Ask HN: I feel stuck even though my startup is doing well. What should I do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I feel stuck even though my startup is doing well. What should I do?

5 pointsthrowawaystuck_9 comments

I've been running my startup solo for the past 3 years, and it's been growing steadily.

It's a B2C SaaS with about 15,000 paying users, $2.4M in yearly revenue, and I'm paying myself $90K per month at the moment. I feel lucky to have been able to take it thus far.

This being said, I feel totally exhausted and I can't manage to work on my product at the moment; I keep hitting analysis paralysis.

I can't even take proper time off or travel and not think about my startup, monitoring sign ups/revenue and growth and making sure it doesn't all come crashing down somehow.

At the same time, it's impossible for me to work on new, exciting projects, because I want to keep my eyes on the ball (but I wish I could). All in all, I feel stuck.

I end up consuming social media, X/Twitter and YouTube all day as a way to pass the time.

How do I break out of this?

PS: throwaway account.

Hire people that will take over the parts you don't want to deal with. That will give you some breathing room to figure out the business's future. Some businesses can't be expanded. If that's the case then move on and have someone else do the work while you manage it or even get someone else to manage it. Do not add features just because you feel they are needed. Ask your users. They know what features they want. But keep in mind that they can't tell you what feature will move the service to the next level. That's up to you to figure it out. FYI, I, and many others, hate it when upgrades(?) mean that I have to use a new interface and the upgrade is full of bugs.

Else, it's hard for a business to last a long time, you can just fight it out and get enough to retire and sell the company. A $3 million next egg gives you a great retirement, not luxurious but decent.

If you really do not enjoy what you are doing, one option is to simply stop. Either sell or even liquidate the business, when you have earned enough.

Do the math: Think about how much gross (=before taxes) annual income you need and multiply that with 20 (or 25 do be absolutely sure). This is the amount of savings you really require. Put the money into ETFs and live off the surpluses. You can then just do whatever you want. No pressure to run a business anymore.

This really isn’t a hard problem. Hire someone.

Also I would suggest you look into using a company like Rippling or another PEO to take some of the managing a company off of your hands

https://www.rippling.com/peo

https://www.insperity.com/services/human-resources-outsourci...

I can recommend the book "The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together". It's for solo entrepreneurs and doesn't want to sell you success or make you strive for even more, it assumes you already have success but need mental models to deal with it.

Also what others already said: start hiring. You don't need a cofounder, try a consultant for a fixed contract with fixed payment (no revenue share or such).

I'll happily help you run it, whatever it takes, for only $45k per month.

Thank you for the offer

It’s time to start hiring people. Seriously, you will not regret it.

I worry that it will turn into a job, whereas for the longest time it didn't feel like a job

Do you mind sharing the product. I may be able to offer advice but without context a little hard to be specific.

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