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.

I'm leading a 40 people team, and it's going well. How did I get there? By chance. Another hackathon resulted in the right industry at the right time.

But also 12 years of exercise in pitching, structuring information, data, setting up on organization, addressing all kinds of different technologies and all of that.

You are learning so much and you feel treated unfairly by not being able to show it off. Keep on going. Maybe go back to work for 10-12 months for some stability and to take a break, but then try again.

We're also facing hard issues every now and then and then you face things like strong competition that can make you nervous at times (depending of the scale of your industry), but having suffered more personally in the past in this context, just helps to face these things today much easier.

Having a co-founder that is complementary to your personality and skill-set is highly valuable. We've been working together for 10 years now.

Is your 40 person team for a venture of your own, or are you working with a larger org now?

Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing?

Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed.

And this stuff is hard! There's a reason why good salespeople and marketers are paid so well!

You definitely can learn that, it's a skillset like any other. But treating it like a secondary concern is a death trap for your business.

If you are a tech founder, it's absolutely crucial you figure out a strategy for customer acquisition – find a sales co-founder, hire some good salespeople, get someone who can teach you how to do it – just do not treat it as something less important than tech, because then you are just counting on being lucky. And if you decide to sell yourself, expect that to be a difficult, time consuming job – don't be surprised if you spend more time chasing business rather than coding.

Sales & Marketing is just as complex as the tech stack. Yes, we techs can learn that side of the fence, but it takes a bit of humility to recognize that it'll come at a cost.

If the postmortem is "I tried to follow what influencers said, but it didn't work, so I'm tired, I give up" then, well, no surprise here.

And yes, startups are hard. Very hard.

- Entrepreneurship isn't a lifestyle. Stay in a job unless you have a good idea and are ready to execute.

- Try your idea internally. Starting a new product in a company is easier than outside. It doesn't have a $1B upside, but it has enough upside, in all respects (not just financial -- learning, credibility, etc.).

- If that doesn't pan out, go external only once you're pretty confident of success.

My experience is that entrepreneurship isn't so much hard or take luck, as it takes a lot of groundwork:

- You want a diverse set of skills. Management. Finance. Sales. Technical. Legal. Market research. Etc. It's not a place for specialists, and it takes time to develop those skills. You also ought to enjoy (or at least not hate) most of them.

- You want good market timing, which comes with experience.

- You want a good idea with traction. That's where nights / weekends fit in. Nights / weekends don't give enough time for a successful startup, but they give enough to do early prototyping.

Doing a (failed) startup as a student is a good learning experience. I wish I had done it. I don't wish I had done it three times, or as an adult.

Oh, and selling false dreams is part of being a successful entrepreneur. You'll get zero customers if people think you're on the verge of going broke. Every business I've seen takes a "fake it until you make it approach." If you rely on blogs for what entrepreneurship ought to look like, you're in for a nasty surprise. A better option to learn how to do a startup is a job at a startup; you'll see the process from the inside.

I followed roughly this path until I was in my late 30s. Now have a startup that is growing because we put in essentially 5 years of groundwork, while working full time day jobs, building product in an industry that isn’t sexy, being “lucky” (patient/observant) enough to ride a new federal regulation, having go throw away an entire product after 2 years and starting a new product in the same space/customers, showing customers we were in it for the long haul FOR THEM, with a well rounded seasoned founding team, business model first, taking the right amount of investment from the right investors at the right time.

In that way I think entrepreneurship IS actually a lifestyle, but the behaviors are not what OP alludes to. The lifestyle is falling in love with a problem or a type of customer or both and just seeing what you can do to help while building a business along the way…SUSTAINABLY. If your version of lifestyle is somehow BEING caught up in acting a certain way based on influence (I have no idea what an indie hacker is), that seems destined for failure.

TLDR. Go live your life, get a normal job to build security, don’t try and start a company at all, wait for a problem/opportunity to find you.

