I’m sitting on a bench and don’t have any clue about my future.
My boyfriend and I entered the startup world around 4 years ago. He’s the technical co-founder, and I’m non-technical. We secured two investments but pivoted multiple times and couldn’t achieve profitability. We earned some money in those 4 years, a total of around 250k.
Now, we’ve decided to completely pivot and do something else. We believe we can’t be successful in the current industry; it’s extremely challenging, with few competitors, and users expect everything for free. Our ARPU was less than a dollar ☹️
Fortunately, we still have around 1 year of runway, which is good. We could try new ideas, but we have barely any motivation left. One day we’re on a hype train, thinking we’ve found a profitable problem, and the next day, we’re feeling blue because we realize it’s a hard barrier to entry.
What should we do? We’re both super lost. Should we go into communities we’re interested in, build a network first, and then start another startup? Or what?
We know two things - we don’t want to return to a 9-5 job, and we super enjoy working with each other.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Consider trying to shorten the time to validate your idea. Before building the MVP you could try mocking up a fake business & run a real marketing campaign to test the waters. Just be explicit that the product doesn’t exist & people are signing up for a waitlist.