After losing my savings as an indie hacker, I can't do it anymore. I quit.

My two cents

1. If money is very pressing, you should save up enough until it isn't. Spending all your saving is obviously going to induce a lot of stress.

Better yet - spend other peoples money. That means raising money, but you'd be surprised how many angle investors or startup programs there are out there, that are willing to seed you with (relatively small amounts of) money. The catch here is that they typically want a very solid business and marketing plan, and will probably turn down typical cookie-cutter ideas (marketplace, social network, etc.).

2. Yes, it's hard to do when bootstrapping yourself,but hire people to do the marketing and sales. These things can and will make or break early startups and businesses.

Let's take he music venue analogy:

Imagine that you want to build the best concert venue in town. You've poured your hard-owned money into it, along with blood, sweat and tears.

Finally the venue is finished - but there's a problem: No one knows about it.

You figure it will pretty much sell itself, and hire in some artists to perform there - but have done zero advertisement or marketing. Concert comes and goes, but no-one showed up - because no-one knew about the concert. Bands and artists still want their money, same goes with utilities and what not.

Point is - if you can't do the sales or marketing yourself, you need to hire someone to do it for you. You're just throwing money into a black hole and getting nothing in return, because potential clients don't even know you exist. If you can't afford someone - anyone - to do that for you, then you probably don't have enough funds to begin with.

edit: It just seems like your biggest troubles stems from the fact that you (seemingly, or due to anxiety) hate sales and marketing yourself, and that your product/segment may have been quite a tough to succeed in.

That's unfortunate and I've been basically in the same position of yours.

I've written here already about some issues I faced. In my case, I've lost all my savings and much more, but I'll not compare my situation to yours, that would definitely not help you. Only you know your own situation and what you're feeling.

People will say that you might not have what it takes to be a successful startup owner. That may be true, but people often forget that there are other kinds of companies than startups, and you can perform really well even if you don't meet Paul Grahamer criteria for successful founders.

I'm currently working on a regular job and planning to come back within a year or so. But I'm not taking that as a hard requirement -- I'll assess the situation by then and decide if it's really a good idea.

I've come to realize that myself and my weaknesses are really big competitors of mine, and I'll try to manage them properly. I'll separate some money that I won't care too much if I loose -- I believe that that will help me to manage my own anxiety and the truckload of poor decisions I make after months of anxiety and stress.

And I'll hire a salesperson to help me on this. Many say this is bad idea, that you yourself have to sell your product and so and so, and I thank you all for the advice but I'm not following it this time and OK.

I'll work on presenting myself a bit stronger to people. It's interesting how condescending people become when they see that you are performing bad. They start to patronize you and feel overconfident to give terrible ideas. I don't blame them too much but, even to be fair to myself, some pieces of bad advice contributed to make my situation a bit worse.

That's what I'm planning to do, see if it helps.

From what I've seen there seems to be three main paths to being a successful indie entrepreneur:

1) The "Maker" Path: you slowly improve your own skills and reputation as a developer (or designer) until they give you a big enough advantage that you can translate them into a successful product. This usually means first growing an audience through blogging, conferences, courses, etc.

2) The "Marketing" Path: you become so good at the "business" part of your business that the you're able to launch new products from scratch without a preexisting audience. It's tough to know if this really works or not but I assume with all the money spent on Google Ads some of it has to work… right?

3) The "Idea" Path: you have an idea that you believe in so much that you'll basically stop at nothing to make it work, even if it takes years (which it probably will). You usually pick up the other skills along the way.

I feel like the poster here suffers from not quite fitting in any of the main paths: they did not seem to have a large pre-existing audience or network to launch to, hate anything related to marketing by their own admission, and their ideas –while perfectly good products, such as https://nomadmail.io/– do not seem to be the kind of project that would inspire the kind of passion necessary to sacrifice years of your life.

This is a difficult post to respond to

Firstly, your issue doesn't seem to be anything other than social anxiety

If you have to 'lose sleep' after contacting someone on LinkedIn about your product, then you are just not suited to doing a startup

Secondly, there is nothing to feel bad about

Vast majority of people are not suited to starting a company or working in a small startup

Lots of good jobs in middle and large companies for you

Thirdly, the scale of stuff you are talking about is miniscule

I walked away from a Green Card to start my company

If I didn't succeed, I would have lost access to the developed world FOREVER

You are upset that your girlfriend had to stay at home one year and you couldn't take her out for dinner????

Finally, this is a Catch 22 situation. Not sure why you are submitting this or writing about your experience if the ENTIRE reason you quit was you couldn't handle doing sales and marketing and putting yourself out there

I'm reluctant to respond because people who have social anxiety can sometimes take genuine feedback and mis-interpret it

What I'm trying to say is that the extent of the risk you took is not very high

And the reason that stuff didn't work out is your social anxiety

So just make sure you don't take the wrong feedback from what life is telling you

Thank you for writing this. It is making me see what's at stake, which is basically this:

So the real cost is more than the money I lost. I made my girlfriend stay home for a year, we didn't do anything, we didn't buy clothes and ate the cheapest food, etc.

---

I got much more from the articles that I wrote here on Indie Hackers than from any of my projects. And I did those in a couple of hours.

I know you don't like that it only took a couple of hours. But if you got more from them, why not go further into that? 80/20 etc.

Every time that I want to promote something, my stomach hurts. If I share an article on Reddit I feel anxious for a week. When I go to a Facebook Group to suggest my apps, I feel sick. If I send a private message on Twitter or Linkedin, I can't sleep. All the time I think people are going to hate me, tell me that I am an idiot, a con maker, that my ideas are terrible, that I suck. And they did many times, and I can't handle that while making $0. So, I quit.

That sucks. I'll be on the lookout for these signals as well. If I have them, then I either try to find a growth hacker type of person, or quit as well.

I always wanted to write more. I love it. But I felt that I couldn't write if I wasn't successful. But I guess there are no rules.

Indeed, there aren't. When you write, you get to set the frame and tone of your message.