So I decided to go and do a startup with an old coworker of mine about two years ago because I actually really like programming and I had enough money to live off my savings for awhile. So I'm building an open source piece of software, we have no real monetization scheme and that's fine. Maybe some rich company will adopt us and we can get a service contract, or we can trick some investor in giving us some money and we'll burn it all on bloated salaries.
The problem is that I've been doing this for 2 years and I'm throughly burned out. I've been working like a dog, 12+ hour days, rarely any time off. I don't have any hobbies anymore and my relationship with my partner isn't great. I want this to be useful to people because it has the real capacity to make peoples jobs easier. It abstracts away like 90% of what data engineers have to do and in my opinion it is actually innovative (fully outside of capitalism). I'm just at this point where I'm mentally done with the idea and I just don't have the energy anymore to see the rest of it through. I've been getting in a lot of arguments with my cofounder recently about product direction and I think it's just me being anxious about getting this adopted. We still don't know who our target users are and I just want anyone to use it and I don't care about 'personas' and product market fit.
I'm not going to drop the link here because I don't want it coming up in a google search but you can DM me and I can show you what I've done. I honestly don't know what I should do at this point, just quit and get a real job or take a break and then just try to trudge through it.
Thanks of listening.
Real adoption and genuine popularity are very very rare, especially nowadays. Your success is directly proportional to who you know with money to spend. I would say go find someone who has experience pandering to rich uncles and tech fuckwads for funding. If you want to make money in tech, you have to market your solution and convince people (e.g. morons with too much money) to invest in you because you have "the next big thing".
Being a Petit Bourgeois is unfortunately mostly about sucking up to bigger and more undesirable Petit Bourgeois so you can get a chance to get money from the actual Bourgeois. If you want to bust into this world, you might have to take a step back from making a genuinely worthy tool and start engaging with those ideas of marketing, personas, user stories, etc. If that isn't your vision (which I can't blame you for) then keep trudging on but at least know you didn't sell out.