A friend and I were out of jobs and eager to test an idea we had about local real estate which had the potential to scale. I raised 25k in seed money from family.
That person was more biz/sales oriented and we hired one of our other friend who had experience building software. Both of them became lazy and uninterested after a few months and quit as soon as we ran out of money.
I worked at it for almost a year, alone with a part time admin assistant.
Managed to pay back the seed money and "live through" that year but ended up very tired and still broke.
Variant 2:
One day I get a call from a MBA in a similar industry and he was very excited about the model. I was tired, broke and felt lonely, I easily got convinced to re-launch under a new name for a broader market. (original was in french)
Created a whole new business, new name, new website, new everything. With the technical side mostly handled by me. 3 months in just as we were about to launch the new partner starts arguing all the time and suddently didn't trust me. We were not even putting our new version in front of clients yet and he was panicking.
He forced a shut down of the business. It was the second time I was building this model - was still broke and exhausted.
Variant 3:
I felt relived and thought I'd go work a day job for a little while. Then 3 days later I'm sitting with one of the client of the first business and for him it made such a difference that he trying to convince me to try again and offered 100k in investment.
Worked my ass off again for launch #3 - except this one I was aiming for the stars and had 100k in bank. Made a huge mistake in hiring technical talent, took us months to get a shitty product out. Made a huge mistake in hiring admin talent, burnt through 15k until we had to stop working with that person. And worst, 6 months in, as we're trying to hit it really hard we realize that the real estate markets we were after slowed down dramatically (40%-50% drop in sales)
So we ran a test campaign and indeed, it confirmed a huge drop.
I had to cut on every aspects of the business, let go of hires, go back to the plan and do a lot of thinking. We managed to survive a few months but it was extremely hard to get money out of clients because they knew the market was down and felt like they would waste money by investing in our platform in such a downturn.
We had to pivot our business model and our client approach multiple times in the last 3 months. Which in retrospective brought me tremendous knowledge and made us try new innovative tactics to help my clients and show them that we could be trusted.
Slowly but surely we've started to generate revenue and I'm proud to say that in the last few weeks we've actually hit our target, we're no longer digging ourselves in a hole.
I'm now still completely broke but at least I can pay our team every week and I know that it's not just money that we borrowed but money that we earned and I'm confident in our new way of doing things.
Reiteration works. It will get through anything, look at water. And so will I.