I'm almost 38. Start programming at 10. Spent 7 years in video game industry as programmer, project manager, CTO. I tried during 5 years to create a "startup".
I still have a half time job that pay the bill and give me enough time to create something. During these 5 years I created a game, a tool for geeks, a B2B project and lot of more things. I created some projects alone, with CEO partners, CTO partners. Each time, I have no traction, negative feedback, I demotivating and then I stop the project. I read too much about pretotyping, MVP, lean startup, marketing.
Now I don't even know what to do. All ideas I have seems already made by someone else, and often better than I planned to do them. Each partners I meet seems too newbie to work with.
It's horrible because I have time and skills to do lot of things but nothing motivate me anymore. I think all those failures killed me and now I'm lost. What a waste.
If you have any advises, ways to help me, ideas, insult, whatever, shoot.
--- UPDATE: Thank you so much for your advises, I need to think about all this. I'll answer you one by one.
I'm on HN since 1400 days with a total of 42 karma point and never been on HN homepage. My anonymous account have more karam and on homepage in 30mn. What a pitty! but anyway, I'm not looking to be a star or for vanity metrics so it's not a problem.
Lot of people would love to enough money each month and free time to do whatever they want. It's a waste because I don't know what to do with this free time...
Everything is insipid for me. I have no hobby, no programming idea, no desire to meet people, travel whatever. When I try to get a hobby, I m fed up after a few try. When I go to nice tech event, I'm bored.
It's easy to get caught in the echo chamber of the Startup world. The reality is, it is very hard to strike it rich in any industry. That doesn't mean we should stop trying, but just try to enjoy your life along the way by diversifying your time investment portfolio. That means that even if every attempt you make fails, you still enjoy the journey.
So go out there and have some fun. Don't worry, there will be plenty of opportunities for startups when you return.
After fighting intermittantly with my cofounder and my wife, I decided I didn't want to be that way. I've burnt the candle on both ends long enough and I was out of wax. While I can't take the full month off like FD3SA is recommending, I significantly scaled back (for me) to only working 5.5 days a week and putting a big effort into working out at least 4 days a week. Also, spending quality time with my family, not just being in the same room while I stared at a laptop. Keeping a high priority on work, but also a similar priority on fun and on life in general. I've only been doing this for a couple of months and have seen a significant improvement on my productivity, a more harmonious working and family life, and just a better overall outlook on life.
There are a million great opportunities out there, especially in the tech space - but if you are burnt to a crisp and you are physically/mentally not in a good place, it's easy to not see them or to feel too defeated to want to tackle them. Take care of yourself - you'll appreciate it.
Our brains get stimulated on new patterns. By doing something totally non-computer related higher level concepts will stimulate the higher regions of your brain and give you new perspectives and insights. These perspectives and insights will both work as a source of energy and motivation while you're coding, and the higher level patterns you learn doing a totally different task will help you "think outside the box" when writing software.
Go out there and stimulate that higher neocortex with some fresh patterns!
Take a break, go on a vacation, and recharge your batteries. You have the skills to have a well-paid job, and a great life. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth just because you had a failed dream of being a millionaire through some startup. You can still have a great life from your skills, if you just step back and realize how lucky you are.
The wrong product at the right time can help you laugh all the way to the bank, while the perfect product when nobody is buying will languish in obscurity.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Come back and kick ass.
Do some side projects, get interested in something. If you've got a lot of interests you'll invariably have a lot of inspiration.
If your inspiration consists of "FUCK I NEED AN IDEA" you'll probably fail miserably.
You may think you're desperate, but you're not. Keep reading...
I'm almost 38. Start programming at 10. Spent 7 years in video game industry as programmer, project manager, CTO.
None of that matters. Today is Day 0.
I tried during 5 years to create a "startup".
You don't "create a startup". You supply solutions to other people's problems. When you do that properly, a "startup" is often the byproduct. Focus on their needs, not yours, and allow the "startup" to evolve to what it should become instead of pushing some preconceived notion.
I still have a half time job that pay the bill and give me enough time to create something.
That's great! Fantastic, in fact. You have the best of all world's: enough income, enough time, and enough connections to other things and people to supply yourself with plenty of demands to supply. You're ahead of 95% of others already. So please stop feeling "desperate" and harness the excellent position you're already in.
During these 5 years I created a game, a tool for geeks, a B2B project and lot of more things. I created some projects alone, with CEO partners, CTO partners. Each time, I have no traction, negative feedback, I demotivating and then I stop the project.
a. Focus on what someone else needs. b. Limit the number of others and needs to streamline that focus. c. Work alone as long as you can. You may surprise yourself at how much you can accomplish.
I read too much about pretotyping, MVP, lean startup, marketing.
Then stop reading and start doing. When you reach the point where you don't know how to do something that you must do, then reach for help, reading or otherwise, but not before then. Allow yourself to be pulled by your customer's demands, not pushed by what you think you should be doing.
Now I don't even know what to do.
Find a customer.
All ideas I have seems already made by someone else, and often better than I planned to do them.
That's a good thing! You want other people's great ideas. It's your execution, not their idea, that will be your key to success.
Each partners I meet seems too newbie to work with.
Then work alone and learn what you have do when you need to.
It's horrible because I have time and skills to do lot of things but nothing motivate me anymore.
That's because you're too focused on yourself, and not enough on others. Concentrate on satisfying someone else's needs by supplying something excellent. That's almost always enough motivation. You'll see.
I think all those failures killed me and now I'm lost. What a waste.
