Thanks saved!

I think the “younger generation” is making rational choices based on return on investment. You could choose to take risk or work hard but if the payoff isn’t enough then obviously you can refuse to do it. So “laying flat” “quiet quitting” and all of this is actually a rational economic choice for many people. Nevermind that the way that the “older generation” got ahead was to practice exactly the same. The only difference being, the price of homes was much lower so you could get 10x or 100x return for the same amount of effort.

It’s harder for younger people to make it work especially starting from 0 now. You also have to ignore the advice of well meaning but out of touch older people like buying only your dream home or a brand new detached home (now it’s get any property at all and not waiting), ignore distractions like crypto alt coins or picking stocks (you have to invest in an S&P500 index fund but you can’t make stock picks because that’s gambling) and so on. The amount of knowledge required to succeed, the knowledge floor and decision floor if you will has gone up.

One wrong move won’t ruin you, but ongoing bad decisions (every day you decide to keep all money in cash, delay buying any property, staying in the same job for too long because of fear, etc.) would compound and create extreme difficulty over the long run.

Skill is always the harder path since it takes dedication. There’s also the risk you pick the wrong skill for profit in a market. You have to keep an eye out on trends.

Not everyone can gain skill in everything. Results is talent or intangibles times effort so some people will gain more results than other people for the same amount of effort. But talent untrained is useless. Most skills can be trained given enough effort. Once you have skill you can focus on smart work over excessive hours (hard work).

I think the sad truth is that most people have personalities or hobbies unsuited for survival in our capitalist dog eat dog world. Maybe take a deeper look at your hobbies and free time and see whether you’re just a consumer taking or if you’re a creator giving back. Beyond that most hobbies can be monetised. This attitude to life doesn’t sit well with those who believe in training and education but is actually a key difference in thought between rich people and workers (rich and wealthy tend to think in terms of skills and workers tend to think in terms of education or papers). Reality is probably somewhere in between and there’s more than one way to achieve success. You need to do what’s best for you and for most people that’s gaining skills. For others it will be rolling dice. But even if you’re a dice roller you got to setup so if you roll snake eyes you can roll again until you win.

Most of the people here are individuals who find the idea of working for little money or free or not being the majority shareholder or having all the power to be unacceptable. In other words older people who want to make money for themselves or only themselves.

If you are 21, you are young. That means you can take years off or time off and probably have little in the way of responsibilities (ongoing costs) unless you have a child or sick parent. That means you can join an accelerator or pre-accelerator. They will take you, work with you for six months and after the end of it you will team up with three or five or ten other people and use a fair equity sharing model to proceed.

https://slicingpie.com/the-new-pie-slicer/

Most people here cannot do this because they are not interested in creating a company that scales globally, only enriching themselves. That’s why you hear dropshipping, opening this or that store, doing real estate and so on. All of that is actually not what most serial entrepreneurs would call global scale. On top of that, most of these are low skill in that they don’t take ten thousand hours or a lifetime to master or hone the skill. That sounds a lot like having a job, but you actually have to bring something to the table or else your compensation and equity in a fair split (say slicing pie model) would scale accordingly (and you would end up making up for lack of skill or assets or value with excessive work which would make it like a job for sure).

Your best bet is to join the accelerator and work in a group (working in a group greatest chance of success). Your next best bet is to gain skills and be very good at whatever it is you do (which also carries into a career or a job). Most people here are actually going down the wrong path and will have very low chances of success. As always be careful what you listen to on the Internet. Go local, join a local group of entrepreneurs and you will make it real and actually accomplish something as opposed to locking yourself in a basement for years or trying to do everything yourself and failing because you don’t have all the necessary skills.

Yeah better to take the money

The macro is important too; recession coming and badly funded businesses won’t survive. Maybe in other hands with unlimited money, it would thrive and grow but in the hands of someone cash strapped, it won’t or would even die

If you sell, it could live on forever

Yes I need more storage

So does everyone apparently

Glory to the Lord

No

Get a technical cofounder

Money is just an artificial construct. Debt is just a promise by you that you will pay someone back (possibly with interest). If the debt is not personally guaranteed (a company’s debt) it’s implied that if the company dies the money is gone.

So I don’t think you are far off the mark, lol.