Most startups try to build another database, web framework, or data service, or whatnot, because that's the problem programmers are familiar with. The next ones are consumer products, assuming consumers look like SFO. The competition is fierce, and very few succeed.

My experience is that in virtually any other industry -- I don't care if you're in construction, shipbuilding, or farming -- there will be many low-hanging fruit which people in that industry won't be competent to solve. If you:

- go into some (nearly random) industry;

- keep your head up enough to gain an understanding how it works; and

- build out a network of connections you trust and who trust you

entrepreneurship is easy.

I guess the other piece is keeping your toe deep enough in tech that you can pull together a good team and solve problems a typical IT department can't solve. But that should be the easy part for readers here.

You can even start consulting. In the same way as a tech company doesn't want to outsource its core competency but is happy to outsource legal, payroll, and similar, the opposite is true in most industry. I've seen industries on HN where you (the typical HN reader) could outperform a whole 20-person team because the tech they hire is so incompetent. That's not a tough sell.

Starting a business can be an all-consuming pursuit, and it's important to make sure you're taking care of your mental health and well-being. It's not uncommon for entrepreneurs to experience feelings of burnout, anxiety, and depression, and it's essential to prioritize your own self-care. This could mean seeking support from friends, family, or a mental health professional, taking breaks to rest and recharge, or finding ways to manage stress and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

It's also important to remember that building a successful startup is a marathon, not a sprint. It can take time to find a product-market fit, build an audience, and gain traction. It's natural to have ups and downs and to face challenges along the way, but the key is to learn from your failures and keep moving forward.

I understand that it may not be easy, but please don't give up on your entrepreneurial dreams just yet. Remember that you are not alone and there are resources and support available to help you through this difficult time. If you ever need to talk or just need someone to listen, don't hesitate to reach out.

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.

It’s interesting how one can say something to others and do the exact opposite a second later. It seems like you’re ok with others doing the hard work, but not yourself.

IMO its hard, but possible. If others could do it, so can I. I have learnt that by being consistent and working hard, things eventually work out someway.

257 comments to this post submitted by user whose account was only created 2-3 hours ago!! I feel this is a post that someone may have generated using ChatGPT.

Why doe sit matter? Jesus, he was just institutionalized, you people are cruel.

And who cares about how long ago the account was created?

Next line

> But for me, I can't take it anymore.

How can you advice something you're not doing?

I don't question you have worked really hard and pushed yourself to the limit, but I would look at the experience you've gained as a learning experience and seeing things from different perspective when you get a job. Now you will see in more clarity why decisions are made at work, and how hard it is to sell a product.

Celebrate your learnings, your situation is the majority, very few startups will succeed.

I'm sorry that your enterprises have failed but this doesn't surprise me. I'm happy that you changed your direction (imho, it's not giving up) to something different. It's very hard to find the point where you let it go while success seems such a very short distance away like you can reach your hand and grab it. But it's so frustrating that even if you are approaching your goal, you can't just close the distance and it's still far away.

There will be people who will label you as a "loser" as you "gave up on your dreams", but you are not actually. You are just one of millions of people who were trying to make it but didn't. I doesn't matter if your idea was great or not, if your execution was perfect or not, if your audience was willing to pay or not, if the time was right or not, sometimes it just doesn't work. And it's still OK.

Best of luck to you.

Its an era of industrialized cookiecutter startup generation, too much money chasing too few worthy ideas, overwhelming oligopoly power, permacrises that wake nobody up from the consumerist get-rich-quick stupor, an era of dwarf politicians, and supersized hypes, engineered manias and fomo and a dazed, confused and bitter body politic.

Its an era of startups-as-a-service and right now we are probably entering the managing-startup-failure-as-a-service phase.

We are, in part, complicit in this state of affairs, the way the cogs of a malfunctioning machine are both cause and victims of its unhappy unraveling.

These small successes is what you need. To propel you back into the entrepreneurship journey. I don't know about these influencers and not sure what they sell. You just have to get lucky. I have been through so many startup failures that I have stopped counting, but I attribute my failures to my own laziness and not being in the right market.

