I Built Something I Couldn't Afford to Keep

I’m going to tell you what happened. The real version. Not the polished one.

I started Unfireable because I got rejected by the job market 850 times and I needed somewhere to put the truth about what that felt like.

I built it into a community of nearly a thousand people. Craig Bachman came on and gave everything he had to make it work operationally. Toolie Merchant showed up and became one of the most genuine people I’ve met in years. We ran Reboot Camp. We held webinars. We coached. We showed up every single day for people who were struggling.

It was real. The work was real. The people were real. The mission was real.

And I couldn’t afford to keep doing it.

Here’s what nobody tells you about building a free community for people who are broke.

When your entire audience consists of people who can’t afford to pay for help, you can’t charge them for help. Which means you’re working for free. Which means at some point the math stops working no matter how much you believe in what you’re building.

I was putting in 20-hour days sometimes. Seven days a week. Not occasionally. Regularly.

And the income from Unfireable was not covering my bills.

I tried to tell this community to build multiple income streams. I said it over and over. Build something that pays you. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t work for free indefinitely hoping something will change.

And then I did exactly that.

For months.

I did not take my own advice. I poured everything into a community that couldn’t pay me back and I kept going because I believed in it and because walking away felt like abandoning people who needed help.

But you can’t pour from an empty cup. I say that and I don’t even like that phrase usually because it sounds like a poster in a therapist’s waiting room. But it’s true. And I ignored it until I couldn’t anymore.

I also have to be honest about something else.

When I stepped back because of personal issues, the community went quiet.

I’m not saying that as a criticism. I understand it. People were busy. People were dealing with their own stuff. People come to communities for support and when the support infrastructure goes quiet, they go quiet too.

But it told me something I needed to hear.

The community was built around me showing up every day. Not around people showing up for each other. Which means what I built wasn’t a community that could sustain itself. It was a platform that depended entirely on my energy to function.

That’s not sustainable. And it’s not what I wanted to build. I wanted people to help each other. I wanted it to be a place that kept going even when I wasn’t in the room.

It wasn’t that yet.

Maybe it never would have been. I’ll never know.

Reboot Camp was good. I’m proud of what we built there. Craig and Toolie and I put together something real and the people who went through it got something out of it. That part worked.

But we couldn’t do it for free anymore either.

So we’re closing the doors.

On Skool. On Circle. On the whole infrastructure we built over the past year and a half.

Unfireable is over. At least this version of it.

Maybe it comes back someday as a nonprofit with actual funding and a structure that doesn’t depend on me working 20-hour days for nothing. That would be the right version. A workforce development nonprofit with grant funding and institutional partners and people getting paid for the work they do.

But that’s not today. Today I don’t have the money or the bandwidth to build that version.

So here’s where I am.

I left Medium. Not dramatically. Just done. I’m tired of giving my content to a platform that throttled me overnight after I made real money two months in a row and then told me nothing was wrong. I’ll read on Medium. I won’t post there anymore.

I’m here now. Substack. Where I own the relationship with the people who want to read what I write.

I’m selling used items online right now because I need to make real money and selling used items makes real money in a way that writing for free does not. That’s not a sad fact. That’s just an honest one.

I’m still going to write. Writing is the one thing that has been consistent through every version of my life. The heart attack didn’t stop it. The hospitalizations didn’t stop it. 850 rejections didn’t stop it. Losing Unfireable doesn’t stop it.

I write because I can’t not write. That’s the truest thing I know about myself.

I want to say something to Craig and Toolie directly even though they’ll probably not see this.

Craig came into this because he wanted to pay something forward. He gave frameworks and time and operational intelligence and genuine partnership. He didn’t have to do any of that. He did it because he’s the kind of person who does things because they’re right, not because they’re profitable.

Toolie showed up and became something I didn’t expect. A real friend. Someone who understood the mission from the inside because she was living the same thing. She brought energy and expertise and warmth to people who needed all three.

I’ll carry both of them with me regardless of what comes next.

And to everyone who was part of this community: thank you. We helped people. I know we did. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.

Here’s what I know about what comes next.

I don’t have a plan. Not a polished one.

I have a Substack and I’m going to write here. Honestly. About what’s happening. About what it feels like to close something you built and believed in. About selling used items online at 57 while you figure out what the next chapter looks like. About building multiple income streams like you told everyone else to do and then not doing it and having to start over.

If there’s anyone I trust to read the honest version of all of that, it’s the people who were in Unfireable with me.

You already know I don’t sugarcoat things.

This isn’t me sugarcoating things.

This is just me. Still here. Still writing. Figuring it out in public the way I always have.

Come with me if you want.

— Jason

You can find me here on Substack at jasonweiland.substack.com and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jason-james-weiland. Those are the two places I’ll be.