Sorry about that

Shit happens

Thanks for sharing

The real deal is to join an accelerator, use slicing pie model to divide equity and join a group of people to build a company. The company will more likely than not get funding

If you want to do it yourself that’s much more fraught with pain and suffering and more importantly no investors

Nobody will sign an NDA for your idea and accelerators will not sign it as part of you joining up

So you’re Bezos but the failure version. That’s fine. Startup success rate is a very low percentage.

You should have joined an accelerator, used slicing pie model and used someone else’s money. One of the rules is to always use someone else’s money or to bootstrap with a tiny amount of money.

Also it’s possible you’re not a failure. But you probably already failed. You should embrace that. As for employability that’s bullshit. Suppose it’s true that entrepreneurs or founders face more challenges than others when finding a job and that you need a job. You can remove almost all of that from your LinkedIn except your work history. If someone asks you can say you were a cofounder for one year but spent $200k or $300k on a failed venture and need to work now to pay bills. I think that’s the middle ground between going full blown entrepreneur (which might signal that you will run to do it again) and leaving it out completely. You got it out of your system and you’re ready to go back to work. In other words telling the truth gets you the furthest. It’s possible no one asks at all and no one cares unless you make it a big deal.

Another option is to do the accelerator route again and this time spend no money of your own. I would seriously consider that before throwing in the towel. All the lessons you learned can be applied. Then you can feel you gave it a shot.

Cool (the business I mean)

No advice but hope you reach your future goals

I think it’s pretty cool what you did

I also think it’s what a lot of people are trying to do anyway with landing pages and e-mail signups and so on

You should take what you did as a win and move on

And sell it to recover all losses and make money if you can… let someone else run it and take it where it needs to go. That Chinese investor could be looking for immigration, so would be willing to invest in literally anything so they could make good all your losses and then some. As long as you are honest that the business is failing and has no hope under you I don’t see it as unethical to sell it for massive amounts of money

First come first serve

Unlike homes or life essentials Internet domain names are not required for life so totally commercial

Unless they are squatting your legal name or taking unethical actions like turning domain name searches into domains or squatting a name of your existing business after researching you, you shouldn’t be angry at it

I agree it’s a moat but then Disney+ has a moat (Disney shows) and Netflix’s moat isn’t as strong since their licensed shows can be bought except for Netflix exclusives

If “content is king” then is all copyrighted content a moat? I think we will see that challenged by AI and licensing; it’s only a moat because customers see the value in it; if customers can replace it then it’s not a moat anymore

My personal belief is that moats are overrated. Yes someone can invest time money and effort to steal your customers, but that’s a lot of cash. Meanwhile you can match with brand and customer loyalty and product differentiation

What kind of moat does Netflix have over Disney+? Nothing

As for “luxury software” it’s entertainment

With no experience you need a technical cofounder

Doing it on your own is shit if you know nothing and you should use no code site builders if you really want to do it on your own

The counter to that is a job is for money. So long as you made some money, you did real work. How you made that money or what you did making that money so long as not immoral or illegal is nobody’s business (even immorality could be nobody’s business as long as you aren’t eating babies or a terrorist)

If you made no money at all, then the counter is you were learning either learning how to sell or learning how to build or so on. If you made no money until 35 then their criticism of you is somewhat valid (everyone should be able to support themselves at a certain point) and you will have to make money in some way shape or form (or get off their teat) if they don’t want you using their money

Money makes the world go around

There’s more to just making it. There’s knowing what to make (Product or Research), and designing what to make (UI/UX) and then selling or pushing what you make. You got the 3 H’s (hacker, hustler, hipster) and each would bring unique skills. 99% of programmers cannot design or sell worth a cent.

You can use slicing pie model https://slicingpie.com/learn-slicing-pie-model/ to turn everything into a “slice” and calculate fair market value. Time, relationships, money even ideas all have fair market value. You can have real time calculation of equity. In most primitive way you have time based vesting but more advanced tracking like slicing pie has no fixed equity chunks. If someone was lazy and did nothing and got fired, the treatment of their “slices” would be different than if someone walked away for either bad or good reasons. When the startup gets funding, slicing pie model ends and you can accurately price and hire. People’s “slices” (equity) is paid off then and you move into salaries and normal compensation.

The builder can try to “usurp” the whole idea but then they would need another person to do the selling and the designing. The sales guy can walk away too and so can the designer. The risk is the same.