
Ask HN: What did you get out of being an entrepreneur? - netham91
We have these expectations or anticipations when we dream and spend months and years building new products or services.<p>With time in the journey we make new discoveries and realisations. I am looking for the bare and honest truths and reality checks.
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meiraleal
I got a debt of 100,000 dollars, depression and suicide thoughts. Then I gave
up, got a backpack and started travelling just to live and have fun. 6 years
later, I'm happier than I ever thought I could be, and way more satisfied with
life than I would be if my startup had be successful. Life is definitely not a
straight line.

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econcon
I started a filament brand based on developed at garage tech:
[https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-
ho...](https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-
cheap-6c908bb09922)

I feel really good knowing that I am competing with others who are using
machines made by real engineers and also I get free filament for my hobbies
and money from which I am able to buy more machinery and tools than I'll ever
need.

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davidajackson
Freedom to work on what I wanted during the day. Also before the days where
remote jobs were so common it was nice to be able to work from wherever, I
considered it a luxury. I suspect that will be more and more common.

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muzani
Do it for the lifestyle.

Entrepreneurship is said to be long hours, lots of sacrifice, total devotion
to your business and nothing else. That sounds a lot like marriage and kids.
That sounds a lot like an extreme hobby. We're born too late to colonize new
continents and too early to colonize planets. Entrepreneurship is the closest
you'll get to an adventure.

As for what I actually got, we sold the company for about a year's salary for
about a year of work.

My co-founder went to lead a much bigger company and still runs it, and
they're one of the top media companies in my country and ranked regionally. I
got a job offer from a VC we pitched to, doing corporate training. It led to
two months of road trips teaching at educational institutions all over the
country (with free food and hotels!) Me and my wife put on a lot of weight
from the buffets, lol. That led on to plenty of other projects, consulting and
training mostly. One was as technical management lead for a project with
millions of daily active users. I took on numerous CTO roles for startups that
didn't survive after that, got burnt out from the lack of control of managing
low budget teams, and went back to coding.

I got on at least 8 newspapers (the ones that people read and are in print).
Some covered me and similar startups in two pages even. It felt a little
hollow; the papers were top of the iceberg for all the work we put in. We got
something like 1000 users from the papers, but it was dwarfed by the 3000
users organic growth spike around the time, and the hits weren't as relevant.
But my mother-in-law saw it and was impressed - she had been a wet blanket
about the whole entrepreneur thing until then.

The government would sponsor us for some things and educate us too. We got
offers to flights to conferences and 5 star hotels, which was really nice of
them, but it was awfully distracting to the mission, which was to build a
better product, reach more users, and raise money to do that.

The tl;dr of it is we had a lot of fun and was a positive experience. But only
if your idea of fun is spending 80% of your time building and talking to
users.

