You
may have heard that I’ve been working on a SaaS startup project for
the last two years. I gave my everything to that project and spent more than 2000 hours on it so far. Unfortunately, after so much effort, we still haven’t been able to convince our first customers. Meanwhile, we’ve tried raising funds but failed so far. I still strongly believe in this project, but as time goes on, hope slowly fades away, and team morale goes down. It’s unavoidable. The journey is long, dark, and lonely. Doubt creeps in insidiously, and the financial aspect is very impactful. The opportunity cost is now well above 200K EUR for me alone, and I’ve reached a point where I’ve almost exhausted my financial resources, forcing me to react. It’s a very important source of stress in my life at the moment, which is why I wanted to discuss it a bit with you here. People share success stories all the time, but for each success, there are a thousand failures. It may be sad, but it’s the reality. Everything has to be right for a project to succeed. The right idea, outstanding execution, the right people, the right timing, and luck. And even then, it may very well fail anyway. But whatever happens with this particular project, I know that I didn’t just “lose” my time. I’ve learned
a ton along the way, both about technology and about myself. On a personal level, I’ve learned that I’m strong enough to work day after day after day, relentlessly towards my goals. I’ve learned that yes, I can really build a full-blown product from scratch, taking care of everything from product design, UI & UX aspects down to the low-level infrastructure and security details, all while catering for dependency management, code quality, deployments, automation, CI, project management, and then some more. And don’t misinterpret this. I’m not bragging; no one cares except me. I’m just proud of myself, even if the project ultimately fails. I’m proud because I know that I did my best, and that’s what matters. The project may fail, but I haven’t, and I won’t. Also, the things that I’ve learned along the way (technical or otherwise) will fuel my writing for quite some time, and I’ll make sure to share as much as I can with you all. Anyways, I still have (nearly) infinite patience, a ton of willpower and countless ideas. So whatever happens next, I know that I won’t get bored ;-)
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