$30k & 3yrs in with $0 revenue. Do I quit?

Option 3: Get a full-time job and work in the evenings and weekends

Never allow the 'gas gauge' to hit the 'E' empty mark.

Especially with a family to support.

Even if your projections of success over the next few months are a 'sure thing' - it's more likely that they're not.

Risk-taking when you're the only one directly impacted if/when it fails is one thing - but when there are others in the picture it's a different story.

Jess - Full disclosure: I'm probably the oldest person (60 y/o) on IH. I've been in the software business since the early '80s, so my opinion is worth what you are paying for it ;-) However, I've seen a lot of folks in your position. Here are some observations:

1. Don't quit. Your idea will fail only when you give up. Iterate, pivot, or change your strategy. Having said that, the one reason to quit is if you have lost your passion. If you have lost your passion for this project, put it on the back burner and come back to it later when you have recovered from your (suspected) burnout - or find a new project you are passionate about.

2. You have selected one of the harder business models - the "chicken and egg" model. You have to create two (or three in your case) communities and then bring them together before you can monetize. Focus on building your speaker base first (I would call them SMEs - Subject Matter Experts). Once you hit some arbitrary number (we can't know that number, but let's say 100), you can start SELLING to recruiters.

3. You will have to start learning to sell. The only way you are going to make this work is to pick up the phone and start calling internal recruiters. They have dozens of channels from which to find applicants. They are super busy and under a ton of pressure. It's not an easy sell, you have to make it easy for them. UNDERSTAND THEIR PAIN. Try to think about how your system will make their job easier. I suggest that before you write another line of code on that side of your app, you get in touch with at least ten internal recruiters in your target audience and explain your solution and ask for their input. Talk to your prospects! Offer a give-to-get - e.g. six months free once you have enough SMEs and go live.

4. How to make ends meet in the meantime: You could get a full-time job and work on cete.io in your free time. Yes, you will have to sacrifice some things, but it pays dividends in the long run. I don't know your skill set but from your post, I gather that it does not include sales. My suggestion is that you push the envelope and get an entry-level remote software sales job. That means you will be an SDR (sales development rep) or an ADR (account development rep). The pay varies but you can expect ~$40k base + ~$40k in incentive pay (commission/bonuses). If you can live on $70-$80k and work remotely, you can get paid for sales training, get comfortable with selling, and set aside some time during the day to make some calls for cete.io. Of course, you will have to become a time management Ninja. But it can be done!

5. One last thing - I signed up for your site. I instantly got an email - a very nice sign-up process. However, once I signed in I could see the "Pricing | Sign in | Create account" menu in the header. So I think you should have at least "Pricing | Manage Account" persistent in the header.

I hope this gets the wheels turning. Feel free to reach out to me at slg1283 (at) gmail.com

Best - Griff

First off: I have tremendous respect for the fact you took 3 years out of your life and actually tried to build something. You are already ahead of the curve!

However: It’s definitely time to stop and write it off.

It seems like you put level 10 effort into a level 3 opportunity.

Any company or project should have paying users within the first 6 months otherwise you need to stop, write it off and try something else. People don’t need it or don’t want to pay for it.

Some feedback on Cete. It’s a low-value market - almost nobody spends money on Meetups or Events outside of catering. Nobody is getting paid - Cete doesn’t offer any economic incentive. The speaker isn’t getting paid, so doesn’t have any incentive to run their bookings through Cete. The organizer doesn’t save a ton of money, since all products in the market is cheap or free. Competition is stellar - There is a ton of competition on the market and no clear differentiation.

When you are thinking about a product or market for your next project. You should sort it into the following questions:

• Is the buyer is massive pain? They must desperately need what you are building.
• Does the buyer have purchasing power? Do they have money and can they allocate to fix this problem.
• Are they easy to target? Is it easy to find and build a list of emails or facebook group for these specific people or companies.
• Is the market growing? You don’t want to sell a product to newspapers, because every year your market shrinks.

For your next project. Spend a maximum of 3 months building a scrappy, but valuable version of your product. Spend another 3 months marketing and selling it. Did you get paying customers? Keep going. Didn’t get any customers? Abandon and try something else. You’ll eventually hit something.

I want to add option 3.

Stop building and start selling, or ar least onboarding some users.

You can focus on your regular job more and at the same time give the project more chance to fly.

What options do you have when you quit?

It's not okay for me to give an advice on this topic, with the fact that some people perform better under pressure and some don't. Going through desperate situations may force someone to go out their comfort zone and do wonders or exact opposite.

I don't get the numbers, I think pricing suppose to be set according to page views. To be able to ask for $500, I believe there has to be a huge interest in those events, event pages. I'm doing the math from regular ads from newsletter sponsors and adsense. Offer here seems to be more targeted but still...

