I learned that you should never bet on people whose main goal is financial freedom. If someone does it because they're trying to solve a problem, or improving lives, or because it's fun, that's fine. All those clients are still active.
The gold rushers all died. The people who wanted to get their faces in newspapers eventually died. Some have a lot more money and take longer to die. Some were rich when they started, but money didn't give them recognition, so they tried to make a startup. The startup was never there to make money, it's there to make themselves and their companies look cool.
Also I got some nice code out of these contracts. If you want to do something for cheap, the best deal IMO is being able to test new tech in production. Most of them don't care about the tech, and the equity deal is just insurance.
- it’s very high stakes, and easy to shapegoat the consultant for poor product market fit
- chance of poor product-market fit are very high
- they don’t have much money, and are not a reliable source of work
- startup is likely to fail and thus be unable to pay you
- it’s very “personality driven” by the often charismatic-worst case narcissistic-founder.
- no experience working with contractors/consultants.
- little regard for actual contract and legal formalities of contracting
Tech startups need strong tech cofounders. So I might work for a startup, I’d almost never do consulting for one.
Then either the project failed (prob) or it worked and you either did or did not get something from your equity.
Or, you never did the work or partially did it because you didn't trust the entrepreneur.
etc.
Did you learn anything?
Is this sort of thing ever possible?