[edw519]

I'm desperate.

You may think you're desperate, but you're not. Keep reading...

I'm almost 38. Start programming at 10. Spent 7 years in video game industry as programmer, project manager, CTO.

None of that matters. Today is Day 0.

I tried during 5 years to create a "startup".

You don't "create a startup". You supply solutions to other people's problems. When you do that properly, a "startup" is often the byproduct. Focus on their needs, not yours, and allow the "startup" to evolve to what it should become instead of pushing some preconceived notion.

I still have a half time job that pay the bill and give me enough time to create something.

That's great! Fantastic, in fact. You have the best of all world's: enough income, enough time, and enough connections to other things and people to supply yourself with plenty of demands to supply. You're ahead of 95% of others already. So please stop feeling "desperate" and harness the excellent position you're already in.

During these 5 years I created a game, a tool for geeks, a B2B project and lot of more things. I created some projects alone, with CEO partners, CTO partners. Each time, I have no traction, negative feedback, I demotivating and then I stop the project.

a. Focus on what someone else needs. b. Limit the number of others and needs to streamline that focus. c. Work alone as long as you can. You may surprise yourself at how much you can accomplish.

I read too much about pretotyping, MVP, lean startup, marketing.

Then stop reading and start doing. When you reach the point where you don't know how to do something that you must do, then reach for help, reading or otherwise, but not before then. Allow yourself to be pulled by your customer's demands, not pushed by what you think you should be doing.

Now I don't even know what to do.

Find a customer.

All ideas I have seems already made by someone else, and often better than I planned to do them.

That's a good thing! You want other people's great ideas. It's your execution, not their idea, that will be your key to success.

Each partners I meet seems too newbie to work with.

Then work alone and learn what you have do when you need to.

It's horrible because I have time and skills to do lot of things but nothing motivate me anymore.

That's because you're too focused on yourself, and not enough on others. Concentrate on satisfying someone else's needs by supplying something excellent. That's almost always enough motivation. You'll see.

I think all those failures killed me and now I'm lost. What a waste.

They weren't failures, but necessary learning experiences to get where you are now. Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Colonel Saunders all "failed" many more times than you have before they succeeded. And each one of them would tell you that those "failures" were necessary but not sufficient for success.

Take a deep breath, get rid of you're stinkin' thinkin', regroup, find a customer, and build something great. We both know you can do it. Best wishes.

[sage_joch]

It should also be noted that startups aren't for everyone. After reading PG's essays in ~2005, I realized there was too much stress and anguish in that path for my personal tastes. It turns out the idea of creating value is also a useful abstraction as an employee, and I've never regretted not going the startup route.

[shail]

I agree, but looking at the way he has been trying hard to build something (doesn't matter whether he was building it for himself or someone else), I think he is pretty much a startup guy. Success is something unrelated altogether.

[ChuckMcM]

This should be pinned up on the wall, great summary.

Once this person gets focussed on solving problems for customers I think they will be very successful.

[127001brewer]

... solving problems for customers ...

Or just a solve a problem for a single customer.

For example, I started a business that solves a problem for a single customer (for a niche industry). After my customer signed up, my website now only displays a "log in" form (and not a "sign up" form).

Why? Because I'm more focused on providing a great experience more than worrying about scaling up or other problems I don't currently have...

[keiferski]

What happens if that one customer leaves?

[ninh]

+1

@topicstarter: consider taking a break. Things usually make more sense once you've taken a breather and focus on other things in life than "doing a startup". It can provide you with a new sense of perspective on your current situation (i.e. it's not as bad as you think it is).

Moreover, creating well executed solutions is a hard thing to do, period. Try adjusting your goals on what you hope to get out of your startup: not only financially but intrinsically as well. Setting the bar too high on day 1 is the same as setting yourself up for failure. Taking things one step at a time works much more motivating and allows you to iterate to your desired end-goal.

