The side hustle from hell

Having non-technical founders who failed to even outsource their project is an enormous red flag. Nobody there knew how to make the product a reality and if it is you who is doing 100% of the work, then you obviously deserve 100% of the equity. "Having an idea" is not worth equity.

If you thought the idea was great, there was an obvious golden opportunity for you, none of the people there are going to make this into a product, but you can. If the idea was bad, getting paid in equity means getting paid in something worthless.

The only situation where it is reasonable to deal with such a totally defunct organization is if they pay you a lot of money. And if there is a single missed payment you stop any work until you are paid.

Like many, I also had an experience like this in my younger days: obviously unfit product, early prototype made by bottom-of-the-barrel contractors, co-founders who can't code, no salary, no users.

I got lucky, and spent only a few months while not working that hard.

But at the same time, this quote hits home:

>I was doing a startup. I was executing, and for the first time in my professional life I wasn’t insulated from the results. I didn’t achieve my destiny of great things, but I’d built something.

Currently at a startup that did the same thing wrt having their app built overseas. Protip: don't. Endless bullshit, excruciating trying to get anything out of them. We ended up with an app just like this guy's, locked aspect ratio and all.

If I find another startup whose product is an app, and they can't find a local developer to write that app, I'm running. Why outsource your core product!?

Liked this: "Startup pitch competitions are mostly a waste of time—validation comes from talking to users and iterating, not from impressing a judge."

This article reminded me of the time a guy wanted to pitch his startup idea for me to develop. He wanted me to sign an NDA before telling me, as the idea was so great that I would obviously steal it, which I refused.

So all he would tell me is that it was “the next Twitter”, and from what I could gather, he would retain the majority of the equity and I would do all of the work, while he lobbed ideas at me from on high.

I passed on it, but only because the red flags were extremely obvious. I could certainly see a situation where I might have been sucked into something more subtly exploitative.

The first red flag is a startup that is contingent on a two sided marketplace... damn that's a tough place to be!

An additional red flag - if your company lists "being SEIS registered" as a point of traction, run a mile. Literally every newly registered UK company can get this by spending 60 minutes filling out a form that says "my company is risky, I intend to raise money from VCs".

Oof. Sorry. Missed in this story because Jacob is in Europe/UK is that this level of absolute incompetence in a launch team is, in my experience, extra common on that side of the pond.

There are of course some fantastic startups launched out of the UK and Europe. Spotify, Deepmind and Raspberry Pi come to mind. But, as a rule on the investment side, I'm always super skeptical. Inevitably cap tables are worse, investors have a very different view of their roles than they do in US or Asia, and there's so much less startup infrastructure than in SV or say Singapore or Shanghai that it's a very different world. Ironically, it's self-feeding -- investors think startups are shitty business, they charge more, high quality founders head for greener pastures -- rinse and repeat.

Rather than being a cautionary tale, I actually think this is the kind of misadventure that everybody should have. You learn so much about the real world from a failed startup where nothing is done right (at least I did). Your early 20s are the perfect time to do it with little risk. Lots of painful memories I laugh at later. Highly recommended.

This is the classic dead-end startup story from beginning to end. It checks all the boxes:

- 3 non-technical cofounders

- Flurry of activity for everything other than acquiring customers

- Attempt to outsource development followed by disappointment

- Relentless scope creep

- Zero go to market plan, just an incessant belief that more features in the app will solve all problems

There is also one less obvious point that is buried in the article:

> Simultaneously, my underpaid mid-level consultancy role passed me up for promotion again. I wanted out, double-time.

I did volunteer mentoring for a while. Few people went all-in on unpaid startup jobs as their primary role, but many were tempted to do it as side projects. They always believe it’s less risky. The risk they don’t see is that it distracts them from their main job, either slowing career growth or risking a PIP or layoff.

The common thread I kept coming back to was this: Ignore the side projects. Focus on career growth at your day job. Put your primary energy into growing your career or finding a job where you can.

Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.

Lovely article. The payoff of "I loved every minute of it" after all the agony and missed red flags really hit home.

I love this story. Why? Because it is the story of so many startups. I was so perplexed in the mid-90's when the dot com "boom" had started by people who wanted to do a "startup" but had no idea what that meant. Like the author, people with a feeling of Destiny that they would be some leader of something that everyone talked about. I had the same beliefs when I left Sun where clearly I would never be "famous" but by starting a company that became big? Sure anyone could do that. And in fact, a peer at Sun for whom I felt was not particularly qualified at anything, had gone on to a startup which had then gone public and made millions! And if he could do it, well it was guaranteed for me, right? Yeah, no.

At the other end of my career and looking back it becomes possible to see things that you missed on the journey, the role of luck, the difference between talking hard and working hard, and the critical importance of the people involved. A million monkeys with a million typewriters won't eventually create Shakespeare's works, they will waste a lot of resources and create a bunch trash. I also discovered that there are people who, when they speak, you really want to believe what they are saying. Being able to step back and say "what's the foundation here? Why should I believe this?" can be very difficult.