What you're giving up on is an unhealthy and unrealistic idea of
what "entrepreneurship" means. And that's good. Sounds like you've
been following someone else's dream, not your own. I've seen it often,
in the music and games industries for example. We've all been
there. Failure after failure. But one doesn't give up because the
trick is to find the definition of "entrepreneur" that fits you, for
which you are suited, and successful, and by definition that is what
entrepreneurship is. Don't buy into the pop culture. That said,
always take a healthy break between projects, as you say, for the sake
of your mental health. Good luck.
I am done. I give up
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Re: I am done. I give up
#62Sorry to hear that. How long were you trying for? A lot of these guys were at it for years and years before they found success. It can be brutal in the beginning. I think it's unfair to characterise the "digital nomad influencers" on Twitter as making it seem easy. I know a few of them personally and they work incredibly hard. You can tell by the speed at which they ship new products. They work a lot. That said, buil…
Exactly. I started building stuff at 17 and found "the one" (doing over 1 mil/year) at 27. I can't count how many failed projects I had.
How did you identify your ultimately successful niche, and what do you feel was different about it than your previous attempts?
Re: I am done. I give up
#63I wish you all the best for the future and I'm sure you will find satisfaction in whatever path you pursue going forwards.
Re: I am done. I give up
#64Congrats! You have found out that influencers are gaining money through promising impossible stuff to people who believe that the million comes easy. ;)
I am working in a startup's marketing team and we are constantly struggling to get some attention and customers.
In comparison, big corporations have big sales, marketing, product development teams and etc... And these are constant efforts of hundreds of people so that the company has a good position in the market.
So don't beat yourself up. It is not easy.
Entrepreneurship can often be a very ungrateful job to do. You sacrifice too much. But what do you actually get in the end?
Re: I am done. I give up
#65Re: I am done. I give up
#66A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. The basic fact is that most startups and most entrepreneurial dreams fail or get consumed by another for their talent/clients. And as an entrepreneur you fight against all odds. Most will fail…
> A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. And for anything with bigger ambitions than a lifestyle business, don’t forget connections. Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford. Just look at the “PayPal mafia” to see how inbred tech investing can be. Not that most entrepreneurs need or should expect VC funding, but this is HN, run by a VC. You can totally run a business and be…
I wasted a decade of my life on the notion that you can bootstrap a startup. It is hard mode and the folks that are so dismissive of VC funding should have that disclaimer.
Re: I am done. I give up
#67In a way the tremendous success of YC drove this false belief that :
- Creating a startup is fun & rather EASY success.
It's not. It's never been. It will never be.
I am fifty three: I now know.
I also was a teenager then a young adult, influenced by "entrepreneurs" of their time.
Entrepreneurs dream is RISKY.
Start-up's future is 90% of the time doomed.
Worse : Chance plays a big role.
Re: I am done. I give up
#68Bottom text
Re: I am done. I give up
#69I grew up in a family of successful small entrepreneurs and surrounded by their contacts and friends. I myself chose to get employed in IT and I've been like that for 20 years. A couple of years back I was starting to get the feeling that I'm not all I could be, that maybe I should start my own business and make "real" money. I presented this idea to my father during a lunch with a few of his business partners. The overall sentiment was "Fuck no! The money you're making working 9 to 5? You'd be crazy to give that up for all the trouble a business brings." I was quite surprised, not even one of them supported the idea and most envied my life style.
I could go into how success in business is a lot about who you know and it's quite far from a fair playing field but I don't think it necessary nor do I want to write a book here.
Re: I am done. I give up
#70Some similarities exist in many other businesses like music, games or sports. The distribution is varying degrees of L-shaped. The few successful ones are very successful while most are making a loss.
Another key concept is asymmetric risk to the individual. The way it would make sense to an individual to be an enterpreneur is if they can reduce the downside, ie that failing will not result in a personal catastrophe. For example if they had a lot of money to start with. If you have enough savings to live (and feed your family) for a few years without money, then it makes a lot more sense. There are other methods like incubators or collectives.
And the third one is survivorship bias. A lottery winner telling everyone what kind of pen to use to fill their ticket. People might not know very well why they were successful.
Fourth one is "selling picks to gold miners". There's this business and buzz around enterpreneur culture, someone can make money right out of that without actually being an enterpreneur. No matter what it is, somebody will turn it into a meta business. Fishing is a big business. In the sixteenhundreds, Izaak Walton wrote a successful book on angling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compleat_Angler