Startups and indie hacking are hard

Note: This was originally posted as a Mastodon thread but since my posts there auto-delete after a while I decided to keep a a slightly modified version here too.

People often just share their success stories, but over the past two years, I was involved in/co-founded 6 different projects. Five of them did not work out. That’s a lot of work for very little return (and I’m not even counting opportunity costs), and I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t also affect my confidence a bit.

One’s still going and looks quite promising. And while I’m only involved as a contractor/advisor with a small equity stake, I’d take any W now. For the ones interested, here’s a small summary of the 5 projects and the reasons they failed/got abandoned:

• Project 1: e-learning/education. It’s a good idea/concept, I think, but we reached a point where it was clear that we couldn’t turn this into what we wanted it to be without getting outside investment, and money was hard to find at the time (end of 2022).
• Project 2: Supply chain and inventory management for a specific industry in which my co-founder had domain experience. No real challenges here but the team never had good chemistry and eventually fell apart. We’re all still friends, we just realized we don’t work well together. 🤷‍♂️
• Project 3: While working on project 2 I angel invested in a startup after meeting the founder through common friends. So when I became available I ended up joining them. We assembled a good team, things looked promising and we secured $1m in funding. Or so we thought. Our investor ended up in financial trouble and we only received $178k in total. Shit happens. This project lingers on in a zombie state, making just enough money to more or less pay for itself.
• Project 4: a spin-off of project 3, trying to utilize some of the data we had accrued there in a different way. Got a decent amount of signups but no meaningful amount of conversions, so didn’t seem worth pursuing.
• Project 5: a PoC I built with a friend. Interesting and fun to build, with decent results. I’m not quite sure anymore why we ended up abandoning this but I think it was a combination of concerns re TAM and also just that both of us were busy doing other things at the same time.

If you’re expecting any lessons or takeaways, you may be disappointed because none of these are original:

• Pick your cofounders well, you’re going to spend a lot of time together.
• Same for investors. But better to bootstrap if you can get away with it.
• Some things just don’t stick. It’s ok to move on, try to avoid sunk-cost fallacies.
• Use boring technologies and focus on the product, don’t obsess about scaling problems you’ll most likely never have to face.

On a more positive note, there’s a lot of good tech out there and it’s easier than ever to build decent MVPs really fast. For project 3 we went from idea to first working prototype in around 6h. Keep building.