This is a honest and fantastic postmortem. The lessons teach us more than the success stories.
I had the same problem of envisioning bigger product goal than I can achieve; I simply overestimated my energy, attention, or ability. Nowadays I try to trim down feature ruthlessly and limit scope to the bare minimum. Work not needed are work done great.
Hope it's not too intrusive. Is $10K/month necessary for living expenses?
Thank you for the great self revelation. I'm sure you'll gain more from it even it doesn't pan out the way you want. Good luck.
While at first glance, the "needing 10k/month" seems surprisingly high, it's likely he means "need 10k/month to maintain my present lifestyle." I doubt he actually means "I need 10k/month to survive," just that having a family means less compromising on lifestyle.
If kids are in school, maybe even private school, those expenses are likely something he doesn't intend to compromise on, which is completely fair. If he has a nice home in a nice neighborhood, he still has to pay property taxes. Healthcare costs more for a full family than 1 person. And so on. Sure, there's a path toward having lower living expenses, like moving where property taxes are lower and taking kids out of private school. It's just going to be a lot harder to take.
$10K/mo is a little more than my current salary, but I would have to exclude taxes, health care for four (COBRA is a US law that lets you buy your old employer's health plan for 18 months after you leave, and at my last job it was $1800/mo), etc. I live in Chicago which isn't NYC or SF but still isn't cheap. Plus I would need more savings bc of unpredictable cash flow. Plus stress kills productivity.
$1800/mo. Damn. That's the equivalent of working a 40 hour week $10.80/hour job. I'd be pushing my kids down the stairs to make sure we got our money's worth.
$10K/mo before taxes == $6300/mo after taxes, at least in SF. If you have a family and either rent a 2 bedroom or have a mortgage, you'll spend $2500+ on shelter. Etc etc. It doesn't go as far as you'd think.
sorry, but if you spend 2500 out of 6300 you are still left with 3800. Let's assume you spend 2000 on bills and food, which seems scaringly high for me, you are still left with almost 2k for "fun stuff".
I understand I have a point of view based on living on $1k a month in good ole europe, but that seem to go quite far.
Am I missing some other basic life expenses you have in SF?
Well, $2k is probably on the low side for bills and food. Transport: $1k+/mo, roughly: $250 to park your car at home, $250 at work, $350 car payment, insurance, gas, etc. Plus $100 for public transport for your partner, plus $80 for random taxi rides. Plus savings for maintenance. A family of 3-4 can easily spend $700 - $1000 on groceries. And we haven't discussed clothes, medical, school, etc, or any savings for a rainy day. Or entertainment; just to pick an example, movie tickets run $12 in the city so taking 3 people to the movies with a shared popcorn is $50, etc. Or $200 if you get a babysitter and just take two people out to a movie plus a modestly priced dinner.
I'm sorry to see this. Peter was a friend, and it was great to meet someone else in Chicago working on similar stuff. (We joked that you can tell us apart because he's the Peter in Chicago bootstrapping a social game built in Rails, and I'm the Peter in Chicago bootstrapping a social game built in Rails.) I'm hoping he finds a way to reactivate this project or starts something else great. I had similar issues working steadily on my project and eventually started a little contest at http://www.soplayweall.com to help keep myself accountable.
This was mostly about me not wanting to face reality, and then finding out that reality didn't care whether I was paying attention or not. Lesson learned.
Very honest analysis. It did make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur. For me, starting a business is something I feel compelled to do -- I don't think I can be happy if I'm not in control. I'm certainly happier in my current job than I have ever been in any job where I worked for anyone else. Knowing that if I don't make the business work the kids don't eat and the mortgage doesn't get paid is pretty motivating as well. The author says he's happy in his current job -- so why not stick with it?
It did make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur
It's a question I've asked myself and one of the reasons I wrote it was to try and figure out the answer to that question. I think the answer is that I'm not a natural born entrepreneur, who couldn't have it any other way. I see it as a strategy for achieving a goal and as long as it fits with my life, I'm game. Most of my conclusions were about how to approach it to fit within my personal limitations. But my job right now is too great to leave regardless of how my side projects go.
> For me, starting a business is something I feel compelled to do -- I don't think I can be happy if I'm not in control.
Weird - I think I would be very unhappy as an enterpreneur. You see it as being in control - I see it as being controlled by outside forces (investors, angels, customers, contractors, employees.)
It's pretty depressing to feel like I am not in control of my life, though I know at any second the will of the Universe can dictate what it wants to me ; I'm hardly in control.
For me, believing in free-will, even if we don't really have it, is necessary for a happy existence.
Only if you really need outside capital. Then yes. But small businesses are set up all the time with just the owner's resources. Bootstrapped entrepreneurs who build lifestyle businesses rarely make the headlines but they do enjoy an enviable amount of control over their own lives.
That only eliminates the first two outside forces (investors, angels) in the list. You still have to deal with customers and employees - in other words, the market.
