I've been looking back at my life today, and it's been such a long journey. If only i knew it'll take that long to succeed I'd never start in the first place:
> built & sold my first startup in 2009
> over the next 13 years, invested all this money in startups
> lost money on all 30 startups founder/invested
> still kept going
> sold my house to keep going
> pivoted into bootstrapping in 2023
> spent more of my savings to build several micro saas products & acquire one
> hired an expensive pro team to market it, burnt so much money with no results
> fired everyone in marketing and growth to go solo
> in 2024, most of the bets paid off, and the total crossed over $2M
> if things wouldn't go the right way in 2024, I'd be pretty much broke, with no home, no savings, no morale, not knowing what to do further.
Idk if this will encourage you to build a startup or to quit and go back to a regular job,
but I've done my task here, I shared the raw truth, and I'm rooting for you.
15 years of my startup failures where I almost lost everything
byu/johnrushx inEntrepreneur
Posted by johnrushx
2 Comments
The irony is you could have invested that money you made in 2009 in the S&P and have 10x more today with significantly less stress and hours invested.
the part about firing the expensive marketing team and going solo hits hard. did the same thing – spent $8k/month on an agency for 4 months, got 23 sign-ups total. cost per acquisition was $1,390. went back to doing it myself, got 47 sign-ups in the next month spending $200 on ads
what actually worked: stopped trying to “scale” and just talked to every single user. wrote down their exact words when they described their problem. used those words in everything
your 2017-2021 run fascinates me – $30k/month is solid but you said it “failed”? that’s the part nobody talks about. a business can be profitable and still fail if the founder dynamics break or you can’t stand working on it anymore
been through 3 co-founder breakups. the common thread: we never set a kill date upfront. if we’d said “we’ll try this for 18 months then decide” instead of “let’s build this together forever” the exits would’ve been way cleaner
the S&P comment above misses the point completely. if you wanted index fund returns you wouldn’t be an entrepreneur. you’re buying lottery tickets to life experience, not optimizing for risk-adjusted returns