2mo for supply side, 1mo for demand sounds so arbitrary. Even if they work out as planned, I read many startup stories and I don't recall any of them started with $2K per week (if I get it right).

There is also another options like delegating where you fall short or finding co-founders to speed up the process. So I think it's better to talk about what can be done rather than should you quit or not.

Hey Jess, five stars for perseverance, good one! You would have learnt heaps in 3-years.

If you have lost the love of building your project, definitely Option 2 - stop. But, it sounds like you're really passionate about Cete ..

Given the context, I'll vote for Option 3 - i.e. get some serious full-time/freelance income asap (for your kids!) whilst working on Cete on the side.

Some thoughts ..

For your platform, things seem to * really hinge * on your Supply side growing big and juicy (this is "inventory/stock" for your marketplace). The underlying business offer is for recruiters (exclusive?) access to groups of speakers/organisers/events.

Not sure where Cete is at (looking at a slightly sparse home page), but nobody wants to visit an empty store/shop, much less buy from it (survival bias). Getting tens / hundreds of event signups (maybe even brand ones!) will be rocket fuel. Dropping a whole bunch of social proof ( "### organisers are using Cete", "###, TedX, etc, speaking events", testimonials, etc ) on your home page could be key. Ideally, this would be industry related events attended by * professionals *, given the Demand side price point.

Without inventory (speakers/organisers/events in this case), it will be a hard sell to recruiters, really hard. No point putting the cart before the horse.

On the other hand, with a shop stocked with highly sought after inventory, you wouldn't really need to do any selling. Just need to spread the word and recruiters will come. Also, as an added bonus, the supply side stands to gain immediate value from your service, even with zero on the demand side (recruiters).

With plenty of (hints to) inventory prominently featured on your website, you can always sign up your Demand side manually. Recruiters won't mind wiring funds straight to your bank account if you have ("access" to) events/people they desperately want to get in front of - even hot-skill sectors (software engineers?), better odds. Write them a * manual * invoice! (Word document).

For now, maybe focus on get a (barely) working version of the free part out, asap, in the next week! Do things manually if required. Call people / speakers / organisers. Chase your inventory (maybe even narrow down to a niche audience in a good market or location recruiters are actively pursuing). Write down and measure your target number of new signups/events on you wall, increase this target by 10% each week. Fill up your website, even by hand!

In summary ..

When you have inventory, it'll take a while to get revenue. So .. even consider working for a company/agency where you can mingle with folks in the potential supply side and build inventory, on the side - all whilst you get paid :).

Keep scratching that itch and best of luck!

Some pessimistic feedback for the website:

• the landing page looks unfinished, especially because I can scroll down slightly
• the loading indicator in the navigation bar looks buggy
• the avatar field in the registration form is unnecessary, let people add an picture after registration under profile editing
• with every click on "sign it" the urls gets longer
• I don't like neither the logo nor the name

I checked your product. What I didn't understand where did you spend $30K? What you have already build can be built within $100-1k Max and in just a month.

Where is the money going?

I don't understand why your product looks so complicated. If you are serving event organizers, just charge money from them, why involving the recruiters?

Why use your app to find the next speaker but not use other social networks like LinkedIn, twitter? And searching in social networks is free and fast

If you make the product so complicated, you are just making the game more difficult for youself

Like many others have said, a full-time job and continuing building the project on the side is the way to go. For now, though, it's time to take a pause to stop bleeding money.

Option 3.

Get a full time job. Try to sell your Product for another couple of months. Considering you've spent 3 years building and selling, spending 1 more year may not be worthwhile.

I'll share my personal experience also.
I built (raileo.com)[raileo.com], a passionate project of mine. Worked 1 year on it, got few free users, none of them upgraded. After a year, I released v3, completely revamped everything. Got 1 paying customer . But I could not scale after that. My limited knowledge in marketing and my non-existing network was not helping at all.

So after building for 3 years, I decided to sell. That made more sense. I didn't want to scrape it off completely, at the same time, I could not stand to see it die. I had about 800 free users and 1 paid user.

I listed on Microacquire (for a minimal and reasonable price), got 20+ requests and closed a deal within weeks.

Raileo is still active and I'm happy that it is. I moved on to other projects like statsph.com and metricsbeam.com.

I went to the site while not reading your explanation , i had no understanding what this site is about , my first reflex was : i have not used meetup (the service) in years.

i think it would be good to clearly state what the service does for who on the first page

I would suggest to go for a MVC first and try to build customer on top of it to understand the market potential for your business. With that in hand, then you can add more features to your app.

Until tell have some part time job or current job with you to run your daily life.

Once the marketing is done right. You can able to see the results on your app.

Hope this helps and never ever try to quit until you do it right….🖖

I spent a good bit of time on your site.

