
Ask HN: Need advice from failed entrepreneurs - nisthana
I built a product that had some traction, but not enough to raise any angel&#x2F;vc funding. I ran out of my personal savings. What should I do next? Leave everything and look for jobs?
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cocktailpeanuts
You should be getting advice from people who have failed AND succeeded. If the
person only failed and never succeeded in anything, they probably think they
know why they failed but actually they don't. That's why you see a lot of
misleading medium blog posts about people talking about why they failed when
they know nothing about why. On the other hand people who've only succeeded
(has nothing to do with whether they're more competent than the ones who've
failed, just means they were lucky) don't know what it means to fail so won't
be able to give you good advice.

Secondly, raising money is not related to succeeding. You will understand when
you take a step back and watch 99% of the once-popular companies go out of
business after raising millions of dollars.

I suggest you keep working on your thing on the side (if you're still
passionate about it) and get a job. You can always quit and come back to
fulltime on your thing when you see a glimmer of hope.

~~~
nisthana
Thats awesome advice. I definitely want to keep on doing, I am very
passionate. Heck 2 of my students who used my platform got into good schools
(one in Yale and one in UC Davis). They called me and thanked me. I know this
thing is useful but I need to reach out to millions of people to make anything
substantial out of it. And I just don't have the money.

I am thinking of getting a contracting job so I can keep working on it on the
side. I have been out of job for a long time so I don't even know where to
start from.

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aespinoza
The first thing you need to figure out is what went wrong? Did you get data on
why your product didn't get enough traction ? Some ideas are features of other
products and not products by themselves. You need to figure that out. The most
important thing in entrepreneurship, if you ever want to be successful, is to
learn from failures. So get data first. The data will tell you what to do.
Maybe a little tweak to your business model might get you more traction, maybe
the product is simply not a product. Get data. Talk to users. Figure out what
worked and what didn't.

~~~
nisthana
I have the data, lots of it. I have lots of learning. What I built was to help
people get into college and career by connecting them with a role model in
college or companies. It's a mentoring platform.

What I found the hard way is that I cannot build a long term sustaining
business out of mentoring. So investors did not want to get into it.

The users used it only for to get one time advice from mentors and then never
came back. There was nothing viral about it.

I developed a good strategy to increase awareness of the product locally but
failed to distribute it to the masses (I used Facebook Ads). If I had funds, I
could have hired a growth hacker or a good marketing person to at least make
people aware because if people don't know about it, they won't use it.

The product is still running. However I cannot invest my savings any more on
it. Job is an option (I am in Silicon valley so there are plenty). But its so
hard to leave everything I've built behind and go back to working for someone
else :-((

------
PaulHoule
Go revenue first and try to bootstrap.

~~~
nisthana
Been bootstrapped all along.

