Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?
Hi, I had a startup fail after we (I had 1 co-founder) invested ~4 years into it. Some thoughts:<p>A startup failing is not a rational thing. At this time emotions (regret, fear, stress, depression) take over, it&#x27;s a tough time to handle. If it&#x27;s tough for you, take comfort in knowing that it&#x27;s tough for everyone. When I was going through this, I couldn&#x27;t handle the stress, so it spilled over into my personal life, and in the end I also got divorced a few months after the startup failed. Avoid that by not prolonging the process.<p>Talking to too many people isn&#x27;t that helpful. Most &quot;naive&quot; people (who haven&#x27;t done this, who don&#x27;t understand how tech companies work, etc) will just tell you to push on. They will do so simply because it&#x27;s baked into our Culture, that when somebody is in trouble you should be positive to them, tell them not to quit, the way you would fire up a runner at a Marathon race. But a startup is NOT a Marathon race, because training for and finishing a Marathon is purely up to you, but that&#x27;s simply not true for a startup. (As a Marathon runner, this was one of my misconceptions going into my startup.) Here on HN we&#x27;re okay with failure, but outside this bubble it&#x27;s not that okay. So if you talk to people (friends, relatives) you&#x27;ll get roughly the same if you told them about &quot;I&#x27;m dating a girl and it&#x27;s not working out that great&quot; or &quot;I have a new job but it&#x27;s not working out that great&quot;, most advice would be pretty useless and just along the lines of Try Harder. So you have to learn to ignore these non-expert opinions. The fact that they may be investors sucks.<p>It sounds like you really don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s going to work out. Don&#x27;t spend another 3-6 months proving to whoever&#x27;s left (clients&#x2F;investors) that it doesn&#x27;t work, just so they &quot;let you&quot; off the hook. As somebody else said, go on a vacation, and if you still want to stop it, stop it.<p>One final thing: when I was going through this, I was constantly projecting bad outcomes, which in this first world scenario is a few tough&#x2F;uncomfortable conversations&#x2F;situations with people. In the end, some of these happened, but overall it was maybe 1-2 hours worth of  conversations, which really weren&#x27;t that tough&#x2F;uncomfortable in the end. In retrospect, the fact that I stressed over it 24&#x2F;7 for months (so, 100s of hours) was really stupid and irrational, so don&#x27;t do that.<p>One final trick: imagine yourself 3 years down the line. EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT.<p>Good luck :)