Ozymandeas
New Contributor
TL/DR: My best friend and I have been working on an internet startup seriously for 3 years. I want to start something more realistic (an e-commerce/lifestyle company/branded product, etc). Business partner/Best friend does not think its worthwhile. Wants to do startups only. But doesn't want to learn to code. Hasn't done any work in months. Has horrid levels of paralysis/analysis and hamstrings every decision we make. Never started a business on his own ever. Should I cut the business relationship and go off on my own. And is there a way I can go about it without completely blowing up our friendship?
So, here’s a little bit about me. Ever since I was younger, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When people were 10 and talking about being in the NBA or being a movie star. I wanted to own my own company. I never ever ever had the desire to work for others. I always wanted to own my own business. A good amount of people in my family own their own business. My sister is in cosmetology. My brother is in landscaping. My uncle is an independent electrician. My grandmother/grandfather ran a barbershop/salon. I wanted to do the same. When I turned 18, I started various online businesses, selling shoes and jewelry. I made a few thousand dollars but, the businesses went belly up because of mistakes I made.
So, I went to college. Decided to put those dreams on hold and focus on school.
Around junior year, roughly 5 years ago (I’ve been out of school 3 years now), I got the idea to start an internet startup. One of my best friends from back home was in college still in the same city where my college was located, so naturally, we gravitated to one another and decided to become business partners. Problem was….we couldn’t code. We were just like every other douchebag out there with cool grand ideas but, no ability to bring it to fruition. We tried to find funding. Couldn’t. We tried to bring on computer science students/programmers. Couldn’t. We tried to get into incubators. Couldn’t. After a while, we just sorta fell back to focus on school eventhough our ideas still lingered in the back of our heads. We didn’t become serious until Post-Graduation, which puts us up to Fall 2014.
So that was three years ago as its Winter 2017 now. In those last three years, I’ve taught myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I am pretty good at front-end development. My back-end skills are still rudimentary at best, knowing a bit of PHP and Python. Nonetheless, I am about 60% through with building a prototype (hacking an MVP together) for our startup idea but, I’m starting to get the nagging feeling that I should abandon our startup and go out on my own. In those three years, I started to realize that maybe shooting for an internet startup was foolish when we didn’t have the skillset. And even though I labored enough to sling together something, with the amount of time wasted, we could’ve built a smaller but, profitable business by now. Everywhere I look around on the internet, I see companies that are earning $5MM to $15MM a year (or even more) doing ideas that are less ambitious than trying to create the next Snapchat or Facebook. And it drives me crazy because I’ve had about 50 of those less ambitious ideas so far and there’s a good chance I could have been successful at one by now. Maybe not seven figures but, better than the zero we’re at now. For example, I’m looking at companies like OwlCrate, Diamond Candles, Tattly, S’well, etc. But, everytime I tried to sell my partner on the idea of downsizing and going into that direction, he wasn’t interested. Sometimes he would feign interest and revert back to the “big startup ideas” a few days later. His words paraphrased were, he didn’t see the point in building a million dollar company or a company that would only make $20 million or so a year. He wanted a billion dollar idea. In my mind, this sounded incredibly stupid because we had been tinkering on our ideas for three years now outside of college and hadn’t made a single cent. And despite my business partner pushing for us to continue focusing on the “big startup idea”, he refused to learn to program himself. In his mind, he thought that we could learn to code in 2-3 months and when he failed to learn enough in a summer, he quit and said we should just hire coders. He thought we could build a pitch deck and drum up money from investors for programmers. Didn’t work. So….after he quit seriously learning to code, I have since been building our platform while he does nothing.
I’ve written about 20,000 lines of code so far but, I kinda want to abandon the project. I’m annoyed about so many things. In my partner’s mind, starting an idea that’s not “Facebook or Instagram” is not worthy of his time eventhough he can’t code a lick. In my mind, starting a business period is what I want to do because that’s all I wanted to do since I was 14 and I would love to be running any profitable business right now. Also, my partner is scared of taking even the slightest of risks. I had to force him to apply to seed incubators. He was scared to. I had to force him to reach out to investors. He was scared to. Once, he had an argument with me because I sent an email to a potential contact without talking to him. He’s scared of anything blowing back on him and ruining his future career prospects so every business decision he makes is filtered through that lens. I think being in a partnership with someone like that slowed me down because on my own before our partnership, eventhough my first few businesses failed (shoes, jewelry), I was not afraid at all to take risks, try new things and learn/adapt quickly. And I can’t help but, wonder if I never wasted years and years with him that I might’ve built something successful on my own now. Another sore point is that my younger cousin is already pulling in $200,000+ a year in his business but, unlike me, he never decided to get a business partner. Everyone works for him. Makes me a bit frustrated because I see how easy it is for him to run when he didn’t have an anvil as a partner slowing him down.
My business partner’s career has started to take off in the past three years. Very happy for him as a friend. But as a business partner, seeing that he’s only doing about 10% of the work, it feels like I’m busting my a$$ and sacrificing my nights/weekends/livelihood to start “our business” while he focuses on his job but, expects to share 50% of the earnings should the idea ever take off. Like, we have weekly meetings where we’re supposed to discuss updates for the business and every week, I’ll have more and more code/features written for the site and he just talks about his promotion at work or “ideas” he’s thinking about.
