Yes. Every time

Yes because that’s the answer that you want to hear. This is natural when you’re young/inexperienced. We all start out thinking we know how we’re going to change the world, and then realize that we can only impact one thing at a time. The nice part is that it is up to you! You can choose to let your ego get in the way and find excuses to fail. Or you can do a little deeper examination of yourself and figure out what drives you. This is your passion! It’s not some anecdotal point solution for society. Invest your time in getting better at what drive you to be a founder and CEO, and you will be a success

Now you’re just making up statistics or providing statistics from your deal flow. Shopify survivorship is 51.6% at 5 years (published by Shopify). BLS average survivorship at 5 years is 65%. Maybe your experience is 99% fail, which would mean you would have done/seen 100 deals (unlikely), or you just want to be right and beat down on people on the internet.

I’d just ask yourself, “What would I pay $1,000/month for someone to solve for me?” Figure out who else would have that same problem. Interview those people. Learn their real problem. Solve that and build.

You don’t win a race looking at who’s running next to you

Well the nice thing it’s up to the OP to decide what to do with our advice: take your advice and do nothing, which may be more valuable than trying again, but it’s definitely $0. However, there are lots of people making millions on Shopify because they have a captive audience that relates to the founder’s story. If you know 1,000 similar patients to you, you can make a living.

I don’t know the financial circumstances of the OP. Will this make $1B? No. 2% of adult population, 4M Americans, 330k users on PatientsLikeMe (guessing 10% with fibromyalgia), buying private-label consumables at a 40% gross margin. Sounds like an easy way to $1M EBITDA. $4M in a few years may not be a lot to you, but it’s a lot to a lot of people.

Huge grey area. I like to think I work a “chill 60,” which means my work day/week seems fairly normal (and probably less than 40) but the reality is I’m working more like 60-80 because the business is always on my mind.

Yes, marketing costs are super high right now on average because the market is flooded with cheap content. However, the OP is probably already in a bunch of support groups on different platforms full of patients trying to find similar answers. This is the case for most specialty patients. Don’t know if your experience would counter this argument, but this is from my experience working with a large biotech client in specialty pharma and helping a friend with POTS develop a product.

Yes. It’d be easy to market: just tell your story on PatientsLikeMe. Publish your socials too. You’d need your be shameless, which has its own grievances, but you’d definitely make a business

Everyone’s provided great tips. I would simplify a few things given the context. Basically, assume all labor is $100/hr. How many people do you need for each function in the business?

Then you can go back and make adjustments like adding a load (additional costs of employee +20-30%), adjusting pay based on job, etc.

Starting with complexity can lead you down rabbit holes. So I would standardize the labor costs and figure out the jobs to be done by your company, and then modify your plan with the added complexities.

Don’t sell yourself short, write “SOC2” on a napkin and do it for 125k

Commenting because I want to follow. Did a call with Modern Treasury, which does a high price subscription over a transaction fee. This seems good for my use case, high $ transactions and low volume.

Stripe Atlas works fine. You’ll need to get a Certificate of Good Standing on your own, but email Stripe for help. Clerk is pretty much the same (both are YC alumni). Both come with enough compute credits to offset their cost, and it’s a better option than most, IMO, in this thread (unless law firms are giving out AWS and OpenAI credits). I’ve also used Cooley and Gunderson Dettmer in the past and had a good experience

Hack together a prototype, somehow. If you can’t, I don’t hold much hope for hiring a software engineer who will charge you less than $250k for a non-functional product.

My question is how good is your partner in their functions and how critical is the software versus a no-code hack? Ultimately, there’s no answer than, “Do you like the deal?” If you’re happy with it, there’s really no replacement for the experience. This is coming from someone who’s done more for less. Did I maximize my leverage/income/etc? No way. Were things financially uncomfortable? Absolutely. Did I end up doing fine? Yes, and now, I know I can start and raise whatever I want.

Whatever the slang is for sketchy transactions in the UK

Have you stressed over prepping for a case interview? Even better, were you in management consulting, IB, or PE who helped with recruiting? The best way to know what people want is to solve a problem for yourself (directly or indirectly).