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20 Months in, 2K Hours Spent and 200K € Lost. A Story About Resilience and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
TL;DR: It can be really hard to know if we’re just resilient or falling for the sunk cost fallacy.
I’ve been working for ~20 months on my current project, spent 2K hours on it, and “lost” 200K € by not doing something else. That project is not ready yet. Here’s the story behind it.
Update 2021–02–28: I posted a follow-up: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/21-months-in-and-80k-views-later-a01eb8a05898
Before it all
Early in 2018, after having worked for 10+ years as an employee, office politics got to me and I was tired of wasting time in meetings. I really wanted to quit, be my own boss, and have more impact on the world around me.
I was a tech lead/team manager/project manager, had a really good salary, lots of freedom, a cool team working together with me, and not that much to complain about, really. I could organize my days/weeks however I wanted, worked on interesting/challenging projects, and my team was really cool (alright, I already said that :p).
Still, I was willing to throw it all away to go and try something else, on my own terms.
First attempts
I had a colleague/friend who was also willing to create products; so we started brainstorming together. For a while, we were just trying to find the idea (well-known anti-pattern, right?). We did eventually find two ideas that we thought were worth pursuing.
One was about creating digital solutions for schools, to help them handle meal orders, payments, presences, etc. What we observed with our own children convinced us that there were very real problems to solve. There were a few competitors in Belgium, but not that many, and not present yet in our part of the country. We also had a very different angle.
The second idea was to create a digital platform for restaurants, where they could publish/customize their menus, have a back-channel towards their clients (e.g., to send them promotions), to increase fidelity, etc.
We started developing the product aimed at schools. Being two full-stack software developers, we didn’t have much trouble…
