After losing my savings as an indie hacker, I can't do it anymore. I quit.

Firstly, your issue doesn't seem to be anything other than social anxiety

If you have to 'lose sleep' after contacting someone on LinkedIn about your product, then you are just not suited to doing a startup

Secondly, there is nothing to feel bad about

Vast majority of people are not suited to starting a company or working in a small startup

Lots of good jobs in middle and large companies for you

Thirdly, the scale of stuff you are talking about is miniscule

I walked away from a Green Card to start my company

If I didn't succeed, I would have lost access to the developed world FOREVER

You are upset that your girlfriend had to stay at home one year and you couldn't take her out for dinner????

Finally, this is a Catch 22 situation. Not sure why you are submitting this or writing about your experience if the ENTIRE reason you quit was you couldn't handle doing sales and marketing and putting yourself out there

I'm reluctant to respond because people who have social anxiety can sometimes take genuine feedback and mis-interpret it

What I'm trying to say is that the extent of the risk you took is not very high

And the reason that stuff didn't work out is your social anxiety

So just make sure you don't take the wrong feedback from what life is telling you

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-failed-6-side-projec...

This is one of the most difficult kinds of business to start. You need to attract both content creators (sellers) and content consumers (buyers). Attracting just one group is hard enough. Attracting both is just about impossible. It's even harder when you're kind of shy and sensitive to criticism.

Hats off to the author for trying the almost impossible anyway. I imagine there are some really good lessons in that experience.

There's plenty more positives you can take from this experience.

1. You learned how crippling your social anxiety can be (perhaps you already knew?), so maybe you can take some steps to work on that.

2. The door of indie developer is now firmly closed, which means you can explore new possibilities (whatever they may be), with wholehearted commitment not distracted by the siren's call.

3. You learned just how supportive your partner is. They stuck with you and are still with you. That's gotta be a good thing right?

Sure, social anxiety might be part of the reason. But I think the biggest contributor to your lack of success was that you did not have a team around you to build the product. With a team, I'm sure you would have found it much more acceptable to cold email people and just feel no shame basically promoting the product.

But that's one part of the whole picture. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to admit that people don't want to buy your product. Maybe it's because you don't know how to market it or maybe it just doesn't provide that much value.

I wish José best of luck to future endeavors and I recommend getting to know other start-up oriented people. Possibly salespersons. To start your next project. Don't get discouraged, that's my advice. With the right people in your team, I'm positive you can succeed.

Yeah, that sucks. I'm sorry you had a bad experience.

I think one thing for the community to take away is you need to be in a good position financially before you can start a startup - unless you can get funding. Especially for indiehackers who don't usually take outside investment, $12k in savings is not enough. It is not normal to have to stop going out at all or to be pinching pennies. Not everyone can afford to start a startup. For some reason, this concept is almost never talked about in the startup community, but it's really important.

I'm currently saving up to do just that and its like, "I could buy a house with this money" or "I could go on sabbatical with this money", or "I could bet everything on a business that may or may not succeed and potentially lose it all"

And if I do? There is nothing except going back to the tech grind, or homelessness, or another (far less lucrative) career. Unemployment won't help me (which is complete and utter BULLSHIT for the amount of money I've paid into it), and I'd be ineligible for social security due to that previous tech income hanging over my head. There are no, "sorry you failed, here's some money to get back on your feet and try again" grants

It really underscores the reality that most of these founders have rich family or friends to fall back on.

I had a similar feeling some 10 years ago after my first startup failed. I felt that I had wasted one year of my life and was very bitter about the failure and the personal sacrifices that came with it.

In time my thinking came around. I better understood my limits, knew my preferences, and developed some new capabilities. I was also better able to navigate startup #2 which is still going great as a bootstrapped company. My cofounder ended up on a corporate software dev team, and is also doing well.

Bottom line: things will get better. Regard this as a learning experience that helped determine a more rewarding future path (probably not doing your own startup, but that's OK, too)

People that stay at a job might actually just have a much more accurate assessment of chances involved and their own capabilities.

That job at Amazon? Go for it! It probably has some stock options too.

Honestly the whole idea of startups has been somehow perverted beyond belief. At least from reading the US news, startups are basically a standardised product themselves, in the same way you have building codes. For an investor the startup is a fungible sprocket that just found a different niche. This kind of... conformity seems the opposite to any true creative business making.

