college life so he must have known things I didn't. I told him he should have tested his idea before quitting his job and moving into a whole other country where he had only been a student. He showed me the website, and it was obviously made by someone who was learning React. There is no need to go fancy when you are still testing your ideas. But there was a problem.
They were paying thousands of dollars a month to keep this barely functional app running.
This is something I see a lot of young people entering web development are doing. They get beefed-up cloud services that eat up a good chunk of their money. Most people think this is the regular cost of being online. It's not! A year later, the domain name doesn't resolve either.
In the story, OP alludes living with his parents. I imagine to save money. But then there is $40k. I hope that it wasn't mostly on the AWS cost. But he gathered valuable data that did cost money.
Don't shut down the website. Keep it running and make the data available in read only mode and add a donation button (alternative to ads). It should cost $5 a month to host on linode or digitalocean. Don't let the money you spent go down the drain.