Well, that remains true regardless of whether you're an entrepreneur, a freelancer or a salaryman. Anyone you do work for is a client of sorts and, even as a salaryman, you can end up in charge of other people. Plus, as an entrepreneur you do have a degree of control over the course to take when engaging the market and hiring people.
As long as we're talking about control, I can't see how it's possible to trump a bootstrapped entrepreneur who has a minimal team or none at all.
"It did make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur."
As someone who relates to the post [i.e., been spinning my wheel's studying for a while], I totally understand the author.
I would say that what makes someone an entrepreneur is a diferent mind set: the people who want to, feel a need to do so. A need to, when you enter a cab and see something not right, start thinking "How would I solve this business issue?".
But, like everything in life, there's the funcional entrepreneur and the dysfuncional one [hope the Author doesn't take it as an insult]. Dysfuncional one's have a passion and a great want to be entrepreneurs, but have a nasty and unhealthy dose of "I want to get this absolutly perfect" syndrome. At the first try. So, we study. And research. And keep researching. And try to forsee every problem we could maybe/possibly encounter, and solve it, mentally. And, times goes by, and little is actually done (though we have a clear "vision" in our minds. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.)
The post doesn't make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur. If he didn't he wouldn't even have started. It makes me wonder how to get out of this dysfuncional "wheel-spinning" pattern of entrepreneurship.
The article was fantastic, but I couldn't disagree more on your conclusions.
> It puts "get-rich quick" hot heads under cold shower.
Everyone I've known to become a millionaire in a short time (a year or less) did it by shipping blazingly fast and getting lucky. You can't get lucky if you never ship.
> It shows why startup must be something to enjoy even if there is no money there.
I agree here.
> It shows that quick growth is highly unlikely.
This article doesn't even tackle growth. You can't grow if you never ship.
> It shows that ~5-10 years of consistent effort is the must for success.
The article shows that you can't have success if you never ship.
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Overall, I think the article is fantastic. It really hits home for me, and matches my experience attempting a side-project-into-business. But the biggest takeaway isn't "it takes hard work.". This guy obviously worked hard for a long time.
The moral of the story is:
* work hard -on the right things-
* use milestones that give you -visible progress-
* get product validation -early and often-
* actually ship
I've learned the same lessons from my past mistakes and I'm actively using these lessons in my current startup.
Thanks for this honest post-mortem. It sure wasn't easy to describe your shortcomings in our world filled with infinite news of shiny web successes. I think one of the main takeaways can be that attacking a large project like this should not be done alone. It's a huge amount of tasks and context switches for one person to handle, and the risk of loosing motivation and even running into a burn out is much higher.
I think the way to go for solo devs is mobile (Android + iOS), since the project scope is often more limited / condensed and it's easier to get users with little marketing efforts.
Well don't forget to read the part where I split it into three tasks - the web part, the game engine part, and the game design part. For game design, I highly recommend A Theory of Fun for Game Design [1] and the column Making Magic by the head designer for Magic: The Gathering[2].
Wow, your story is very familiar. I experienced similar challenges with my first and second startup attempts. The nice part is, you can try again and bring these lessons with you.
We need more posts like this. Success stories are great, they make us believe it can be done.
But failure stories are maybe even more valuable as they teach us that so many things can go wrong..so many.
Success stories makes us dream (which is great) and failure stories wake us up (which is necessary).
Also, failure stories make us appreciate more the success stories. It's never easy even if sometimes it seems so.
I wish that my customers would read this. I just don't know how to suggest it to them with out sounding like I hate them. The big problem is that most of the pain outlined I will go through. The customers I have work for the guy that will feel the pain Peter felt.
Honest analysis like this are worth their weight in gold. I just quit my job 4 months ago and I'm going through what your going through. I've realised I need to ship and I've already been talking to customers. I showed them the initial crappy product and understood their market a little from their product.
Stories like this really highlight the need to ship immediately, the need to talk to customers and test the validity of the idea as soon as possible.
Thank you so much for this.
Also the guys with a family who start companies are the ones with the biggest balls in SV. Kudos. You took your fear and charged right at it. I admire that!
i found your article to mean a lot to me, personally, as i saw a lot of the reasons for my past projects abandoned in your analysis. best of luck for the future!
Yes, I'm very grateful to Peter for writing about this so candidly. He really made himself vulnerable, and is even publishing comments from jerks who are taking advantage of that (http://geekstack.com/blog/geekstack-postmortem/#comment-197)
I had the same problem of envisioning bigger product goal than I can achieve; I simply overestimated my energy, attention, or ability. Nowadays I try to trim down feature ruthlessly and limit scope to the bare minimum. Work not needed are work done great.
Hope it's not too intrusive. Is $10K/month necessary for living expenses?
Thank you for the great self revelation. I'm sure you'll gain more from it even it doesn't pan out the way you want. Good luck.