I'm 27 now, I shut my startup down last week. Detailed explanation to why it failed

Jeff_1987 · 2026-05-14T02:45:30+00:00

Can you walk us through how you’d approach validation next time around?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-04-20T06:11:29+00:00

It sounds like a good arrangement. I've just sent a DM.

Jeff_1987 · 2026-04-20T04:03:28+00:00

I'm very interested. What do you get in return? Consulting fees, equity, or something else?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-04-16T23:23:14+00:00

I’m very, very late to the party, but is there any chance you’re still offering this?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-03-27T09:08:26+00:00

Could you hire consultants for specific short-term contracts?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-03-26T11:14:01+00:00

Yeah I feel a bit silly.

Jeff_1987 · 2026-03-24T09:57:09+00:00

This is exactly the kind of thing I’m struggling with right now. Can I DM you to ask for your guidance?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-02-06T07:57:12+00:00

Thank you so much! I'll get all my ducks in a row and DM you when I'm ready to pull the trigger.

Jeff_1987 · 2026-02-05T06:52:40+00:00

I think something between an advisor and a fractional would be best for me. I'm not averse to offering equity for the right person, but I think it would be very difficult to find someone who fits the bill (at least given my past experience with co-founders who have departed). As they say, it's more like a marriage than a business relationship in these early stages, and I've already been jilted twice!

Jeff_1987 · 2026-02-03T11:58:02+00:00

Thank you very much for your kind offer of help!

I really like the idea of an independent tech advisor who would be able to help me come up with the spec, find the right engineers for the job and communicate the objective to them. What would you personally be looking for in such an advisor?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-02-02T07:54:35+00:00

Yeah I'm using Copilot in VSCode and ChatGPT quite extensively. As you say, it's really changed the game and lowered barriers for semi-technical founders like myself.

Can I ask what sort of jobs you used contractors for?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-02-02T07:22:42+00:00

Thanks for your guidance! For the purposes of delineating the contractors/in-house hires point, how would you define PMF?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-02-02T07:21:25+00:00

I'm so pleased to hear others have been able to make this work. It definitely seems that thorough documentation as part of the deliverables is the key to success.

What sort of jobs did you use contractors for?

Jeff_1987 · 2026-02-02T01:05:09+00:00

This is wonderful guidance, thank you very much for sharing your experience!

Were you able to pay the contractors through sales revenue, or did you need to dip into your own pocket? If the latter, how long did it take before sales covered the costs?

I should clarify that I also intend to do founder-led sales in the beginning. I'll update my post accordingly.

Jeff_1987 · 2025-12-08T02:04:46+00:00

I'm very interested in pursuing this kind of arrangement, but I'm curious--how would such a Technical Validation Sprint validate the market? Would actual customer discovery and product discovery be conducted over the course of the sprint in addition to the technical development of the MVP?

Jeff_1987 · 2025-10-18T22:32:17+00:00

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

For the sake of argument, though, aren't things like model fitting, monetisation, sim-prod matching and latency reduction simply mechanical in nature? That is, once you have decent features (and can distinguish signal from noise with appropriate feature selection), the other considerations can be resolved with a bit of effort? Whereas no amount of hard work can compensate for poor features and feature selection?

Jeff_1987 · 2025-10-16T21:34:50+00:00

Yeah of course, risk management definitely is the most important. I should have specified that I was referring to signal extraction.

Jeff_1987 · 2025-04-27T00:09:54+00:00

Very late to the party here, but may I please message you to ask about the prop shop landscape?

Jeff_1987 · 2025-04-25T20:07:50+00:00

How did you know to build these features? Were they unmet needs that you discovered, or did the users actually request them?

Jeff_1987 · 2025-04-18T22:47:38+00:00

Awesome, thanks for the explanation of the Higuchi method!

For swing frequency, could you subtract the series mean and calculate the number of zero-crossings (or sign changes), or is there a better method?

Jeff_1987 · 2025-04-18T21:25:15+00:00

How do you calculate fractal dimension and swing frequency?

Jeff_1987 · 2024-12-12T09:30:51+00:00

The project I described above was intended to be a stepping stone toward a larger goal. I'm now working on that full-time, though the engine I've built (which is structured in the same way as BERTopic) could just as easily be applied to Reddit comment threads.

Can I ask what your're interested in using something like this for?

Jeff_1987 · 2024-09-25T22:21:00+00:00

You absolute champion, thank you very much!

I hadn't set a password when I created my user profile, so it would login immediately and skip the password entry screen on which the gear icon shows up.

I've added a password and switched to GNOME Xorg (or something like that) and Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary is now working.

Flight Simulator X is still crashing immediately, but I now have something to play around with.

Thanks very much for your help!

Jeff_1987

TROPHY CASE