It’s a lot easier to hear the stories from others, than to live it yourself. And for those of you in your youth, with no families to take care of when you jump the entpreneurial shark – you are both lucky that your risk is proportionally small (only YOU are dependent upon YOU); and unlucky that your domain experience to use for solving problems is also proportionally small.
Right now, my startup has made close to $200k this year; with the vast bulk of that going to engineering and lawyering. We have a cool product, but it’s a beast to deploy and support.
We’ve bootstrapped the whole way so far – and seem to be unable to actually raise around, but able to raise acquisition offers (one, two weeks after we incorporated and got all our IP and employment agreements buttoned up…) and another recently for a pretty large sum of cash and larger amount of stock… and here’s where it gets really tough.
Our cars, problematic (2, both well over 10 years old, well over 100k miles, not super well maintained… because, oh, cash?). Our clothes? Worn out and holey – and not in the fashionable way. We’re skipping health and dental care; because even with insurance, any additional expenditures simply can’t be afforded until the IF and WHEN our product is generating enough cash to pay an actual salary.
Speaking of which, we’ve been paying ourselves so low, for the entire year, that we’ve paid ourselves in 1099’s which is the only way we could eke out enough cash to survive – always working towards some sort of resource infusion that would allow us some way to catch up on payroll taxes owed. It’s just a liability that keeps growing.
We just spent 2 months in due diligence, we were flown down to meet with our courting “acquirer” and they made an offer. My co-founder and I discussed, then accepted the offer, and we got a nice piece of paper that said that IF the deal closed, some things would get easier (all to do with cash), and some things would get harder (all to do with accountability and who controls the product).
It was a piece of paper that, IF the deal closed, we’d be able to get current on our taxes, maybe buy some new clothese, and not worry about how I’m keeping a roof over my wife and daughter’s head every 4 weeks. It meant that we could actually have some resources to help take care of the serious illnesses my wife battles every day, things we just barely get by on kind of “maintaining” – even though it just keeps getting worse. But any effective fight takes considerable cash.
Now, a month later, have been pretty much “left at the alter” with no explanations, no communications, not a damn thing but silence.
Well, not exactly silence – because my wife is busy yelling at me for “ruining Christmas” and “Is anything you ever do actually going to work out? Because this is f**cked.”
It’s really, really discouraging to get up day-after-day trying to figure out how the hell you pay your team enough to keep the product from falling apart, while fighting tooth and nail to keep your family from falling apart at the same time. And after all the years of trying, marginally succeeding, failing, trying again, and again, and again; I’m pretty much unemployable at any other kind of work than what we’re doing – so there’s not any reasonable option I can see that would be any more stable anyway.
Startups are hard. But we all knew that. Sometimes it helps just to tell someone… all of you… instead of just letting it be my secret.
Can I give up now?