Also, consider reading up less about what others do. In particular, consider reading up less about other people's successes and so forth. They can easily create this feeling of "being a failure" for not having been able to achieve that just yet. Startups tend to fail more often than not, although I wouldn't necessarily be too comfortable to use the word "fail" in this context: it's often a necessary thing to learn what one did wrong and how one can improve. In that sense, you might want to take another look at your undertakings of the past few years :)

[zackmorris]

Those are all very solid points towards accomplishment, but I wanted to play devil's advocate for a moment. I'm in the same boat - started programming at 12, am 35 now with no real monetary success to speak of. However, I've gone deeper into computers than I ever thought I would. I could build a computer from the ground up, everything from logic gate design to mask layout to microcode and assembly language, up through the most abstract concurrent algorithms, networking, 3D, AI, you name it. So almost everything I read now feels old hat or a reincarnation of something discovered decades ago. People's ideas seem generally pedestrian, etc.

So I think perhaps it's good to take a step back and stop thinking in terms of what you should "do" and more in terms of what you would like your life to be like. If the current startup scene bores you because of an endless series of negative feedback, just realize that many of us feel the same way. The problem is very much the world's, not yours. It's always been that way, and always will be that way, for any individual in any time period. That's when I finally realized that no matter how hard I worked or how hard I tried, I could never achieve happiness through my accomplishments alone. That's a bitter pill to swallow for someone who built their life around self actualization.

I had a bit of a midlife crisis last year and let it all go, and tried a new way of deciding what to do based on whatever presented itself. If a problem had a smell to it, like I was halfway up Mt. Everest and had to reach the summit before I could even begin working on the crux of it, I said no to it. If you want to try some mantras to get through the day, maybe you could try picturing how to solve a problem without doing it yourself. Like, could you find someone to do it for you, could you do the problem after a few beers or on an island somewhere, things like that. That's how wealthy people approach problems, so you can copy what they do and even though you won't get wealthy right away, you'll start to earn income in the form of time and feel wealthier for less effort. Most problems don't require a superhuman effort to solve, they just require communication and teamwork and patience. A small multiplication of your efforts through others can surpass your own ability. Plenty of people have lived rich lives with no money to speak of.

Anyway, I wish I had some deep insight or miracle cure but I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I guess, whenever I'm not sure about something, I try to ask which option will reenfranchise the most people, or is most in line with how I would like the world to be in the future, regardless of the immediate benefit to myself. It's weird because if you start approaching the world in those terms, opportunities start falling in your lap, because people somehow sense that about others. There is plenty of wealth in the world, maybe a quadrillion dollars or some unfathomable number, so if the game is to be part of that, it's a more effective strategy for people to share it with you of their own accord than to somehow win it from them through sport. I guess that's why I'm starting to have more and more doubts that the startup scene can create the kind of world I want to live in, even though it's one of the best tools we've got right now. Probably the orders of magnitude higher per capita wealth on something like Star Trek is going to come from cooperativism and automating society's basic needs so that people are free to explore further into what it means to be human. So this musical chairs game people are playing with capital is distracting us from the infinite potential we each have inside us. Staying in the casino too long means you never won. Someone else did.

If you have kids or are responsible for someone, disregard my advice because I have absolutely no idea what to do in that situation. It scares the crap out of me. So I know I only have half a theory here and wish I knew how to generalize it.

[rckclmbr]

I think it's interesting you mentioned a "Star Trek" society. I think that's what everyone one of us engineers who have any kind of altruism in them wants. If not, we're just automating jobs away, which is basically automating peoples lives away.

I don't know how to create that kind of society, but you're right, it's going to take a lot more than the current startup scene to do.

[buro9]

I'd also add:

> Each time, I have ... negative feedback

Great, you have the ability to focus and prioritise which is something people with positive feedback lack.

Though I guess the question I am most interested in hearing an answer to is: Why are you doing what you're doing?

If the answer is to do a startup, it's the wrong answer. If it's to solve problems and fill a need, then it may be the right answer if other people share that problem too and your solution works for them.

Answering "Why?" supplied the epiphany I needed to start building what people want.

[tocomment]

That's great advice, but any tips on finding a customer?

[edw519]

See the link to my ebook in my profile. Chapter 10.

[tocomment]

Wow that's amazing! Thanks for putting that together. I'm going to read it on my kindle later.