Raising money fucked me up

Summary

About four months ago I quit my job at Doublepoint and decided to start my own thing. I'd been working on a little project with Pedrique (who would become my co-founder) for a bit over half-a-year and decided I had enough signal to determine he was someone I wanted to start a business with. I was excited about the idea we were working on at the time, but being truly honest about my motivations, I mostly wanted to run my own thing. In a dream world I'd have had the "idea of my life" while working at PostHog or Doublepoint and have gone on to build that with maximum conviction but this wasn't the case, so I got tired of waiting for a spark and decided to go out and make it happen, with the idea we were working on being our best bet at the time. Since I'd just quit my job, I had my finances well in order. Thus, my ideal scenario would have been to work on the idea we had the MVP for, try to get it off the ground, and if that didn't work, try something else, then something else, until something did indeed get off the ground, and only at that point we would consider whether or not to raise VC funding, depending on whether it made sense or not. My ideal scenario wasn't going to work for Pedrique, though. He had told me for a while that the money he had saved up for trying to build his own thing was running out and that soon he'd need to start freelancing or something to make some income in order to sustain the search for a little longer. Prior to us working together, he had a bit of success with his MicroSaaS products but only just enough to increase his personal runway, which was now reasonably short. We had spoken about this before, but with me now being 110% in, we had to do something about it. I had just come in full-time so we weren't about to go back to a dynamic where one person was full-time and the other part-time because they needed to make ends meet. The decision then became clear: we're gonna raise. At that point, it was an easy decision to make. Again, we hav...