Someday I’ll tell you the story of everything I did to keep my company up and running, to give it a chance at being the company I believed in my heart it could be, to give it a chance to do the good it was intended to do.
Someday I’ll tell you about how I, an out-of-shape 50+ year old single woman, spent nearly a year living in our warehouse – not a cool, Elon Musk warehouse, but a large, cold, open warehouse. How I showered with a plastic dog-washing hose over a drain with lukewarm (at best) water. How I hid when I saw a police car cruise past our office window at night.
Before that, how I chose to let my beloved house go so I could continue to fight… how I lived in a friend’s garage for more than a year, how we tried to romanticize it by calling it the Cottage… How some nights I sat in the corner of my office and recreated Goldie Hawn’s chainsaw scene in Overboard.
How I cried when I did the phone interview for food stamps. How humiliated I felt when I begged a friend for money to feed my dog.
And how I felt like a con when I couldn’t deliver for the people who believed in me.
How fear and dread and disappointment in myself sucked me under. How I felt relief and a twisted excitement when a stomach bug gave me hope I might have something lethal so people wouldn’t hate me for quitting. How love of that dog – a special needs dog no one would take if something happened to me – kept me going through it all, clawing for one more inch of survival.
Someday I’ll tell you all that. For now, I’m trying again. Focusing on living, and remembering that despite that failure, I have gifts I can give to the world, more – much more – than when I started.
Hey. Triumph and disaster are two impostors that look a lot like each other. Whatever “failure” you might have gone through, your passion is greater and will keep you going. Please do tell the story. I for one really need to hear it.
I respect your grit, but your story sounds like a classic case of falling in love with the startup as a narrative of personal growth and perseverance. As opposed to taking a startup seriously as a business.
You put yourself in a situation where you suffer only because that way your eventual success would become that much sweeter. You probably fantasized about the stories you were going to tell others about the hardship you faced on the road to success. How you succeeded despite being out of shape, having no money, no shower or any other basic luxury. People would oohh and ahhh and tell you they couldn’t possibly do what you did. And you would shower in their admiration.
That’s not gonna happen.
After the rawness of this failure has worn off I hope you will seriously reflect on the mistakes you made, so that you may learn from them. Otherwise your next venture will fail in a similar manner.