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.

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
    ·
    2 years ago

    None of us told the capitalist fuck who dared admit to being a capitalist fuck to use their wealth to build something good and sustainable

    "Having enough money saved up to live off for a couple years" does not make someone a capitalist. Heck, I've got enough savings to live off for at least 2 years and my bank account is well below the median worker's annual earnings in the US; my income was never even close to that level.

    I am not arguing in any capacity in favor of the hot take that "successful CEOs have rare and powerful skills"; I'm just saying maybe cut OP some slack for working on an open source project that OP thinks will make people's jobs easier, instead of whatever you deem to be The Most Valid Leftist Project.

    Although if you have more ideas on what "building something good and sustainable" is, I'd be really interested in comparing notes; I've been thinking about this for a long while.