Ask HN: I am at a loss. What shall I do?

Put the startup on the back burner and go work a contract/full time job. It seems like you need the stability at least temporarily.

I disagree that you’ve fully failed (as the other commenter put it), but the current situation is untenable, you can’t make progress on your startup under that stress and you can’t survive/thrive in regular life.

Put that on top of grief from losing a family member and you’re basically doing the startup on hardest possible mode.

Unfortunately the job market isn’t great right now but if you put the energy you used to build the company in, you’ll find something.

Oh also talk to your investors and be honest/share your plan.

Steve Jobs famously said something like "every day I wake up in the morning, and if I don't like what I want to do today, for a certain number of days, then I stop doing it".

In this case it sounds like even if you thought you would enjoy having a startup, the reality is you're not enjoying it.

If you're not enjoying it, then there's no reason to continue doing it.

It's time to roll the dice and try some other lifestyle e.g. salaried employment. And if that doesn't work out for you after having tried it for 1-2 years, you are not locked down, you can still roll the dice again and try something else.

Do not draw from your savings when you have investors. Instead draw a minimum salary for yourself. Your job is now to raise a next round.

This sounds like sage advice! Instead of paying for ads, pay for yourself to cold call. The investors still get value.

Also don't travel anymore and the workshops are not mandatory unless it is in some kind of contract. Even then negotiate to get that changed as it increases runway. They can record the workshop for you too if needed.

If you do everything remotely you could move to lower COL area.

When you realise your start up isn’t working, the smartest thing you can do is either sell it to someone who has the resources to do perhaps what you cannot to make it a viable product or service, or give up and move on to something new.

To persist endlessly in something that isn’t going to do anything but drain your resources financially and emotionally, is a much bigger failure in the long run. What do you have to lose if you persist with this start up that’s going nowhere vs, what do you have to lose if you just cut your losses now?

Honestly, most start ups actually fail. It’s a part of the process. People always think their start up will be the one that doesn’t fail, but it’s because humans are inherently over-optimistic about their businesses. They always think they’ll have them established more quickly, for much less money and work than it actually takes.

Take the lessons you’ve learned from this try, and try and apply them to a new idea or start up.

If it makes you feel better, I too started a business last year. However, I knew it would likely fail, but I still wanted to give it a go to see if it would work for my lifestyle and I was using it predominantly as a tax deduction anyway. After about 6 months however, I realised my business model was quite frankly not sustainable for the long term and was probably going to cost me more than I had to gain from persisting. Thus, I applied for a job somewhere, and I am in the process of shutting my business down.

Does that mean I’m done with trying new things? No. It just means, I’ll do things differently next time. For now, I’m taking the time to ‘recover’ from the burnout, and I’m thinking about new ideas for things I can try later down the track when I’m ready to go again.

> Most of our software is for Marketing folks. I am using LinkedIn as primary channel and I do get 3% response

Are you using the free version of LinkedIn?

I’ve had great success with random outreach using LinkedIn Recruiter Lite ($160 a month).

I was using it for recruiting and then one day was in a confusing situation and was like how I can I reach people who might know the answer and have more experience than me?

I just sent them InMails as I would if I were recruiting them. But instead of offering a job I just asked my question.

I got about a 70% response rate. Several people thought it was a clever lead-gen strategy for recruiting them (had to burst their bubbles) but everyone who replied seemed happy to give me advice.

I used to be in marketing and still have lots of contacts in the space. Feel free to share your product and I will send it to my contacts.

I'm going to give you tough love, because you seem to have come here without having gotten it from someone else. I've been here myself, so take it as "me in the future giving me advice" rather than someone being condescending.

> I started a startup about 1.5 years ago and raised about $100k.

That's a very short runway when you have ~$0 revenue. If you couldn't raise more or bootstrap, it was probably a sign to move on.

> It is incredibly hard to survive without any income on the west coast. I have considered moving but all other obligations doesn't let that happen.

It sounds like you know you need to get a job with a salary. You can't move somewhere inexpensive and you can't survive as things as now. Start applying feverishly to jobs.

> I don't know if I am burned out or something is wrong with my brain. I am just numb to everything since 2023 when my father passed away.

Nothing is wrong with you! You're having a normal human reaction to two of the most common human experiences: failure and grief. It would be weird if you felt fine right now.

> But, I am just not finding anyone to talk to. I have little to no network.

Then this business wasn't a good idea from the beginning. Your network is your startup. Sales is always the hardest part, and having a network of buyers already is a huge advantage.

Most startups fail, and most of the time it's because other people are learning this same lesson. You are not alone at all.

> I am at a crosspoint now. I don't know if I should continue to work on my startup.

Absolutely not. You've already failed. Lean on friends/family, find a therapist, and move on. Most startups are failures. There's no shame in it. But don't shoot yourself in the foot by trying to make it work when it has objectively, fully failed. You're almost out of money and you don't even know how to spend money to get revenue. That's a fully dead business.