- https://nomadnest.org an alternative to Couchsurfing

- https://coffeelist.co - a coffee community

- https://nomadasdigitales.com - a digital nomads community in Spanish.

- https://lanzame.net - a Product Hunt in Spanish.

- https://classline.io - a SaaS for teachers to simply communicate with students over email, this is using the technology that I created for nomadmail.

for one person this is just too much to get it right in one year I guess. How much time can one really spend to deeply understand customers and their wants/needs?

Apart from that - answering the classical questions like what problem does it solve? why now? etc. points me to a lot of issues with copy-solutions, especially some of these ones during a pandemic.

thinking ahead: if the code quality is good, I can imagine a lot of people paying decent money on learing how he did it - although also in this niche there are some players.

I've written here already about some issues I faced. In my case, I've lost all my savings and much more, but I'll not compare my situation to yours, that would definitely not help you. Only you know your own situation and what you're feeling.

People will say that you might not have what it takes to be a successful startup owner. That may be true, but people often forget that there are other kinds of companies than startups, and you can perform really well even if you don't meet Paul Grahamer criteria for successful founders.

I'm currently working on a regular job and planning to come back within a year or so. But I'm not taking that as a hard requirement -- I'll assess the situation by then and decide if it's really a good idea.

I've come to realize that myself and my weaknesses are really big competitors of mine, and I'll try to manage them properly. I'll separate some money that I won't care too much if I loose -- I believe that that will help me to manage my own anxiety and the truckload of poor decisions I make after months of anxiety and stress.

And I'll hire a salesperson to help me on this. Many say this is bad idea, that you yourself have to sell your product and so and so, and I thank you all for the advice but I'm not following it this time and OK.

I'll work on presenting myself a bit stronger to people. It's interesting how condescending people become when they see that you are performing bad. They start to patronize you and feel overconfident to give terrible ideas. I don't blame them too much but, even to be fair to myself, some pieces of bad advice contributed to make my situation a bit worse.

That's what I'm planning to do, see if it helps.

There is a big element of luck in success, so multiple attempts may be necessary even if funding is available.

I was finally acquhired (to use a term invented later) by a local startup that needed what I was doing, for a signing bonus, decent salary, and a big chunk of equity. (This was in the late 80s. My "plan", such as it was, would not work now, because software is basically given away.)

I guess the lesson is this: know your limitations, and work around them. If you hate doing X, then don't force yourself to do X, because you will suck at it compared to the many people who love doing X. And you will be miserable. Find a situation where you can do what you enjoy, and are good at, and somebody else does X.

> So the real cost is more than the money I lost. I made my girlfriend stay home for a year, we didn't do anything, we didn't buy clothes and ate the cheapest food, etc.

---

> I got much more from the articles that I wrote here on Indie Hackers than from any of my projects. And I did those in a couple of hours.

I know you don't like that it only took a couple of hours. But if you got more from them, why not go further into that? 80/20 etc.

> Every time that I want to promote something, my stomach hurts. If I share an article on Reddit I feel anxious for a week. When I go to a Facebook Group to suggest my apps, I feel sick. If I send a private message on Twitter or Linkedin, I can't sleep. All the time I think people are going to hate me, tell me that I am an idiot, a con maker, that my ideas are terrible, that I suck. And they did many times, and I can't handle that while making $0. So, I quit.

That sucks. I'll be on the lookout for these signals as well. If I have them, then I either try to find a growth hacker type of person, or quit as well.

> I always wanted to write more. I love it. But I felt that I couldn't write if I wasn't successful. But I guess there are no rules.

Indeed, there aren't. When you write, you get to set the frame and tone of your message.

- was this a problem-driven product? Because this seems like a crowded market, which means you probably need to be able to outcompete the existing products

- startups aren’t for everyone; those gut feelings could have been identified by spending a few weekends doing market research and validation.

- so it took a year, a year is nothing. You learnt you don’t want to do startups and probably learnt a bunch of stuff that would be useful in the future. You challenged yourself. And you’ll be more grateful for that regular pay check in the future.

It’s not a disaster, it’s learning and experience and those things are valuable.

I think he's the only one giving worthwhile advice here. You're very unlikely to succeed at bootstrapping a startup and people often don't realise this or act like through perseverance they will definitely succeed. He's lucky to have realised that he had other things in his life he cared about more after only a year.

