Title: Hey everyone! This is kinda my first post so hi. Not sure if HN is the correct place to ask this.
This is a bit personal, but throughout my life, I&#x27;ve been helping companies, big and small, my friend&#x27;s startups, other people, even random people on algorithms, programming, maths etc.<p>I&#x27;m happy they come and ask me for help, but it feels like I&#x27;m a doormat. I&#x27;m now trying to run a startup, so it gets worse.<p>I don&#x27;t mind helping my close friends though. I feel used when companies or people use my work and profit from it. The worse is when they advertise that they did it. I get 0 pay, and ironically I sometimes have to travel to THEM on my own expense? Yikes I feel so dumb.<p>My family have told me I&#x27;m stupid, so I&#x27;m trying to set boundaries. Some kind fellow startup founders also told me to be more aggressive.<p>The worst is when people can see me contribute to my hobby projects (open source), or I teach people for free, but that&#x27;s because I like doing these things. The people then make me feel bad by constantly asking for help, especially for profit generation.<p>I&#x27;m still in my twenties, but I feel like this can&#x27;t go on forever. Does anyone have any suggestions what I should do?<p>Like I don&#x27;t wanna reject them, but if I can somewhow ask them to pay that would be great.
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