Is entrepreneurship worth the pain?

I think there is a misconception about entrepreneurship, a lot of people thinks that includes pain, asking your mother for money, living in a friend's flat, getting fat, not doing exercise, working 12 hours a day, etc, and finally becoming a hero.

This is very common for accelerated companies but very uncommon for indie hackers.

I work part-time, do exercise every day, never left my high paying job (remote), spend the weekends doing the things I love with my family, and my startup is growing 300% in revenue and users every month, the experience is not painful at all.

I don't plan to be famous, even my Linkedin/Twitter/etc doesn't say anything about my startup.

I have loneliness days, some anxiety and stress, but it's all in your head, you have to be comfortable, do exercise, eat good, earn a lot of money in your daily job and also start a profitable company.

There is an interesting video about this, from YCombinator (Startup School), talking about Sleep, Food, Excercise, Mind, Leadership:
https://www.startupschool.org/videos/53

For me it has always been employment that I struggled with, I never found somewhere that I enjoyed or fit with, and that caused lots of stress/pain.

I think everything comes with pain and for me I'd rather have pain trying to do something I believed in than have pain doing something that didn't really matter.

But it's also very possible to find companies to work for that align with what you want to do too, that's essentially me and my work at IH right now, I'm very happy supporting IH rather than focusing on a new business.

There are ways to reduce the pain or even eliminate it completely. Some of these might be too late for your current venture, but if you start something new, consider the following:

• Take care of your health. Sleep, exercise, stay in touch with your friends and family, etc. There's no legitimate reason to cut any of that out.
• Keep your expectations low. Start small. Reduce the scope of what you're working on. A lot of stress is caused by simply trying to do too much. Imagine you had 10% of the time you have to build your business. What would you cut? Great, cut that.
• Don't quit your day job. From someone who's been there, it can be absurdly stressful to watch your bank account decline month after month. But doing that is totally optional. Going into debt is certainly optional.
• Work with a co-founder or two, ideally people you really like. That helps with a lot of the loneliness and the stress caused by massive personal responsibility.
• Talk to other founders. Share your highs and lows on Indie Hackers, for example. It helps to realize you aren't alone.

Is it worth it? That's up to you. But for me, the answer is yes, even during the 7 years I kept starting things that didn't do well.

Yes it totally is worth it!

I think both your upsides & downsides come from a biased perspective. I didn't start a company to become famous (I did do it for money & independence, though!)

Your downsides seem to be more in line with the problems I had way back when I was freelancing. But freelancing is entirely different than building a company.

I've been a cofounder for close to 3 years now, and I've got less anxiety, stress, and loneliness than I ever did before.

I think you can start a company without caring about the fame and glory, just focus on making a nice profitable solid and predictable company, and avoid all of the needless stress. :)

Depends on who you are. Does my cat have a better life than me?

For me it was "- loneliness, ultra lows, anxiety, stress, health problems " going to work. Meetings, Long bus/train ride, Waiting for bus/train while hungry, not being able to go to gym as often, meeting people from another department who either had no interest in your project (and vice versa), stupid all hands on deck meetings because "the vendor" screwed up, listening to stupid motivational speech middle of a debugging session, working with programmer who kept saying the last time they did any programming was 20 years ago.. and on and on and on.. only upside was the time actually spent developing and the paycheck.

This is a question everyone has to answer individually. If you think there is more pain than gain, then I don't think you should force yourself to do it.

Money might be good, but most of the people don't earn more than they would earn if they were employed. And is fame really a good way to do anything?