Many people want a family or want to buy a house. Others want to enjoy their 20s (or 30s for that matter). Others want to put money into investments or a pension for their old age. You could sacrifice all of these things chasing a startup dream and end up with nothing. There is a high likelihood of this. Unless you believe you've very different odds or a much lower cost (e.g. an investor) you probably shouldn't do it.

I'm reminded of the chapter on Stardew Valley in the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. That story is also about a developer who worked on a solo project, years, however, and who brought in no income while his girlfriend worked to support both of them. Obviously that one has a much happier ending. (I will say one huge difference is that from early on, it was clear that there was a fanatic user base just waiting for the game to be released.)

I've spent a year and half building out something that i can see bringing value and enjoyment to a wide swath of people.

I just flail hard at the thought of putting myself out there to market it. My personal problem though is "its not good enough yet" and I just stop. A lot of advice here says "its just not for you" but I dont entirely believe that.

I've enjoyed creation, autonomy, and the freedom to define my path. There was to be a way to get out of your own way...

Drove myself and my family into the poor house for something people enjoyed using for free but wouldn't pay for... made plenty of mistakes.

I thought if I didn't quit on it I wouldn't fail, but looking back it started failing the second I launched it as a generic product... you need a big marketing budget to launch i ended up giving it away free just to see people use it.

Doing this stuff self-funded with a nearly nonexistent budget is harder than Hard Mode.

Seeing all these TV shows, movies, HN posts about people starting their own company, etc. I think people greatly overinflate the chances that you make it even somewhat mediocre big -- if you even have an idea that's any good.

Like one of the big logistics companies advertising that, hey you can be a truck driver in control of your destiny -- when in fact, it's paying up front for the training, taking out a loan for the truck, and being in debt for years. Or kids enrolling in music school hoping to become a celeb.

Except here, you do it to yourself through hopes and dreams.

1) The "Maker" Path: you slowly improve your own skills and reputation as a developer (or designer) until they give you a big enough advantage that you can translate them into a successful product. This usually means first growing an audience through blogging, conferences, courses, etc.

2) The "Marketing" Path: you become so good at the "business" part of your business that the you're able to launch new products from scratch without a preexisting audience. It's tough to know if this really works or not but I assume with all the money spent on Google Ads some of it has to work… right?

3) The "Idea" Path: you have an idea that you believe in so much that you'll basically stop at nothing to make it work, even if it takes years (which it probably will). You usually pick up the other skills along the way.

I feel like the poster here suffers from not quite fitting in any of the main paths: they did not seem to have a large pre-existing audience or network to launch to, hate anything related to marketing by their own admission, and their ideas –while perfectly good products, such as https://nomadmail.io/– do not seem to be the kind of project that would inspire the kind of passion necessary to sacrifice years of your life.

I don't want to read too much into your article, but I just wanted to add that it sounded like you were doing things on your own which can be extremely hard (or easy) depending on your personality type. Also it sounded like having a marketing/sales co-founder could have made a difference. I'm not sure where I came across the advice that a start-up needs a hipster, a hacker and a hustler, but it's a rare individual who embodies all three qualities.

My first 2 business failures were because I was inexperienced as an entrepreneur and didn't understand where my strengths and weaknesses were. My next venture was a success because I had co-founders and I could focus on my strengths.

I'm sorry things didn't turn out well and I wish you luck in your next move. Whatever you do just be the best version of yourself... whatever that is.

Technical people both enjoy, and know how to build digital products. But they don't understand that a product is not a business.

A product solves a problem.

A business has a steady stream of customers actively searching to fix that problem (a market) and a set of reliable channels for converting these leads into customers (distribution).

If you're not in a reliable market and have no reliable distribution within that market...you have a product, not a business.

A good way to figure out if you'll enjoy being an entrepreneur is to start building an audience first (namely an email list built through social and blog content). It's all of the vital marketing/sales work and talking to customers you'll need, without burning all your savings on 6 months of product development that might be wasted.

If you don't enjoy building the audience of customers, selling to them, and talking to them, you won't enjoy being an entrepreneur.

- It took a bit more than a year.

- Meanwhile count users, not revenue. (need a free version)

- Marketing, not "sales". Your product does a useful thing, for people with some need. Create a "pitch" - a short, memorable description of the problem and your solution. The idea is word of mouth: people repeat your pitch to someone who needs it, like a virus. (A meme, by Dawkins' original definition). Free sales and advertising.