> I desperately want to make it work

Why? What's wrong with a corporate job or something sustainable that isn't a startup?

> How do I find users to talk to and how can I reach out to them?

You either build your network through extroversion, unpaid favors, friends/family, college, etc. or... you pay for that network. And paying for it is insanely expensive.

Your personality hasn't lent itself to the former, so you're faced with the latter, and you don't have the money for that. So the answer is: you can't. You can't find users. Stop trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Your personality isn't "startup founder who sells sells sells".

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. That is a tremendous event, and definitely takes a huge toll.

May I ask what exactly you're building? You said software for Marketing folks. Is this an area that you have expertise in (maybe worked in Marketing before, or were building adjacent marketing software)?

First and foremost, draw a salary. It doesn't have to be much at all, but take something so you're not watching your savings dwindle.

Once you paid yourself take a 1-2 week break and really think about what you want to do. If you want to keep pushing, figure out how to do it sustainably.

Hey, I really hear the weight of what you're going through. Losing your father and then trying to navigate the brutal startup world on the West Coast with limited resources sounds incredibly tough, and the numbness you describe is a very real response to that kind of sustained pressure and grief.

It's easy for advice to sound like clichés, especially "talk to customers," but the struggle you're having to even find those conversations highlights a core challenge. Building a network, especially as an introvert, takes time and intentional effort. LinkedIn can be a numbers game, and a 3% response rate, while not zero, can feel disheartening when you're up against the clock.

Considering where you are financially and emotionally, and being honest about the traction so far, it might be worth seriously considering hardwaresofton's suggestion to put the startup on the back burner for now and find some stability with a contract or full-time role. This wouldn't be giving up on your tech experience or your entrepreneurial spirit, but rather hitting pause to address your immediate needs. That steady income could provide the breathing room to process your grief, recharge, and then revisit your startup with fresh eyes and a more stable foundation, or even pivot to a new idea with the lessons learned.

Think of it as gathering resources – both financial and emotional – for your next chapter, whatever that may be. The decade you've spent in tech is valuable, and finding a role that utilizes those skills while providing security could be a powerful step forward right now.

It's okay to feel lost and burned out. It's a natural reaction to what you've been through. Taking some pressure off yourself to "make it work" right now might actually be the most strategic move you can make for your long-term well-being and future success.

This is the answer. Take a moment, get a job, regroup and mourn your losses. Your well being is paramount, OP.

Good answer, though I strongly suspect it was generated by ChatGPT, which makes me sad.

Thanks ChatGPT

People already mentioned this, but take a base salary at least.

Consider posting your product, maybe someone would have an idea of what to do with it or a company might need exactly certain features, even if your product does not have traction at the moment.

Sounds like you have done your best, if you have any invested funds left - return them to your investors. Seek some employment and healing. Grow strong and try again with a fresh idea and a wealth of experience another day.

No one wants to buy your product. Your marketing-to-revenue ratio should tell you that. If you're not making more money than you put into ads, then your product sucks. Time to drop it and get back to full employment.

It's not just talking to customers. How you talk is also important.

I highly recommend the book "The Mom Test." It opened up my eyes about how many things I was doing wrong in the early discovery conversations.

MVP. Minimum viable product. “sell” it first using ads, build a contact list from that, then build the product.

Stress and worry is useless. You gather information, plan, decide. GPD.

Building the product is the easy part. Don’t start there.

I got out of your situation by getting interested in investing in 2020. I made smart bets in march that year and had 5X the money when I dumped all my tsla stock teo years ago

I suggest getting a job that you like and is low stress. I spend all my free time studying everything there is to know about human interaction. there are all kinds of subtleties in dating an I'm learning the purpose of each structure. it's like a clutch

if you reveal your hand too fast, you dump the clutch and stall the entine and maybe jerk forward. if you do the the opposite, that's called riding the clutch and in this analogy you wait too long to act toward your nascent goal and the other party loses whatever interest they may have had

you have to constantly re-evaluate this after every single interaction

you have to take an interest in their lives and anticipate their needs

Gambling on the stock market is the absolute worst advice you could give someone in this situation

It is pretty decent strategy. Wait for a once a century global pandemic, then buy like crazy at the bottom!

I didn't know it was gonna be the pandemic that did it. I was getting ready to get in because I saw the tiny yield curve inversion in like August or September of 2019 and was preparing to make up for lost decades of not investing at all. I learned all I needed to know in three weeks on youtube and I dunno, it worked for me.

I'm no expert myself in anything, but I pick my experts carefully

You can be incredibly fucking lazy for most of your life except for a few key hinges

A fresher will loss their all money in stock market. Stock market isn't career advice when someone really in failed stage.