Hello everyone!

Earlier this year in May, I graduated from a full-stack web dev bootcamp in Canada (one of the better, well-known ones). Unfortunately, as many of you probably already know, the job market sucked at the time and basically none of my cohort was getting hired (even now, probably only a bit less than half are hired). I was honestly not quite sure what path I should have taken given these circumstances. A few weeks after graduating, an opportunity came up to co-found a startup. A VP of a medium sized startup in Canada contacted me about my final project which he thought was interesting (it had to do with AI-assisted travel itinerary generation). He pitched his idea for another AI startup to me and I thought it was really interesting and jumped right away on the idea. Another friend from university, also a full-stack dev with 5 years of experience, who was basically on his way out of his company (the company culture started sucking a lot), said that he’d be interested in working on this startup as well and the three of us ended co-founding that startup soon after in around June.

Honestly, I’m having the time of my life working and developing for the startup. I’m learning so much about the challenges of running a startup, I’m getting hands-on experience with everything I learned in bootcamp (databases, front-end development), and even more (AWS, Wordpress, QuickBooks, etc.) My two fellow co-founders, even the one I didn’t know from before, are both great to work with and I’ve developed a great personal and professional relationship with both of them.

Now, here’s my problem. I haven’t made any money since. I did have to contribute some money to the company (only around $1000 CDN), and our overhead isn’t big at all, so I haven’t had to contribute more. I honestly feel really embarrassed about my situation and try not to talk too much with friends and family about the fact that I don’t actually make any money with what I’m doing on the daily. Furthermore, it’s uncertain when exactly my startup will start making money. We haven’t received any funding and are still in the process of making MVP (although close to finishing), but we have signed a B2B pilot project to build a widget that uses our back end for a company here in Canada. It doesn’t seem like that would be enough for any of us to make salary, just on that deal alone.

What should I do? I’m really at a loss and am not sure what to do. Financially, I’m alright - I kind of expected that I’d be in this situation when I first started bootcamp so I made sure to save up a lot beforehand. Should I start looking for an “actual” job? Would it perhaps be good if I finished MVP then left to make real money elsewhere? Should I keep the startup and work on it simultaneously with a job that actually earns me income (for my current startup, I am currently working at least 40 hrs a week on it).

Any advice or comments would be appreciated!