Wantrepreneur who's run out of energy/ideas. What now?

Build something that there is already a market for but focus on a specific niche of customers and build it only for them. There are a lot of businesses that struggle to get software to work the way they need it to. For example, inventory tracking for flower shops.

Sell something online.

I have spent more than 20 years working on side hustles. I love tech and enjoyed building various prototypes and games. Building is easy part.

Never fully understood rest of the business, had no sales.

A friend who had done same thing, decided to stop doing that. Instead he started an e-commerce store. Focused on market research, marketing, etc. After his first store took off, he created more stores. He doesn’t care about what he sells, he just cares about revenue.

He is making enough to quit his EM job. He plans to keep adding new stores in his portfolio.

Sometimes backing off and giving yourself even more of a break may be the best way to give good ideas a chance to hit.

Also maybe go along to local inventors' clubs, uni and business seminars, and other things that might set new thoughts running...

Stay receptive to interesting things, but try less hard for a while.

Been there, feel your pain on all these points. Realizing that your awesome thing isn't landing the same way with others is humbling. First thing is don't attach yourself worth to the idea or solution. Failing is just part of the process for the vast majority of us. We're still good people who are into continual growth.

As for the next part, learning and talking to others. Go learn about things that interest you, new technologies and tools, problems people have, the competitive landscape to find gaps. I spent most of '24 in this mode and have settled on ATProtocol as the area I'm now focusing in. There are vast and open green fields and the opportunity to reshape how humans use social media and interact with each other through it.

Look at the problems that people around you are having. Women especially (most software is written by men for men).

Try to solve a small problem, rather than trying to boil the ocean, it may lead on to other things.

Buy an existing business.

If you have any cash saved up, this would be a way to go because:

- cash flow - existing customer base to talk to - product - market fit has happened (hopefully)

You'll get a crash course in everything after the 0 to 1 phase of the business.

And you'll get some energy from talking to customers and building for them.

source: I'm doing that with https://www.fundedlist.com after many years of doing what you described.

Could you explain what your motivation is? Why do you want to start a business?

I think it isn't obvious why it should be a desirable thing to do.

I am genuinely interested to know your answer - because there's so much startup culture but it isn't clear to me what the drive is...

The usual trite reasons of money or independence are not compelling enough. I think most founders know the probability is failure and $0. Having clients or VCs mean independence is not much more than a trade worker.

Nobody is going to be able to give you any good advice since you don't tell people anything about yourself. What knowledge do you have? What resources do you have? What are your goals?

How can you have a sales career behind you and not been able to make any sales on your previous projects? It's not hard to make a business with good revenue. What's hard is making a decent profit from that.

YC has listed some ideas: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Writing up the next steps for me:

- continue attending networking events

- start reading books on technical topics that I'm personally interested in

- look into e-commerce businesses

- write some blog posts about technical/business things I have strong opinions on

Appreciate all the comments!

All advice you read before didn't help you to start a profitable company. Why would it be different now?