[revelio]

I have a business that is on track for failure. It's got some time yet but seems unlikely to turn around. The threshold for failure in this case is that it does not generate enough revenue to pay me and my partner a proper salary and won't any time soon. The cause is probably one of either over-estimating the market size or under-estimating the difficulty of building awareness of the product within that market. It's a bit hard to tell the difference. There might be other causes but it amounts to: not enough customers show up and pay for the product, and advertising doesn't seem to work. It will have resulted in a net loss, however, I'm lucky to have ample resources and so it won't make much difference to my overall net worth. It is an affordable failure.

A deeper root cause is perhaps a different kind of failure in the past. Several times in my career I've had the experience of appearing to have career success due to either initiating or being very early involved in successful projects. But this didn't lead to a stable or cushy career. Instead what happened each time is that after a few years the organizations in effect thanked me for my work and then pushed me aside due to various forms of back-room politics. I've never been fired but have been sidelined or driven to quit, each time with the people closest to what happened making it clear that what happened was deeply unfair and often not just involving me but also others being pushed out at the same time (and thus usually it wasn't strictly personal but involved wider organizational dysfunction).

Creating a company was my hope for an escape from this, to find peace and stability at last where good work done can build something for the long term, without the constant mental drain of wondering if there are people manoeuvering behind the scenes to tear it all down. Alas, you can see the key weakness: the company was created to satisfy my own needs, not because I saw an upswell of untapped customer demand. Creating successful companies is hard, especially in the software world where there are many competitors who are engage in market dumping with loose VC money for years or decades at a time. I chose not to raise (a deliberate choice, the option was there), because building a cash burner is easy but doesn't satisfy the goal of creating long term stability. So unless we pivot and get lucky with some new idea I'll probably have to return to the corporate world later this year or next and just get used to the idea that life will likely always be somewhat restless.