We're not screwed per se, just treading water just below break even. We still have a significant paying user-base but our churn is higher than our new user acquisition rate.
We keep trying to fix that but over the past year or two we've had little success.
I like the team and we're working on another project that could potentially re-ignite the company so I haven't given up all hope yet.
I committed a block of money back into the company when I decided to hire a team. We haven't burned through it yet (that's the 6-12 months runway that's left at this point) but once it's up I can't justify putting in any more and wouldn't feel comfortable asking an investor to put money into something that I wouldn't fund myself.
It took me a long time to get over the fear of others relying on me to support their family/lifestyle. I think deep down inside I felt like my business was a fad and since I didn't have a clear vision of where it would be in 3-5 years I didn't feel comfortable having others reliant on it for their livelihood.
I started it when I was 19 and since it wasn't on purpose and I couldn't envision myself working on it in 5 years I didn't feel like I could ask that of someone else. I wasn't passionate about the project, it was just the first thing I'd done that had gotten so much traction.
I liked the freedom of being able to travel the world without feeling beholden to others back at home. Since I was only accountable to myself I could work 10 hours a week from anywhere on the globe and there was nobody to tell me to get back to work.
At one point I remember saying "I don't want this to be what I'm remembered for." I still feel that way; I want to solve a big problem with my next company someday (bud I didn't and still don't don't know what that will be yet). But that shouldn't have precluded me from going big on this project. I was rushing things, trivializing what I was currently doing, in search of my next big thing.
I eventually did invest a significant portion back into the company to hire a couple developers, designers, etc. But I should have done this much, much sooner.
I too am running a startup with a downward trajectory. We have more like 6-12 months of runway left but things aren't looking good.
Our path tracks your alternate reality.
I started a project several years ago that took off. It wasn't meant to be a business at the beginning but once it started getting traction I slowly devoted more and more time to it.
It was "profitable" from the first day; the Adsense ads more than made up for the costs of hosting it and the initial design work. I programmed it myself so there was no development cost.
From the beginning it snowballed. It had a thousand users the first week, ten thousand the first month, and 50k users 3 months in. It was at that point that my amateur coding got in the way and the server crashed and burned.
By this time the business was making about $300/day in advertising. The costs were basically zero (a single virtual server + me part-time while I was still in school).
In retrospect this is the point I wish I had dropped out of school, raised some funding, and started building a development team. But I didn't; I read up all I could on scaling and hacked together some more code. That helped the project grow to a million users by the end of the first year.
By this time I had added in for-pay features to the free product to augment advertising and was making well over $1000 per day. I started plugging some of this into advertising to accelerate the growth but most of it was being distributed to me as the only shareholder. Things were going peachy until the servers crashed again.
Again, I read up on scaling, bought a couple hours of consulting time, and patched things up. Within a few months the advertising spend had paid off and at the peak the project was raking in $20,000/day (most funneling straight back to me since at this point it was just me [still part-time] and a couple of part-time customer service reps). This was where the project hit its peak of about 1 million monthly actives.
And, of course, the servers tanked again. This time by the time I was able to get things stable again the market was not as good and we weren't ever able to get back our exponential growth.
I wish I had at the very least "gone for it" and plugged the profits back into the business to hire people to help me. It was about this time that my competitors were discovering the same things I had been experiencing (easy viral growth, cheap user acquisition) and raised about 100 million in VC funding to buy up and saturate the market.
Long story short, we stagnated and slowly declined (no longer able to compete effectively with our newly extremely well-funded competition). Our competitor who raised 100MM in VC is now a public company with several billion in market cap, and there are several others who took a similar path that are worth in the range of a billion as well.
By the time I decided to hire and build a team it was too late to make much of a difference.
I made a couple million bucks and had a fun ride but I'm still kicking myself for not seizing the opportunity to go all-in while the window was open.
We're now playing catch-up but the market is more fully developed now and it's harder for underdog players to get an upper hand.