Are there any entrepreneur here who lost or gave up?

Question

We read abour these show hns and side projects which make $$$ mrr every now and then and because of it there is a sort of survivorship bias.Some of them even took money from friends and family and maxed their ccs until they made it.So I'm just wondering if there are any of you who tried, really hard and still didn't make it and gave up? How much did you lose? What are you doing now? And most importantly will you do it again?

jfengel · Accepted Answer

I spent 15 years trying to make it work, and it was a bad idea from the first day. Losses were well into six figures, without taking into account the opportunity costs of working a regular software developer job. Which is what I'm doing now, and am very happy. There is no way I would ever do it again.
The list of lessons learned is very long, much of it having to do with sunk cost fallacies and the "winners never quit" theory. I was able to keep at it so long because I had a lot of money saved up. "Fail fast" would obviously have been smarter, but I believed in the idea. (Still do, sorta, though the world went in a very different direction, high flexibility rather than high data quality.)
I have never been good at selling things. I made a million mistakes, but the main lesson learned is "just don't". Trying and failing leaves scars that "fail fast" doesn't take into account, and I'm less resilient than I had been.

PaulHoule · Answer

I went down a rabbit hole for several years, probably "wasted" $10,000 on AWS, wound up with $80k on my home equity line. I've done two years of regular work since and I expect to have the HELOC paid in the next few months.
It was stressful on me and my family but we kept it together.
Since those events I worked a year for a "startup" company in the data analytics and AI field slinging Python and now I do Java and Javascript for a non-profit/academic organization, entirely focused on getting data out of a database and in front of customers.
I am focused on doing application programming well on my day job but I do side projects involving printing, arduino, embedding Java inside itself as a Lisp-like DSL, etc. Practically those things line up: in the process of understanding handicapped accessibility for work i learned to think in terms of "value", Ansel Adams, and how to generate random color schemes that are always legible. jooq which I was using for work got me thinking in a mathematical way about what is possible to express as a java internal dsl, etc.
Do it again?
That's out of the time horizon I am thinking in today but I wouldn't rule it out.