They weren't failures, but necessary learning experiences to get where you are now. Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Colonel Saunders all "failed" many more times than you have before they succeeded. And each one of them would tell you that those "failures" were necessary but not sufficient for success.
Take a deep breath, get rid of you're stinkin' thinkin', regroup, find a customer, and build something great. We both know you can do it. Best wishes.
Once this person gets focussed on solving problems for customers I think they will be very successful.
Or just a solve a problem for a single customer.
For example, I started a business that solves a problem for a single customer (for a niche industry). After my customer signed up, my website now only displays a "log in" form (and not a "sign up" form).
Why? Because I'm more focused on providing a great experience more than worrying about scaling up or other problems I don't currently have...
@topicstarter: consider taking a break. Things usually make more sense once you've taken a breather and focus on other things in life than "doing a startup". It can provide you with a new sense of perspective on your current situation (i.e. it's not as bad as you think it is).
Moreover, creating well executed solutions is a hard thing to do, period. Try adjusting your goals on what you hope to get out of your startup: not only financially but intrinsically as well. Setting the bar too high on day 1 is the same as setting yourself up for failure. Taking things one step at a time works much more motivating and allows you to iterate to your desired end-goal.
Also, consider reading up less about what others do. In particular, consider reading up less about other people's successes and so forth. They can easily create this feeling of "being a failure" for not having been able to achieve that just yet. Startups tend to fail more often than not, although I wouldn't necessarily be too comfortable to use the word "fail" in this context: it's often a necessary thing to learn what one did wrong and how one can improve. In that sense, you might want to take another look at your undertakings of the past few years :)
So I think perhaps it's good to take a step back and stop thinking in terms of what you should "do" and more in terms of what you would like your life to be like. If the current startup scene bores you because of an endless series of negative feedback, just realize that many of us feel the same way. The problem is very much the world's, not yours. It's always been that way, and always will be that way, for any individual in any time period. That's when I finally realized that no matter how hard I worked or how hard I tried, I could never achieve happiness through my accomplishments alone. That's a bitter pill to swallow for someone who built their life around self actualization.
I had a bit of a midlife crisis last year and let it all go, and tried a new way of deciding what to do based on whatever presented itself. If a problem had a smell to it, like I was halfway up Mt. Everest and had to reach the summit before I could even begin working on the crux of it, I said no to it. If you want to try some mantras to get through the day, maybe you could try picturing how to solve a problem without doing it yourself. Like, could you find someone to do it for you, could you do the problem after a few beers or on an island somewhere, things like that. That's how wealthy people approach problems, so you can copy what they do and even though you won't get wealthy right away, you'll start to earn income in the form of time and feel wealthier for less effort. Most problems don't require a superhuman effort to solve, they just require communication and teamwork and patience. A small multiplication of your efforts through others can surpass your own ability. Plenty of people have lived rich lives with no money to speak of.
Anyway, I wish I had some deep insight or miracle cure but I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I guess, whenever I'm not sure about something, I try to ask which option will reenfranchise the most people, or is most in line with how I would like the world to be in the future, regardless of the immediate benefit to myself. It's weird because if you start approaching the world in those terms, opportunities start falling in your lap, because people somehow sense that about others. There is plenty of wealth in the world, maybe a quadrillion dollars or some unfathomable number, so if the game is to be part of that, it's a more effective strategy for people to share it with you of their own accord than to somehow win it from them through sport. I guess that's why I'm starting to have more and more doubts that the startup scene can create the kind of world I want to live in, even though it's one of the best tools we've got right now. Probably the orders of magnitude higher per capita wealth on something like Star Trek is going to come from cooperativism and automating society's basic needs so that people are free to explore further into what it means to be human. So this musical chairs game people are playing with capital is distracting us from the infinite potential we each have inside us. Staying in the casino too long means you never won. Someone else did.
If you have kids or are responsible for someone, disregard my advice because I have absolutely no idea what to do in that situation. It scares the crap out of me. So I know I only have half a theory here and wish I knew how to generalize it.
I don't know how to create that kind of society, but you're right, it's going to take a lot more than the current startup scene to do.
> Each time, I have ... negative feedback
Great, you have the ability to focus and prioritise which is something people with positive feedback lack.
Though I guess the question I am most interested in hearing an answer to is: Why are you doing what you're doing?
If the answer is to do a startup, it's the wrong answer. If it's to solve problems and fill a need, then it may be the right answer if other people share that problem too and your solution works for them.
Answering "Why?" supplied the epiphany I needed to start building what people want.
I took about six months of very minimal contract programming work, at the same time as doing a lot of physical work on a "fixer-upper" house my wife and I bought in a cheap area. Then I settled on a project which I hope will turn into a startup, but which I'd be completely happy just working on anyway even if it never turns into a business - I'm just that interested in it. Consulting is still there to pay the bills.
Good luck!
You likely have a lot of native code experience, and probably dealt with annoying hardware issues, right (PowerPC, whatever)? Try getting a gig with somebody targeting embedded systems, or take some time off.
Live life for a bit, stop programming, and maybe attend the odd hackathon until you learn to love coding again.
Hit me up on email if you want to vent/chat/whatever.
Reading tech news sites all the time kind of makes me feel like unless you're pouring your heart and soul into your job or startup or whatever you're just a useless asshole. Maybe that's not the case and experience is worth something, enough to coast along and be useful while you find new direction or new inspiration.
I don't know!
Read "Masters of Doom", read "Soul of a New Machine", read "The New New Thing", read iWoz: we see that products fail all the time, that pioneers take a bath, that the second mouse gets the cheese--but that engineers are always in demand.
A business can fail, but raw material is always being looked for.