alt Hacker NewsThis is a lesson that a ton of developers / engineers can learn, and it's hard to truly learn it via any other way but The Hard Way and I definitely sympathize with OP; making a great product isn't always the same as making a profitable product and a great business. Once you get to "selling something on the Internet", it gets a lot harder and the rubber hits the road, so to say. Thanks for the insightful write-up
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I also like to emphasis the corollary for this: You can build so much more if you remove the “be profitable” constraint. Building a profitable business reduces both the problem and the solution space by a huge margin, and if you can find a way to get rid of that, the space opens up. As an extension, taking VC money reduces the problem space even further.
Things like 'the cost of doing business' didn't make full sense to me until I was running a small one. I agree some lessons aren't easily taught unless you have skin in the game or some kind of first hand experience.
As a loose analogy paper trading can work great as practice(and if done right is supposed to help with this). Yet when u apply your system and stuff goes sideways, you're sweating and emotionally(as well as financially) impacted for real now, not just on paper. Those losses are real and paper trading would never 'hurt' like that.