in 2024, I spent a fairly significant amount of time building startups and, in general, grinding myself ot the bone trying to “make it” financially.
I built a cyber security startup that got 1 user and lost a fair bit of money, I worked 60-80h weeks for 6 months on a contract that ghosted me out of $12,000 and a lot more in revenue sharing and I started an image generation startup that, frankly, I did not care about at all and “failed” before launch (I killed it).
throughout these really difficult weeks, I found myself hating code. I’ve been coding since around 2013, starting with Python and Java in high school and college and moving on to JavaScript, Rust, Golang, and C/C++. I’d built malware, video games, a billion APIs, web scrapers, reverse engineering tools, frontends, backends and everything in between. I loved to code… until I didn’t.
when that client ghosted me (it went really badly…) I took probably 2-3 months off of writing code. not entirely, I still banged stuff out here and there, but for the most part I killed everything. my security startup was failing, I’d killed my image generation startup, and I’d worked myself to the bone, missing out time with my wife and kids, skipping family functions, working on the beach when I could have been fishing, all for a contract that I’d never see a dime for.
mentally, I was taking out my frustration about my business failures on the code. my businesses didn’t fail because my code was bad, they failed because I was (am still) bad at business. but if you’ve ever been burned out, you know that your feelings don’t care about the facts. you just feel awful.
the cleansing fire
between november of 2024 and february of 2025, I killed all of my businesses. I stopped looking for freelance clients, I killed my domains, I killed my AWS infrastructure, I burned it all in a cleansing fire. I made a resolution to myself: I was not going to start another business until I had built something I loved.
I had realized that one of the reasons behind both the burnout and, I think, my business failures is that I was working on things I did not at all care about. the freelance client I had that burned me had me writing thousands of lines of code to handle parsing PDFs for real estate transactions and loan files. technically difficult? sure, but I did not at all care about the real estate market (in fact, I actively hate a lot of it) and I definitely didn’t care to build something that was mainly serving a bunch of banks.
I didn’t care about creating images of influencers in front of cars. not even a little! technically difficult? a little, but that wasn’t enough to make it fulfilling to spend hours and hours trying to get image-gen API’s to play nice with my front end. it was a neat side project but as a business I did not care about it at all.
this had spread to a lot of my YouTube content. I was creating stuff on YouTube for the sake of having videos that did well. ironically, they didn’t even do well.
so, I started by burning it all down and taking some time off. the best part of having 0 customers and 0 MRR is that nobody even noticed.
rising from the ashes
on December 31, 2024, I celebrated 1 year of sobriety. in celebration that day, I pledged that I would abstain from building startups that I did not care about, for at least a year.
since then, I’ve started half a dozen projects. game development, malware development, web development, systems development and data visualization. all stuff that I am interested in. most of those won’t ever be published anywhere. I also have probably a dozen more projects I’m going to start and maybe not finish this year. I’ve got Lowki that I have big plans for, and my personal site and blog that I’ve built and published, but those are projects I care about and, frankly, that I may never make money from, and I really enjoyed building them.
I am building them for me.
this year is less about building upward and more about building a foundation, a foundation of skills, a foundation of knowing what it is I want to do, and a foundation of learning how to say no to the things I hate doing, even if it means leaving money on the table.
maybe next year I’ll launch more startups. this year, I may not even get Lowki to the point of monetization. and that’s okay. frankly, my tax lady will be happy with me.
what I do know is that I am now happier with coding than I’ve ever been. I’m building projects instead of startups. I’m learning about the secrets of Golang, Rust and JavaScript instead of just sprinting to monetization. I’m vibe coding and learning about how AI works, and I’m turning AI off and leaning heavily on my own ability to debug.
I’m focusing on learning over earning. and it’s way more fun.
my mental health is better now than it’s ever been. I’m sleeping more. every time I open up my codebase (neovim btw) I look forward to writing more code. every time I start coding I look forward to what is being built. I’ve rediscovered my love for software development, and honestly I’m writing more code now than I did before.
if you’re suffering from burnout like me, ask yourself if it’s self-imposed. if it’s the job you use to put food on your table, that sucks, but you’ve gotta keep yourself and your family fed. but if you’re constantly hustling trying to build the next big thing in your nights and weekends, ask yourself if it wouldn’t be better to take a short step back, explore, and find your love for research and development before getting back to the grind.