- Focus on the product, not yourself. Like Feynmann saying his nerves disappear when focussed on the thing he's talking about (not him). Avoids self-consciousness.

Less efficient than sales and advertising, but a way to make money without them.

I can't tell you how many things I tried and failed. It really doesn't matter if it's a start up or not either, plenty of people put everything into new jobs including moving and failing sucks just as much.

I finally figured out how to succeed but it was a difficult and deeply personal struggle that took a long time.

There are still times I just want to pack it all in and give up.

Infact I just had a meltdown a month or so ago and almost sold off everything. I think it's a part of my personality to never be completely satisfied.

Lastly I chuckled a bit when I read about him feeling bad about his girlfriend, at least he still has one! He should be thankful that she stuck around and should show her the appreciation she deserves for supporting him.

Wasn’t the first try. Two times before that I only had a single client, one time they cancelled the project, second time I delivered the software and the client didn’t have other work for me to do. I lived in a big city then, both times I just searched and found another full-time office position.

When I think I have an interesting idea, I sometimes pursue on my free time. So far, the only outcome I got is couple dozen stars on github, and in one case a hundred thousand of free downloads of my app. Pretty close to nothing. https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM https://github.com/Const-me/vis_avs_dx https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac

I don’t really know your motivation for trying this path, but if that motivation remains or returns, you might want to start with a friend, so you can divide up the efforts. Or perhaps you just decided that this path is not for you — nothing wrong with that!

Good luck either way!

As far as friends go:

I Started my first business with two friends: one was really good at cold calls and asking for things (I.e. orders) — I struggled with that similarly to you. The other was super comfortable asking friends to come work with us. I had other things I contributed — and we all programmed.

For the three of us it turned out to be fun. I am sure none of us could have done it alone.

Startups are REALLY, REALLY hard to make a living wage on the whole in a smaller period of time when selling things by the drip (eg: SaaS, Ecomm low price points, etc). The business is an art, which is different than the skillset engineers build up over years in their domain - yet want to achieve 'break even ASAP'.

Edit: Business is a very 'social sport' - if social isn't your thing, you have to: compensate, overcome, hire out, or fail.

Without an existing audience or funding for ads, he had to do cold outreach, which I don't blame him for disliking.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105735

so..... what's the problem here?

> And they did many times, and I can't handle that while making $0.

OOoooh.

Yeah that makes sense. Better to sell shares of your SaaS company at 40x revenue and let your customers and investors lob the con man sentiment at you. Survivorship bias breeds this behavior :)

> I made my girlfriend stay home for a year, we didn't do anything, we didn't buy clothes and ate the cheapest food, etc. I feel that I have lost a year of my life.

You made her stay home...

You lost a year of your life...

HFS

1. If money is very pressing, you should save up enough until it isn't. Spending all your saving is obviously going to induce a lot of stress.

Better yet - spend other peoples money. That means raising money, but you'd be surprised how many angle investors or startup programs there are out there, that are willing to seed you with (relatively small amounts of) money. The catch here is that they typically want a very solid business and marketing plan, and will probably turn down typical cookie-cutter ideas (marketplace, social network, etc.).

2. Yes, it's hard to do when bootstrapping yourself,but hire people to do the marketing and sales. These things can and will make or break early startups and businesses.

Let's take he music venue analogy:

Imagine that you want to build the best concert venue in town. You've poured your hard-owned money into it, along with blood, sweat and tears.

Finally the venue is finished - but there's a problem: No one knows about it.

You figure it will pretty much sell itself, and hire in some artists to perform there - but have done zero advertisement or marketing. Concert comes and goes, but no-one showed up - because no-one knew about the concert. Bands and artists still want their money, same goes with utilities and what not.

Point is - if you can't do the sales or marketing yourself, you need to hire someone to do it for you. You're just throwing money into a black hole and getting nothing in return, because potential clients don't even know you exist. If you can't afford someone - anyone - to do that for you, then you probably don't have enough funds to begin with.

edit: It just seems like your biggest troubles stems from the fact that you (seemingly, or due to anxiety) hate sales and marketing yourself, and that your product/segment may have been quite a tough to succeed in.

Not much luck though. Like OP they decided to go all in. Fingers crossed for them

We all get to decide when to stop trying something. A year may seem like a long time, and it may be long enough for some. But for others, it's just the dark time before daybreak.

what is wrong with that, where is the error?