[muzani]

First time: 6 months.

Market validation in 1 month, very strong traction with no marketing. Spent 6 months trying to find investors.

Started borrowing lots of money to keep it afloat. It had good revenue but not a profit (e-commerce profit margins were around 6%). Couldn't get investors despite two accelerators, so we sold off the company after 14 months. But we made a good profit even after paying off debts.

Second time: years(?)

Ended up trying to do too many features. Still "wasn't ready for launch" 9 months in, ended up building features with no market validation. I ended up quitting the company because no progress was being made.

First and second startups were essentially the same, except the second one had a much bigger team, more ambitious.

I'd say keep your runway as short as possible and try to launch something by 3 months.