Ask HN: Need advice from failed entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Need advice from failed entrepreneurs

1 pointnisthana6 comments

I built a product that had some traction, but not enough to raise any angel/vc funding. I ran out of my personal savings. What should I do next? Leave everything and look for jobs?

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You should be getting advice from people who have failed AND succeeded. If the person only failed and never succeeded in anything, they probably think they know why they failed but actually they don't. That's why you see a lot of misleading medium blog posts about people talking about why they failed when they know nothing about why. On the other hand people who've only succeeded (has nothing to do with whether they're more competent than the ones who've failed, just means they were lucky) don't know what it means to fail so won't be able to give you good advice.

Secondly, raising money is not related to succeeding. You will understand when you take a step back and watch 99% of the once-popular companies go out of business after raising millions of dollars.

I suggest you keep working on your thing on the side (if you're still passionate about it) and get a job. You can always quit and come back to fulltime on your thing when you see a glimmer of hope.

Thats awesome advice. I definitely want to keep on doing, I am very passionate. Heck 2 of my students who used my platform got into good schools (one in Yale and one in UC Davis). They called me and thanked me. I know this thing is useful but I need to reach out to millions of people to make anything substantial out of it. And I just don't have the money.

I am thinking of getting a contracting job so I can keep working on it on the side. I have been out of job for a long time so I don't even know where to start from.

The first thing you need to figure out is what went wrong? Did you get data on why your product didn't get enough traction ? Some ideas are features of other products and not products by themselves. You need to figure that out. The most important thing in entrepreneurship, if you ever want to be successful, is to learn from failures. So get data first. The data will tell you what to do. Maybe a little tweak to your business model might get you more traction, maybe the product is simply not a product. Get data. Talk to users. Figure out what worked and what didn't.

I have the data, lots of it. I have lots of learning. What I built was to help people get into college and career by connecting them with a role model in college or companies. It's a mentoring platform.

What I found the hard way is that I cannot build a long term sustaining business out of mentoring. So investors did not want to get into it.

The users used it only for to get one time advice from mentors and then never came back. There was nothing viral about it.

I developed a good strategy to increase awareness of the product locally but failed to distribute it to the masses (I used Facebook Ads). If I had funds, I could have hired a growth hacker or a good marketing person to at least make people aware because if people don't know about it, they won't use it.

The product is still running. However I cannot invest my savings any more on it. Job is an option (I am in Silicon valley so there are plenty). But its so hard to leave everything I've built behind and go back to working for someone else :-((

Go revenue first and try to bootstrap.

Been bootstrapped all along.

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