Products & Failure, but now what?

Hi all,

I wanted to post a little story about myself, what I have failed along the way but also what I learned as a result.

Ever since my teenage years, I'm in my 30's now, actually, today is my birthday, I have always interested in an independent lifestyle. Independent meaning controlling my time. But unfortunately, like many others, the 9-5 and the money that is a result of it have taken control of my time instead. Things got incredibly harder to separate once I had children. Now, I'm responsible for my kids and really want to provide them with everything that I can. Opportunities, finance, a loving family, and more. I want to make their lives the best I can. As you can see, that really ties you more into the 9-5 than what I expected. I just cannot risk losing the paycheck it would be detrimental to all of us.

Although my passion is business, I have a curious mind and have dabbled into various side projects that rained to be unsuccessful. Initially, I tried Amazon FBA or private label. I stayed up late many nights since the timezones are so different. But I was determined. I spoke to various suppliers chose a product, had samples shipped to me, changed a few things, and was overall happy with the product. So fast-forwarding a little, I started with an order of $500 worth of product that was shipped to various Amazon warehouses. The issue became evident after a few orders later. I was losing money. You see in order to get the cheaper price per unit the more you had to order. However, Amazon rewards the top sellers, so coming into the game late I had to rely on PPC. Basically, I am paying PPC, Amazon seller fees, paying influences to try and get a steady flow of purchases. However, the margins of the product were just not high enough to warrant the expenses. This was a big mistake I was not aware of prior to starting. Not to mention, the countless (fake) reviews competitors already have which gives them a significant leg up. Would you buy from a new seller that has 5 stars with only 3 purchases, or a seller that has 1,000 reviews avg 4.5 stars? The system helps the veteran accounts. Anyway, after all that I hung up the FBA side project.

The failure was a downer but at least I understood how Amazon FBA works, and If I wanted to make another attempt, later on, I could. But, I tried other avenues, drop shipping, creating a SaaS (while learning to code, which by the way isn't as easy as some make it seem), affiliate marketing, creating productized items like Gumroad page reviews, or my newest attempt a Notion Financial Tracker for startups. But the same is true, there's never any momentum, never any traction to keep the energy and excitement up.

I wrote this post to not only rant but to genuinely ask, what's next? It's disheartening when you try but can't get traction. What would you do? How would you approach this? Would you do things differently? If so what and why?