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Comment by henvic | Hacker News Reader

I know this pain.

In my case, I spent most of my life around 18-23 years old living in my parents' working about 100% of my time on something of my own I had a lot of negative support from friends, colleagues, and extended family as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil.

The last project I worked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dML0FQIUcTY, I spent 2013-2014 on it), was heading to the right direction, but then my business partner (first and last one so far) always wanted more and more.

In the end I had other opportunities (go back to college, and start a new job), and we just ditched all our efforts. Of course, we both regret it. Especially each time when we see something similar sold for a couple of millions.

Good luck to us next time!

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I wouldn't have any regrets re:seeing something "similar" sold for millions of $.

Unless "heading in the right direction" means that you had a growing user base and/or solid revenue, in all likelihood the product you were building just wasn't succeeding. The idea in itself is not worth much: think Uber, Coursera, Airbnb, ... these are not novel ideas, many many people had the same ideas but didn't manage to make them a success (bad execution, or just bad luck/timing).

You seem to still be very very young, most successful companies are founded by people in their mid 30s, so don't despair just because a couple of your attempts were not successful. The best is still ahead of you.

tl;dr: I don't regret working on it. Just not even trying to market it!

By heading in the right direction, I mean that I've built the 'minimum viable product' entirely in one year. Now it was time to go after putting it in the market somehow, search for a venture capitalist or anything like that. But, no, we didn't even try.

We had many features that other sites didn't have back then. Such as the 'Google-like' search with auto-complete, auto-refresh appeal, etc. not so common back then, but we never went out after a single potential consumer or investor.

I was in a situation that I had to stop developing on my own and focus on other things in my life. However, my business partner didn't want to stop adding new features. He wanted a few more things that I could achieve in a month or two to start looking for an investor, but I just didn't have the throughput (no time due to new endeavors + saturated), and things died off.

I blame him for chickening out when we had possibly a tremendous competitive advantage that might make it an easy sell. I blame myself for not doing my own research for investors once I noticed that we reached a point of stagnation.

Context: He had great designing ideas but was not technical. I wasn't good at communication back then and counted on him too much to make this happen. If this was today, it wouldn't happen again, thanks to my experience now.

ahhh yes...you were working with an infamous "idea guy" where you were expected to do all the work while he sits back and just thinks of new ways to crack the whip with you.

that sort of thing is very rarely a good way to structure a business. the people who do the actual work almost always need to be the ones who decide on new features as only they know the proper work/reward ratios.

if i had a nickle for all the proposals i've seen from the "idea guys"...well i sure would have a lot of nickles.

>as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil.

How do they think the companies that offer salaried work started?

I sense snark in this comment, but I'll answer anyways.

In Latin America, our culture is extremely conservative about taking risks. We're expected to get a job, settle down, live a nice life.

Generally entrepreneurship is frowned upon by our families and friends.

What does society think of successful entrepreneurs?

There's a huge lack of admiration for entrepreneurs. In special, for the successful ones. Some people just hate them.

I wouldn't say there isn't admiration, at least where I grew up.

It's just a general lack of role models. It's not often massive, inspiring companies emerge from Latin American countries.

Entrepreneurship is really hard in LatAm: bureaucracy, lack of venture capital, grounded business thinking (investors down here are likelier to invest in more grounded, less technological companies over bigger moonshots).

We just have no frame of reference to dream big. Add to that the fact that most LatAm countries are exceedingly poor, there isn't much room to take the kind of financial risk entrepreneurship entails.

There is hope: things are changing. Governments are investing in startup communities and the last decade brought us the first Latino tech unicorns. But we're a long way to go still.

TLDR: LatAm is generally poor, risk-averse due to culture and has problems generating the feel-good success stories first-world countries mass produce.

Here is the issue: pursuing a - so called - stable career as a public servant is, unfortunately i what many consider success.go to a coffeshop and you'll hear many discussing about the admission process, what friends and relatives are trying, salaries for all sorts of random positions, and so on. Barely anyone will be talking about opening a company. Even less if we aren't talking about tech related ones.

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