At this point, I just want to quit, cut off our business relationship, and start my own business. Forget that I wasted years of my prime/youth and get started on building my own company. I have plenty of ideas that I know I can get started on today (and I can atleast code somewhat now). Am I crazy? Am I wrong for feeling this way?
So, here’s a little bit about me. Ever since I was younger, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When people were 10 and talking about being in the NBA or being a movie star. I wanted to own my own company. I never ever ever had the desire to work for others. I always wanted to own my own business. A good amount of people in my family own their own business. My sister is in cosmetology. My brother is in landscaping. My uncle is an independent electrician. My grandmother/grandfather ran a barbershop/salon. I wanted to do the same. When I turned 18, I started various online businesses, selling shoes and jewelry. I made a few thousand dollars but, the businesses went belly up because of mistakes I made.
So, I went to college. Decided to put those dreams on hold and focus on school.
Around junior year, roughly 5 years ago (I’ve been out of school 3 years now), I got the idea to start an internet startup. One of my best friends from back home was in college still in the same city where my college was located, so naturally, we gravitated to one another and decided to become business partners. Problem was….we couldn’t code. We were just like every other douchebag out there with cool grand ideas but, no ability to bring it to fruition. We tried to find funding. Couldn’t. We tried to bring on computer science students/programmers. Couldn’t. We tried to get into incubators. Couldn’t. After a while, we just sorta fell back to focus on school eventhough our ideas still lingered in the back of our heads. We didn’t become serious until Post-Graduation, which puts us up to Fall 2014.
So that was three years ago as its Winter 2017 now. In those last three years, I’ve taught myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I am pretty good at front-end development. My back-end skills are still rudimentary at best, knowing a bit of PHP and Python. Nonetheless, I am about 60% through with building a prototype (hacking an MVP together) for our startup idea but, I’m starting to get the nagging feeling that I should abandon our startup and go out on my own. In those three years, I started to realize that maybe shooting for an internet startup was foolish when we didn’t have the skillset. And even though I labored enough to sling together something, with the amount of time wasted, we could’ve built a smaller but, profitable business by now. Everywhere I look around on the internet, I see companies that are earning $5MM to $15MM a year (or even more) doing ideas that are less ambitious than trying to create the next Snapchat or Facebook. And it drives me crazy because I’ve had about 50 of those less ambitious ideas so far and there’s a good chance I could have been successful at one by now. Maybe not seven figures but, better than the zero we’re at now. For example, I’m looking at companies like OwlCrate, Diamond Candles, Tattly, S’well, etc. But, everytime I tried to sell my partner on the idea of downsizing and going into that direction, he wasn’t interested. Sometimes he would feign interest and revert back to the “big startup ideas” a few days later. His words paraphrased were, he didn’t see the point in building a million dollar company or a company that would only make $20 million or so a year. He wanted a billion dollar idea. In my mind, this sounded incredibly stupid because we had been tinkering on our ideas for three years now outside of college and hadn’t made a single cent. And despite my business partner pushing for us to continue focusing on the “big startup idea”, he refused to learn to program himself. In his mind, he thought that we could learn to code in 2-3 months and when he failed to learn enough in a summer, he quit and said we should just hire coders. He thought we could build a pitch deck and drum up money from investors for programmers. Didn’t work. So….after he quit seriously learning to code, I have since been building our platform while he does nothing.
I’ve written about 20,000 lines of code so far but, I kinda want to abandon the project. I’m annoyed about so many things. In my partner’s mind, starting an idea that’s not “Facebook or Instagram” is not worthy of his time eventhough he can’t code a lick. In my mind, starting a business period is what I want to do because that’s all I wanted to do since I was 14 and I would love to be running any profitable business right now. Also, my partner is scared of taking even the slightest of risks. I had to force him to apply to seed incubators. He was scared to. I had to force him to reach out to investors. He was scared to. Once, he had an argument with me because I sent an email to a potential contact without talking to him. He’s scared of anything blowing back on him and ruining his future career prospects so every business decision he makes is filtered through that lens. I think being in a partnership with someone like that slowed me down because on my own before our partnership, eventhough my first few businesses failed (shoes, jewelry), I was not afraid at all to take risks, try new things and learn/adapt quickly. And I can’t help but, wonder if I never wasted years and years with him that I might’ve built something successful on my own now. Another sore point is that my younger cousin is already pulling in $200,000+ a year in his business but, unlike me, he never decided to get a business partner. Everyone works for him. Makes me a bit frustrated because I see how easy it is for him to run when he didn’t have an anvil as a partner slowing him down.
My business partner’s career has started to take off in the past three years. Very happy for him as a friend. But as a business partner, seeing that he’s only doing about 10% of the work, it feels like I’m busting my a$$ and sacrificing my nights/weekends/livelihood to start “our business” while he focuses on his job but, expects to share 50% of the earnings should the idea ever take off. Like, we have weekly meetings where we’re supposed to discuss updates for the business and every week, I’ll have more and more code/features written for the site and he just talks about his promotion at work or “ideas” he’s thinking about.
At this point, I just want to quit, cut off our business relationship, and start my own business. Forget that I wasted years of my prime/youth and get started on building my own company. I have plenty of ideas that I know I can get started on today (and I can atleast code somewhat now). Am I crazy? Am I wrong for feeling this way?
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