We have a coworking space in a small touristy town (Breckenridge, CO), and I can confirm that things are pretty slow right now. We can see it in our visitors, and I hear the same sentiment from coffee shop and restaurant owners in town. We are also seeing people spend less money. If they were renting private offices last year, now they are happy with a desk. It’s anecdotal data for sure, but it looks like things are slowing down quite a bit.

If you have to ask, the answer is probably yes.

Figure out how to operate given the constraints of what you have right now.
Assume no growth at all.

What can you do to become sustainable, if not profitable? Can you work more hours yourself and thus cut on staff costs. Can you close the shop for hours when you have the least traffic? Can you cut down expenses on items that don’t sell well, and start selling more things that have higher margins? Can you ask your landlord/bank to defer/reduce payments?

You are in a brick and mortar business and while you will probably find a way to grow 10% here and there, you are very unlikely to double your customer base fast; it’s just what it is.

You might consider focusing on your best customers and up-selling them, but even then, you would need to sell $10 worth to 50 customers, $50 to 10 customers every day, or a $500 item to 1 customer, every single day (revenue, not profit). This just sounds very unlikely. Maybe some seasonal offers, like Xmas stuffed toys for kids, or maybe cruise tickets to Bahamas, but again, unlikely.

No one tells you this when you start a small business (we’ve been there too), but you need a good amount of savings to survive the first 3+ years while you figure things out, and even then, it might not work out.

Sorry I don’t have a better advice, just being honest with you here.

I feel what you feel, but the only way to get over it is to go through it. I would recommend biting your lips for a few weeks and releasing as many apps as you can; you will learn a ton and start seeing the world differently. There’s nothing I can say to convince you of that, unless you try it yourself.

Also, I’d recommend dropping at one of the AI Tinkerers meetups (tinkerer dot ai) , it really helped me to see the AI world through other people’s eyes and to see what gets them excited. You don’t have to say anything or present anything, but listening to others will help you be more excited, I promise.

A friend of mine started a service business 10 years ago, and he hates it too. Every year he says it’s the last year, he will sell and move on, but the money is good, and it’s the only thing that he knows, so every year he comes back to do it again.

Whatever you do, I would plan for the long-term. If you hate it now, you will hate it five years from now, and if that’s the case, what do you want to do with your life?

My friend Chris calls these “birthing rights.”

For some products and MVP could be very crappy and you would still use it because it’s novel and solves a problem in an unexpected way, or does something new where trying the product is worth the experience.

For the rest of the products you have expectations of what they look like and how they work, and if those features are missing, then indeed you will not even consider trying.

I think this has been the case for a very long time, but now that coding is becoming somewhat obsolete, simple MVPs are dying indeed. No one needs another X for Y. Your product has to be wildly different to still be accepted as an MVP.

“With three short-term roles my resume is a wreck.” - I think this is the biggest concern that is holding you back. While this might be true in some circumstances, it only IS true IF you make it so. Don’t. Don’t let anybody tell you what to think, and write your own story.

It might be difficult to believe right now, but if you look at your last couple of years and try to revert every negative into a positive, you will come out with a unique resume. Nobody else will have a resume like yours!

Think about it. You went through all these turbulent times, delivered AND surpassed your goals, maintained your own sanity and your team moral, and have had experiences in not just one, but multiple industries. Who else, if not you, is better prepared to wade into the rough seas and succeed?

All the things that made you jump around were completely outside of your control, but everything in your control, you crushed it!

Setup small rooms, like an IKEA warehouse, and rent them out to OnlyFans creators by the hour.

I had a similar experience once, although it was not a business but a job, but I was locked into obligations and money was good, and I spent so much time working that I quite literally do not have memories of that time period. It sucked, and trading my kids’ early months for work wasn’t worth it.

But, before you quit and just walk away, I’d encourage you to first find some bearable middle ground. Work more from home to minimize your commute, spend more time with family, go back to gym…

After all, you are the boss. Yes you need to deal with shit and motivate your employees, but you also gotta take care of yourself, and it sounds like that is way overdue. And you know what, maybe some of your employees are tired too, but they cannot say anything because you are the boss.

Suggestion: Tell everyone that you are off for the month of December and will restart in January. Let them go off and have a paid month leave too. It sounds like your business can afford it, and it is possible that it cannot afford not to.

What’s the worst thing that will happen, vs. the miserable place where you are today?

I had a similar experience once, although it was not a business but a job, but I was locked into obligations and money was good, and I spent so much time working that I quite literally do not have memories of that time period. It sucked, and trading my kids’ early months for work wasn’t worth it.

But, before you quit and just walk away, I’d encourage you to first find some bearable middle ground. Work more from home to minimize your commute, spend more time with family, go back to gym…

After all, you are the boss. Yes you need to deal with shit and motivate your employees, but you also gotta take care of yourself, and it sounds like that is way overdue. And you know what, maybe some of your employees are tired too, but they cannot say anything because you are the boss.

Suggestion: Tell everyone that you are off for the month of December and will restart in January. Let them go off and have a paid month leave too. It sounds like your business can afford it, and it is possible that it cannot afford not to.

What’s the worst thing that will happen, vs. the miserable place where you are today?

The point of a startup is not to waste money but to find a product market fit as cheaply and quickly as possible, and then to scale that product to its maximum potential. Wasting money as a service has only been popularized in recent years. Most VCs would normally fund a hypothesis, and if it shows signs of potential, will continue expanding their investment.

$230m for one hypothesis is a rather ambitious bet on a product that showed no evidence of being desired. For comparison, $318 million is how much Tesla raised pre-IPO, excluding their department of energy loan, and by that point they had hundreds of roadsters on preorder, worth tens of millions of dollars. While Tesla entirely changed the definition of a car, Humane turned off the screen on the Apple Watch and called it future.

So yes, making real bets on wild things is the best way to uncover future potential, but the best are sure not evenly distributed among the wild ideas and their founders. 500 scrappy founders would’ve done what startups are supposed to do - validate an idea first, build later - and yes, it would’ve yielded with more potential unicorn bets, than putting a ton of money into one bucket.