You need to fail fast (Startups create a ton of anxiety)

A few years back I started a company with the hopes of automating most ETL/Datapipeline work. It was right around the time Hadoop was the latest buzzword and most of my consulting engagements included discussions or implementations around this. I thought data and data movement should be made as simple as possible. Many of my engagements were in the healthcare industry. The amount of time and money that was wasted doing simple things wrong, seemed like something that was contributing significantly to the fraud, waste and abuse everyone talks about in health care.

Most "implementation partners" really didn't care that the same mistakes were being made over and over again. I thought why not just utilize automation to make this easy. I built a prototype and landed customer 1 in year 1. Amazing! right?

What I failed to take into account was the life-stage I was currently in. I chose to get married and have kids at a very young age(20), and ultimately it resulted in a situation where the financial risk we were willing to take wasn't much without putting everything we had on the line. I've come to realize this is why starting a business is a young person's game.

When I first got started, I knew that this was not something I was going to be able to do on my own. So I found partners that would fill the skill gaps that I believed I had. This was a COMPLETE DISASTER. I was working consulting engagements during the day while working nights and all weekend trying to build a usable software product. I asked my partners at the time if they would be willing to try out something like Y-Combinator and applying, I thought it would help give us the connections and training we needed to really grow. Unfortunately, moving cross country for a period of time was something they couldn't do.

Ultimately, after a couple of years I had to throw in the towel with my partners, I was losing every last penny I had in savings and was staring at my oldest child going to college in the next 18 months. (I really didn't want to put his future at risk for a pipe dream of mine). As part of our amicable split, we forked the software and I kept the first customer. Over the next couple of years I worked my butt off to create a practical data engineering (ELT) platform for them. Along the way, they had quite a few wins as an organization, I landed customer number 2 and learned that this type of product becomes a critical component of any organizations infrastructure( enter the anxiety attacks).

What I still didn't have was any sort of marketing, branding or sales channel. These pieces are probably more critical than an MVP in my opinion, Without them it's impossible to show what the market interest is. One year out of the split, I had a product that customers 1 and 2 seemed to really like but had no one else to show it too.

At the same time, my oldest child was now entering college. I'm sure folks who are much smarter than me would say I should have planned better, but to be honest, trying to raise kids before you go to college and give them the best education you can is like sprinting a marathon.

The revenue from the first couple customers, plus the consulting was enough for my family to get by and turned out to be a great college fund. At the same time, there is a ton of pressure and anxiety to not to screw up. After all, I now have my kids future, and my customers day to day operations all reliant on the fact that a software product continues to deliver value.

I have also hit a wall, I'm burnt out, no longer enjoy the consulting work(no more challenges), dread going back to being an FTE anywhere, and at the same time know it is in the best interest of my customers to try and figure out a way to scale a business (plan 1 never had me doing this part, I was going to be the tech guy).

I'll share more later on recent suggestions I have had from my customers who are beginning to realize their risk.