The title “I lost over $200k” shortly followed by “do not trust your team” creates an implication that somehow they stole or swindled it from you, whether that was your intention or not. I think it would be good to add some clarity around those two key pieces of information. If all that happened was that you paid your team, then where does trust tie in with this story?
I started working on my SaaS somewhere in 2016, and the first thing I did was hired a CTO. The person had around 3+ years of experience.
Not only was I paying a good salary, but I was also paying for his rent. When we started building the initial set of products, the overall product development kept getting delayed. He said we needed more developers, so we hired around 6-7+ developers.
All the developers were reporting my ex-CTO, and as per our mutual understanding, I was not allowed to have any say in how the product will be developed, and he will be offered full support and resources.
I agreed to that.
Several months passed, and the product was not ready, but I was also losing cash quickly. I was already under heavy stress because there was no flow of income for the product.
I met someone during this time who told me that I should launch my product, and some people will even buy during the alpha stage. I found it skeptical but fell for that trap because I was desperate to bring in more cash to keep the funding going on for the project.
This is where I made another mistake because I unknowingly ended up overpromising, and my team failed to deliver a quality product.
Over 1.5 years passed, and we still needed a stable product.
Over two years went by, and I still did not have a stable product, and this is when my ex-CTO quit, and a few other developers quit along with him when I realized that he used my resources to build his product and shortly flew out of the country.
..I ended up hiring an outside dev team with the little more money I had to keep my promise to the customers, but that did not go well either.
I had no money left; I had to shut the project completely because I had deep into reds and had gotten into heavy clinical depression.