Ask HN: When do you give up? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When do you give up?

9 pointsthrowaway90047 comments

I run a fairly successful consulting company with under a dozen employees. Have been doing this for two years now and for the past six months it has been replacing the day job salary that I was making before I quit to do this.

Some of the motivations for starting the company:

1) Never had a job that I wasn't bored at.

2) Needed a sense of accomplishment and feeling that I am doing something that mattered.

3) Not being just a COG in the wheel.

4) Wanted to become a better developer and learn the new field (mobile development). Used to be a consultant working in enterprise IT. Never felt I could call myself a real developer.

5) Make lots of Money.

Reason for thinking about quitting

1) Became really good at identifying talent and hiring awesome developers. So now I am relegated to writing proposals and managing client relationships. Original goal of becoming a better developer never materialized.

2) Still have the sense that what I am doing is fairly non-consequential and am under-utilizing the talents of my team working on projects for other startups and companies. Clients love our work, but that still doesn't give a sense of accomplishment. Always feel there is a lot more we could do.

3) Haven't been successful at building our own products. Hard to juggle services and products.

4) Money is OK, but it is linear. More money, only if you get more developers and more projects.

5) Not passionate anymore about what I am doing.

In net, I should just close and do something that I feel a lot more motivated about. However couple of things stop me from doing this.

1) Everyone talks about persistence paying off in the end. I just feel like I might be giving it up easily.

2) Sunk costs. I have already sunk two years of my life into this. All the efforts put into bringing the company to this level will go in the drain, if I give up now.

You've given yourself a job you don't like just because it's "boss" stuff. If it's your company you should at least be doing the things you enjoy, not things you don't just because it's what you're supposed to do.

As suggested - hire a biz person/salesy engineer. Obviously, not someone who is just a slick sales guy but one who will fit in with the culture and enjoys what drains you & understands you're still CEO.

If I were you, I'd feel the same way - kinda down (I was just putting together a proposal myself...ugh). But, you should be thrilled. You've lined yourself up so you have the resources (team) to create and the connections (customers/others in same industry) to get early feedback/customers on any product.

Solution: Vacation, find a problem to solve, don't do the stuff at your own company that you don't enjoy.

Tried getting external sales and Biz person, did not work out. I think it is pretty hard to do sales and Biz Dev for a company of my size unless you are the founder. You don't have a real brand and established processes that the sales/biz dev person can rely on. I was warned against this by someone that runs a company 100 times larger than mine and I ignored his advice and tried it anyway.

Agree. It would likely have to be someone you at least somewhat know already and perhaps known by your customer base (go to same conferences, etc.). In general the 100x company advice is right, but, at the same time I don't think you can pick a sales guy & conclude that because it didn't work out that it was the wrong decision. Tough spot.

My consultancy is not as large as yours so I do more of the work, but I understand what you're going through here.

1. Your next step is to hire someone to develop business and manage relationships. You need a COO or president. Of course, you will then be expected to provide a great deal of leadership and vision, but you might have time to code again.

2, 3) Accomplishment may elude you until you build a product if that's what you really want to do. Best advice is to treat it like a client and find room for it.

4. Again, this points to your wanting a product. There's no way to get non-linear with a consultancy. Even a fat retainer is linear because staff has to service it (or it's so automated it's basically a product.) Also, as you keep growing you'll be able to choose better projects.

5. In general, or is this the project again? Regardless this is a good reason to start trying to land a good COO who is passionate.

As you can tell, I believe you are giving up too easily, and I think you should press forward to remove the business side of service consulting from your daily work by removing yourself from the daily business development work, and removing service consulting from your company's work by developing products. Hope it goes well.

2.

Removing service consulting and developing a product is what I am shooting for. Let us see if I can get somewhere with that.

You can invest your companies' services as if it were capital in my company, TCombinator, for a percent equity stake, thus giving you a project you can be proud about: saving the world through entrepreneurship. Check out tcombinator.blogspot.com, tcombinatordev.blogspot.com and transtartup.blogspot.com to read about us and some of our projects.

For some reason, this post originally showed up as dead, so did not check it until now.

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