In 2023 I quit my high paying PM job to go full time on a side hustle making $1k-$2k/month.
Had a year of cash saved. Thought 'What the hell! It'll definitely work.'
But there's no magic.
Your idea is either working or not working. Quitting your job doesn't change that.
Mine wasn't working.
The product was branded realtor GIFs for Instagram stories.
I spent entire days emailing realtors. Filming cringy videos. Burning money on ads.
But the real problem?
One time purchases. Nice to have product. No upsells.
Some months I'd hit $10k in sales. Others just a couple hundred bucks.
It was impossible to predict what I could afford the next month. It felt less like a business and more like a lottery ticket.
6 months in and running out of cash, I saw the truth.
The business model was broken.
Tried pivoting to a subscription content creation tool for the realtors. It was too little too late.
Here's what quitting actually did. Made me too scared to admit the business wasn't working.
'This HAS to work' was stuck in my head.
If I still had my job, I probably would've killed this idea faster and started something else.
Instead I burned 12 months and my savings on something that would never scale.