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Ask HN: Should I keep building my current business or seek new ideas?

4 pointsby valachioabout 5 years ago
Some background info about me. I&#x27;m 22 years old, college dropout, based in Toronto. Over the past 2 years I built a solid Internet business.<p>I will call my current business &quot;B&quot;.<p>B is currently making $500k &#x2F; year profit. If I keep building it full time, it will make several millions a year. However, B is not a very impactful business, nor will it ever scale into a billion dollar company. It&#x27;s a great lifestyle business, not much more.<p>As I built B, my ambitions broadened. When I think of what I really want to do with my life, I realized my dream is to build the next great company (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google). I also realized I don&#x27;t even care if I succeed or not - as long as I am chasing the dream, I believe my life will be fulfilled.<p>As a result, I stopped working full time on B in April 2019, I explored a bunch of new projects, ranging from other Internet projects, a video game, to a chair (yes, designing a chair).<p>I got deep into some of these ideas. The video game for example, I spent 4 months full time on it (Nov 2019 - April 2020). For awhile, I thought I was going to fully commit to building video games for many years to come. Then eventually the idea fizzled out after I thought more about it. I realized a video game company wasn&#x27;t the right path to my ultimate goal, so as of now, it&#x27;s been a month since I touched the game and pretty much abandoned the project.<p>I&#x27;m currently in &quot;The Search&quot; phase once again. And it feels really bad. Life feels directionless when there is no vision. I wake up each morning feeling lethargic, instead of energetic and excited to work on a project.<p>I&#x27;m scared of getting trapped into a cycle of working on new projects that go nowhere.<p>My question boils down to this - Should I keep building B full time and hope to indirectly discover a new idea along the way, or should I directly focus on exploring new fields, new opportunities and new ideas?<p>tl;dr Got a solid business going but I dream of building a much greater business. Not sure if I should spend my time focusing on current business or looking for new ideas.

1 comment

pettycashstash2about 5 years ago
Don’t abandon cash cow. Keep operating if you can. Diversify into other investments that will allow you to continue exploring new ideas. What did Edison say - I dint fail I only discovered 1000 ways that don’t work. Something like that but you get the point