I don’t know how long I can go on like this …

When I was 15 I built my first website, it was terrible but it had about 80 users and it made money. Not serious money, but more money than I had ever held before. A year later, I finished school. In my country, compulsory schooling ends at 16, while my friends went off to sixth form college I started working my on website. It wasn’t even a consious decision, it just felt like the next step in my life. It completely consumed me.

At the time, I had literally no marketing skill, and the site barely grew. My design skills improved drastically and so I made the decision to shut down the website. I started working on an upgraded version and worked on this for two years but I never launched. I did eventually go back to school, the first year did not go well and I was asked to leave. I went back a year later and managed to complete my courses but did not do well enough to get into university.

I had spent most of the time at school learning about growth hacking, web development and design. Since my grades were bad and my job hunting wasn’t going well I started working on startups again. This time I was confident I had the skills to push forward, but there was just one problem. I’m so slow, both physically and mentally. I can’t build an app in a weekend and it takes me a long time to learn. Every day I wake up, work on putting all of the pieces to what feels like this startup puzzle and still I have nothing. Nothing I can launch or show off my skills.

I come from a working class family. I’m 21 now and my parents are getting older. I watch them everyday struggle to get by, my father has a physically demanding job and I’m not sure how long he can keep going on like this. None of my family did well in education and I was the only one that gravitated towards books and knowledge. My family has a very working class attitude so they never expect me to be successful in the way I want to be. They don’t believe there is much opportunity out there for me, so they have accepted there is not much I can do, so they let me stay in my bedroom all day, every day hoping I strike it rich.

I have literally no friends, I feel completely cut off from the outside world. I haven’t been outside in months. I’ve been trying to become more active on social media so I feel like I’m not alone, but I find it hard to put myself out there.

I don’t know how long I can go on like this, I’m starting think the only way out of this mess I’ve got myself into is suicide. Business has totally consumed me. It’s the first thing I wake up thinking about and the last thing I think about before I sleep.

The typical startup story goes like this: find some friends, talk to customers, build an app together, get funding and profit. For me it’s more like this disease I have caught, the ability to dream big and the ability to execute so little and it never goes away, not for one moment. It’s the only thing keeping me alive and in the end it will probably cause my death.