Should I go on or abandon?

What are your other choices outside of freelancing? If you were to invest all your time in this new pivot, would you be able to close enough sales to get you by? Is there a way to reduce your personal expenses?

I'm going through a similar spot myself. I just got really creative because I realized I'd rather invest in me than anything or anyone else. I wish taking a job didn't fill me with anxiety because I would freelance too. I also know most don't have as high of a tolerance for risk as myself.

Be advised - No one looks down at freelancers who run their own business. Do what you must until you can do better. However, there is nothing that more customer checks can't cure. So if you're in a zone of fear and safety, you may have to push yourself. As long as you are still booking customers, you haven't given up.

Somewhat of a double message you're giving us here in these words you wrote:

I am becoming to feel really stressed and burned out (working 80h+ a week), but I ---->don’t want to give up the baby I built<--- and has a better chance of success now, more than ever.

Do you think that ---->I don’t believe in my idea<------ because I am freelancing on the side?

become an uber driver and get a wireless stick

What happens if you took a break from your company? Could the company run on auto-pilot for a while? If you're successful in getting freelance gigs it might make sense to use that to buffer your savings and give you some sanity.

Honestly I'm not big on "finding" co-founders. That process should be organic (ie your former colleagues or people you know), but a place where you can quickly find if you have chemistry with is to go to hackathons - especially the multi-day ones.

For our start-up the original founder brought a second co-founder on board and set himself a commercial milestone which they had to hit making a certain amount of profit to convince himself it was worth carrying on. It worked, and I joined after as the third person after that milestone and we then hit our aggressive target for that year.

Worth perhaps having a similar line in the sand, which you can objectively test your faith against?

We had all worked together before, so any former colleagues or accelerator graduates should probably be your first port of a call.

No shame in freelancing to pay the bills while working on your startup. I did the same (also solo founder). Just be efficient / disciplined about it.

If I hadn't freelanced, we wouldn't have turned the corner (tho it did take a while). If you believe in it, keep going.