So back to successes, what I found super helpful is a micro dosing of success like winning a point in a game of tennis, or getting 10 consecutive shots above the net , something like this, totally unrelated to the world of startups can bring in tremendous confidence and morale boost. Why I say tennis is because getting some of these shots right consistently involves some luck in the beginning. While you may not get all the 10 shots correct, that one lucky shot can bring in a high dose of morale boost. It could be shooting balls as well. I personally find that small successful acts like this, which involve your skill and some luck really help in overcoming failures, failures like what you state, which are truly a result of not just your effort but a lot of outside factors/luck.

Jesus, leave the dude alone, will you? Didn't you read he was institutionalized? Your one of the influencers that make people's lives worse.

If it becomes a burden, then it's a problem.

Also, luck may play a big role, but there's something you learn failing over and over again. You start to see what it's actually working and what path is closer to success. Patterns will emerge. You know that saying that sometimes you do your own luck.

The easiest path to success for a SaaS is getting a feature of a big product into a standalone specialized product and going after that niche. This simple thing so many indie hackers fail to realize, many try to build the next unicorn, the unique idea. If you keep trying like this, you'll likely fail 50 more times.

I think a lot of us have been there.

There's a big difference whether your service:

- is B2B/B2C;

- uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth;

- targets a broad market or a niche (the more niche it is, the better it speaks to your target market, f.e. coaching vs developer coaching vs coaching Java developers VS coaching Java developers in machine learning vs coaching Java developers that use machine learning in the agricultural world...)

- uses different pricing models;

- ...

I've been on this route for 8 years with some consulting stints in between to pay the bills, and it wasn't until this year that my sales pitch finally started to land. Refining my target audience has been a big part of this...

There's a lot of nuance in how to present your offer, and you need to get everything exactly right to convert someone. You have to make someone an offer so good it would feel stupid for them to refuse.

In my opinion a lot of the "snake oil sellers" try to pitch the universal product-led growth approach to a very broad market that works for everything and that you can do from your computer.

In reality, they are most likely optimized to sell as much courses as possible, coming with very generic advice, and don't really care about the results for their target audience.

Another point: unless your target audience is on indie hackers, you should not be spending your time there at all.

I feel for you, so if you want to have a short chat, I might be able to give you some pointers. Feel free to reach out.

In the end, there is a lot of survivorship bias going on, and as the world is in constant flux, what works today will probably not work tomorrow, so you have to find your own path...

And, there's no shame in having tried and failed; by trying you're already within the minority that took action.

By the way, in my experience, people pay way more for an IT consultant that has lived and experienced the bigger picture of running a business, so even if you failed, you should be better off that someone that didn't try...

Update: formatting

What exactly do you mean here? because I'd argue depending on the product, each of the 3 could be the way to go over the others. Are you trying to say one is the best way of growing? Curious to hear your thoughts.

I tried combining both product-led and sales-led, and addressing a lot of different kinds of businesses, but this ended up making my go-to-market more complicated and resulted in almost zero sales.

Second half of this year I finally switched it to sales led targeting a very specific niche, and ended up with a very clear and simple offering for a very specific kind of customer.

This feels counterintuitive because you exclude a huge part of your TAM, but it allows you to be the perfect match for a very specific profile.

Instead of getting a lot of leads with a gazillion questions because they don't trust you, they now start thinking about if/how they can afford it after the first online session.

To get the path of the least resistance, you need to address the exact problems of a certain kind of prospect, conveying your value as easy as possible, and making it a no-brainer for them to commit.

But, don't take my word for it, just ask me again by the end of 2023 whether this all worked out of not.

(I did get some very positive feedback from somebody who bootstrapped, scaled up and sold his company, so I do have high hopes/expectations.)

Perhaps since many broader (less niche) bases are covered by the innumerable products out there today, maybe this is a good way to go for solo people.