You are not alone, Google and Meta are in that same desolate box.
You say your startup filled a valid need? Usually items like that get at least a look. That look has to make the user take the next step = +feedback to proceed. If he/she likes it they promulgate it. Ever see the old hair shampoo commercial, I told my friend, and she told to friends, and they told......screen full of faces.
The fact that you could not progress beyond ~~20 tells me that your App had no 'gain'. Your gunpowder is wet and you will have no explosions.
As to why? this is down to function/feel. If you had instructions that offended people on social/religious/gender grounds - any one of those are killers. Condescension in phrasing - a killer.
Apps need good ideas/coders/manual writers, often these are not embodied in one person. You write good code, but the manual is so badly written people toss it away and walk - same for a number of other aspects. A good app can need a team of several people, each filling a niche.
So analyse your app(s) and see if you can isolate the flaws. It may have a fatal flaw that killed it, or it could be you trying to be a one man band and doing a bad job in one or more aspects.
Now you look down on 'influencers' - AKA advertising or promotion. Their job is eyeballs, once you get eyeballs, you still need gain or traction among users that the influencer attracted to your App, or once the dancing stops, your users will trickle away..
I am done. I give up
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Re: I am done. I give up
#472Here's an unpopular opinion: (i tweeted this a long time ago)
All the solopreneurs on #buildinpublic Twitter seem to be so successful and hard-working, but the reality is most of them are not making anything sustainable or good.
It feels like this community leans toward a shady and awkward Q&A show about how to grow your new venture. This show is the main engine of growth for some shady "bUsInESs" models on #buildinpublic. It's now a hype train for everything: truth, lie, scam, happiness, sadness, etc. And everyone is trying to use it:
Engage with broken founders, ask them about their opinion, tell them how good their ideas are, show off some fake numbers, feed them with productivity hacks, add more emojis , promote your "SaaS", and you'll "succeed".
I feel sad comparing what's happening rn with the way it was in the beginning, N years ago. It went from "sharing my journey" to "growth hacking my shady scheme" on twtr.
Re: I am done. I give up
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their tax rates are only a few percentage points different from ours. I think the difference is that we funnel 20% of it to the military (2% for Norway) and their tax code probably has fewer loopholes for the rich to exploit.
Their total tax burdens are much higher than US citizens' tax burdens unless you're making 7 figures of W-2 income. The top marginal tax rate kicks in an order of magnitude lower in those countries, and hits most of the middle class. In the US, it hits very few people. Also, the military is 20% of the discretionary budget, but 10% or less of the total budget.
US total government spending is officially 34% of total GDP, Germany is 43.7%. With much of that covering healthcare and collage education which more than makes up the difference for the median family. In the end, the US’s extreme defense spending and horrifically inefficient healthcare system is a massive drag on the economy.
What the US does differently from most of the EU is to hide as much spending as possible in the form of targeted tax breaks. From a cash flow perspective little changes but from a political standpoint it’s not spending.
Re: I am done. I give up
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most wealthy Americans were never paying 96% in taxes, if any at all. There were many more loopholes during this time. People are forgetting that the high tax countries are enjoying the fruits of lower-tax countries labor. Technology and drugs are the big ones. Big, evil companies create life-saving drugs and generics are created and sold for pennies to these countries. With no incentive to create (ie: large profits)…
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If the likely financial outcome were the same between making music and writing software for banks or insurance companies, I sure as hell wouldn't go anywhere near a computer.
Do you think people do Office Space style work out of the goodness of their own hearts?
> That’s frankly ridiculous.
The feeling is mutual.
Re: I am done. I give up
#475It's not for everyone, and yes there is some luck involved. Some luck in terms of timing, some in terms of how good your network is. Some ideas just aren't that good too.
I would say don't give up, at least on the general idea of entrepreneurship. If you have that drive, that is more of the equation than you think. Perhaps consider a more stable approach if your situation allows -- get another job and use moonlighting to see what ideas might take off. And keep in mind the saying: alone you go fast, together you go far.
Re: I am done. I give up
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was an engineer at a successful startup. We grew, we went bankrupt, we laid off most the company, the founders kicked in enough to keep us going and we restructured to give the remaining people larger shares. We became profitable and finally sold to another company. My payday was about $70k, which was a nice bonus, I was happy to get it. I moved on to big tech. The company withered away, the company that bought it…
It seems insane to me that the happy path involves you getting $70k. Working in finance, I would expect that amount as a bonus in any year where I perform well and the business isn't unprofitable. When I've spoken to people about the finance/big tech/startup trade-offs, we've often talked about the upside from startup success (outside of the Google or Instagram case) being around an order of magnitude bigger than tha…
I've only got an N of one under my belt, but I'd also note I wasn't a founder or even a pre-series-A employee. I believe the former got more like what you're thinking, and the latter 2x or so what I did. Also I honestly can't recall if that was a pretax or post number at this point.
But on the other end of things... it was still a nice cap on my time there. And even if it's not quit-your-job money, it was still an Everest.
(An Everest being the amount of money it takes to climb Everest, buy a luxury car or a small cabin on a lake, or any other number of reasonably achievable dreams.)
Re: I am done. I give up
#477Succeeding in the startup world reminds me of the funfair analogy: The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon. The middle class kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and also miss. Then they will walk away, saying…
Yes, money maters.
Rich kids can conjure tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars from "friends and family" in a mater of days. Hours even, if they're really connected.
They can then pump all that money straight into advertisement, barely even need a working demo - just something that looks like a product. They can do this many times over.
If you're gonna bootstrap something with $0, then you need to win the algorithmic lottery, simple as that. And even if you have some life savings laying around, you only have one go at burning those - though most working class folks in their early 20s rarely have the substantial funds needed to promote a product.
Re: I am done. I give up
#478Succeeding in the startup world reminds me of the funfair analogy: The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon. The middle class kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and also miss. Then they will walk away, saying…
> The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon I get contacted for a lot of “rich kid” startups for consulting work. This notion that rich kids are succeeding at startups due to their perseverance and fallback options is almost the op…
This makes intuitive sense to me. Startups are so hard that I know I wouldn’t persevere if I was sufficiently wealthy already. I’ve been failing at this game for twenty years straight. Like the OP, I quit last year and got a full time job again. But it always beckons me back somehow. It’s the failed startup attempts, the failed investments, the fraudsters who conned me out of my money, the career that could have been spectacular, but only ended up so-so because I’m not in the US. Somehow every knockdown from life makes me a little grittier, a little more determined when I get back up. How does a rich kid develop that?
Re: I am done. I give up
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked up taxation in Norway, it looks very similar to ours. Personal marginal tax rates cap at 48% and corporate taxes are 23%. What am I missing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Norway
It has nothing to do with taxation - or else the Arab Gulf or Cayman Islands would be entrepreneurial hubs, not California or the Toronto area. It’s all about the price of quality labour. It’s about access to long-term risk capital (aka venture funds) + high quality labour at affordable prices. As in, entrepreneurs having cash to fund projects and being able to actually hire people that will help build them. Try hiri…
Also you get really great engineers in norway, something about the lack of light, cold, snowy eternal night, produces excellent devs. Lots of fantastic open source projects exist due to the vikings no longer using boats..