Condolences for your loss. It sounds like a difficult period - give yourself time to mourn. Try to fill the time with meaningful experiences - if you like dogs, go to a dog shelter, if you like hiking, go hiking. A lot of sun, sport and good company helps too. Avoid thinking about the future, work or money right now.
People already mentioned this, but take a base salary at least.
Consider posting your product, maybe someone would have an idea of what to do with it or a company might need exactly certain features, even if your product does not have traction at the moment.
I submitted the article to HN after reading it and I have joined the Exercism Insiders - recurring $10/month, a very fair deal. Hope that has helped a bit!
As someone already mentioned please consider adding ways for monetizing, ads + remove ads, paywall, paid exercises, etc. to stay afloat.
Also please get in touch, email in bio, I don‘t have anything concrete in mind but would like to be in touch. In another life I would gladly be teaching coding, who knows maybe it works out.
Founder life is difficult and grinding, make sure you have an outlet - sport, hobbies, family etc.
Also, hire and empower people to take off some of your work and responsibilities. For many years I didn’t have a proper vacation as I was trying to be always available and this is not the healthy way.
If you can, consider hiring a CEO/COO or get a cofounder.
There is much advice on the web that you should change jobs regularly to get salary raises fast. It is potentially a good advice if you are very good at what you do and your employer is not investing enough to reward you properly. But I’ve seen many cases where a mediocre developer finds a slightly better paying job and your 1+ year investment in training and teaching goes down the drain. Also with LLMs you usually achieve the same as 3-4 juniors.
I am very much pro-training and teaching juniors but there is (was at least) a sense of entitlement and lack of commitment that is detrimental to those efforts.
Because it's not worth the support and complaints. A business account paying $$$ is more likely to see the benefit and the money goes out from preallocated budget.
Your comment made me wonder if this is the reason a lot of software is a nigthmare. As in, workers will put up with something if they are mandated to but individuals will not.
The analogy in my head is the most excellent little bespoke bun shop I go to every week with my wife which is awesome. Compared to buns made for the masses in the supermarket.
Maybe there is a market for craft software as in craft beer :-)
Anecdotally, I've seen at the SaaS companies I've worked at that the larger customers are often a way better ratio of revenue to support time and easier to work with.
Not that smaller customers are bad, but the ROI isn't as good. I've found that they're much more relaxed and easy to work with compared to working with other startups. The other startups I've worked with on deals often have shorter timelines and the person you're talking to is either a founder or early employee and has way more stake in this transaction that a manager at a larger company does.
Try to share some information about your project and get feedback in a relevant and friendly community (like HN but there are others too). This could boost your motivation and maybe put you on the right track.
