Ask HN: How do you know when to quit the startup you founded?
We've seen... moderate success. By moderate I mean we've always been cash-flow positive and our gross revenue grows by a modest percentage each year. I hear that 90% of SaaS businesses fail, so I guess our "not-failing" could be seen as success.
But it's not the "success" I'd hoped for. I'm in my late 30s now, but in a way, I'm still kind of subsidising the business, because my pay is probably 50% of the market rate for a developer with my experience. Obviously, we still can't afford to hire more developers, so it's just been me, coding away on my own, for years.
We have loyal customers, some who've been with us since the beginning. But our product is getting stale. To stay alive, we've added features to lure in new customers, and to keep them, we've made promises (I know, I know... two things you never do: allow feature-creep and promise features in the future). But don't judge - we did what we had to do to live another day!
Lately, the slog is just too much for me. My productivity is plummeting. I'm becoming irritable in and out of work. I'm probably a bit burned out.
I'm trying to decide which of three paths to take:
1) Stick it out, don't be a quitter, work harder, turn the business into what I want it to be.
2) Leave the business, find work as a developer for a larger company, grow, learn, etc. I like being a developer, but my business isn't going anywhere, so.. fail fast(er) and move on, right?
3) Leverage my entrepreneurial experience into a CTO role. I love the entrepreneurial aspect of my work, because businesses are systems, and making systems better is my jam. Maybe I should get an MBA and leave the coding behind me?
Advice welcome!