| Author here! >I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works! After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite. It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed. In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes. With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up. You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time. |
If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.