I think you need a growth/revenue focused person to give you a few hours of consulting. Here are 2 low hanging fruit I noticed...

I'd recommend

1. Make "search" the secondary UX action. You should change the UI to be focused on showcasing who you have (think like a gallery view) along along with category / filters

2. Focus on specific categories of speakers for now where you think you have a good base

I think those two will help a lot.

I generally agree with the others saying to get a job and continue indiehacking part time as long as you’re into the project.

One thing I don’t understand is what we’re you doing the last three years that meant you only worked on this part time and weren’t earning money either? If it was something required, will that change soon? In other words, do you have the time to be able to do a FT job?

Looking at your Twitter, I’m guessing that you can earn quite a bit if you work full-time. Maybe even $100/hr+. I bet there might be a way of using some of that money to buy time for you and your wife. With your skill set, she shouldn’t have to struggle working overtime, especially with 3 small children.

That's a tough spot to be in and there is some great advice here. Additionally I might offer some other potential avenues for making it work

• Get a partner and/or investor, especially one with a marketing background
• Work part-time, especially if you can find a part-time job that might strengthen your skills in marketing this product
• Sell the product, there are lots of markets for them out there these days
• Turn the product into something non-SaaS like a newsletter

How much work is the product to maintain? TBH I kind of hit a wall with my own product but I left it running since it requires almost no maintenance. Over the years it's grown a following so if I go back to it and decide to work on it full time, I have a lot to build on. That said, there is no guarantee it will develop a userbase organically.

I've helped grow a couple of companies from $0 MRR to profitable enough to stand. My advice is that you focus on demand generation activities such as content marketing and creative brand marketing. You need a way to convince your customers and consumers that you have necessary value to offer them. That's what content marketing can help you with.
If you're interested, we can have a chat about it calendly.com/irhoseapori

You don't need to quit. You need to reset.

Get freelancing gigs.

You will have money coming in from next week and still have the flexibility to keep going.

When in doubt, err on the safe side. Family first.
Also, make sure to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. I've been there, and it ain't pretty: https://medium.com/swlh/20-months-in-2k-hours-spent-and-200k-lost-a-story-about-resilience-and-the-sunk-cost-fallacy-69fd4f61ef59

Take a break if needed, refill your gas tank, recharge and get back to it later on.

I faced the same question last year, and decided to keep going, but dedicating one less day per week, just to make sure I could keep my company afloat.

I voted stop, only due to lack of other options. I would suggest (like others have already said), instead of stopping, take a break from the building activities and start selling. I say this as a person who haven’t sold his product yet. I’ve been working on my project for a year and coincidently today is the day I am going to pause on building and focus on sales/marketing. In fact I have my first demo with the supply side tomo (yes I’m building a marketplace too). I always had a full time job and won’t even think of going partime or quit my day job till I have a bout a 100 paying customers.

Don’t give up on your dream but don’t risk it all either.

Hi Jess,

It is applaudable that you had come this far in building something off the ground. Based on your 2 listed options in your poll, I think what you are trying to seek is somewhere in between of lowering your risk in monetary and not writing off the project resulting in regret.

The reality is, it is hard to balance, there is bound to be a sacrifice somewhere. Either to compromise your time for money, or vice versa. Or when you take on both and keep working throughout your day, night and weekends, health will be the one to sacrifice.

Coming from my personal experience to be in a full time job with a project and balancing between life is a bit tough, and I am getting health feedback due to that as of late.

There are quite a handful of gems from some of the replies which you can really think about it. And even though you had described quite a bit on the context, I do not personally know you enough to comment. But here is what I will do if I were in your shoes.

1. Money matters - If the part time work is enough to sustain a living and maintenance for the upcoming year living expense? If not, money would be the primary concern when especially having a family to take care, need to start making it first, either through a Full Time job or take up more side hustle/freelance work. In the progress, may also find something that can be solved in faster time with client demands.

Alternatively you can devote time to create community growing content which you already have experiences in, and can sell as course, etc. (I am not sure for others, but I am one of whom is trying to up my engagement and community growing skills.) There is more than one way to make money besides a full time job, especially when you are already skilful and experienced in them which others might not.

2. Retrospective time - Take a step back and rethink about the whole project. Is it possible to pivot/make a small project out of it. If this is the level 3, can I build something at level 0 or level 1 to go with first?

3. Marketing time - I am not sure your level of marketing. If you are good with it, then just focus on marketing effort first before you go on to build another feature. If you need some polishing on it, then it is unavoidable to learn and apply. I am trying to build up my muscle in this as well.

4. Spare Change - If #1 is fulfilled and you have spare, you can think about either to top it up on your marketing budget, or level up marketing skills set to drive #3 further.

That would be my 2cents on how I would plan it out if I were you.

Find sales people/affiliates and give them 80% commission.