How I lost 5 months, $5,000, and almost my confidence to people I genuinely called friends (I will not promote)
I want to share this. Not to vent. Not to name anyone. Just because I think this pattern is more common than people admit and nobody really talks about it until it's too late.
It started with a project. A real one. Something I had actually wanted to build for a while, something I cared about. And because I cared about it, I made the classic mistake of bringing in people I liked rather than people I had evidence for.
They were my friends. Or I thought they were.
We worked on the project together for a while. It didn't go anywhere. These things happen. No hard feelings, or so I thought. But instead of walking away clean, we sort of drifted into something else. A company. Not because we had a burning vision or a validated idea, but because none of us wanted to look unemployed, and I figured I could turn it into something I had always wanted to build anyway.
That reasoning, in hindsight, was where I went wrong. I was solving for optics. They were solving for something I still don't fully understand.
I was doing everything.
Built the website. Wrote the content. Went out and talked to real people. Brought in every client we ever had a conversation with. I was the one who knew who to pitch to, what to focus on, how to position what we were building.
I also figured out that our flagship technical approach was fundamentally broken before anyone else did. Not out of ego. I had just actually run the thing on real data and they hadn't.
They disappeared for entire days. Didn't follow up on the clients I brought in. Built things that had never been tested, never been deployed, validated only by asking an AI if the idea sounded plausible.
One of them told me I was thinking too small. This came from someone who had never shipped a single thing that actually worked.
I wasn't angry. I was just... tired. And disappointed in a way that's hard to describe. These were people I had genuinely vouched for.
I tried to bring in more help
At some point, I tried to bring in a few of my other friends. People I trusted, people with actual skills. I thought it would help.
They rejected every single one. Removed them from group chats without explanation. Called them names behind their backs. When my friends tried to engage, they were met with a rudeness that was genuinely shocking.
The result was predictable. My friends, reasonably, assumed I was part of it. Some of them pulled away from me. People I had brought in good faith left, thinking I had somehow endorsed the way they were treated.
That was the part that stung the most. Not the money. Not the wasted time. The fact that their behavior reflected on me to people whose opinion I actually cared about.
The money
About $5,000 of my own money went into this. Personal savings.
It went toward a gaming PC (that they went around and bought without me) that was immediately classified as company property, which was being used by them to run games rather than actually use to run ML pipelines.
Then they asked for another $2,400 for a government grant application and company registration fees. For a project that had never been properly tested, never been evaluated by anyone with domain knowledge, and was ultimately not entertained by the department to which it was submitted. Not rejected formally. Just not entertained.
I said no. And that is when the tone shifted completely.
The day I said I wanted to go a different direction
I didn't make a scene. I just said I wanted to focus somewhere else.
Within hours, I was locked out of every account I had built. The LinkedIn page. The social accounts. The project infrastructure I had designed and deployed myself.
They called me ten times in one hour. When I stopped picking up, they called my father.
I am not exaggerating. They called my dad to complain about me.
What came after
I moved my deployments. Bought back the domain for my own work. Removed their names from things I had built.
What came back was a legal document that had clearly been drafted with AI assistance, stamped with the equivalent of $1.20 to make it look official, claiming ownership over my independent work including language about "knowledge retained mentally as a result of exposure."
One of them made a fake account to leave a negative review on an old project listing of mine. The other went through and removed stars from my GitHub repositories.
I looked at all of this and felt something I did not expect. Not anger. Disappointment. A kind of quiet, heavy disappointment that this was the ceiling of who these people turned out to be.
The legal document had no standing. The fake review changed nothing. The star removal accomplished nothing. It was all just noise from people who had run out of actual moves.
A partner who does not execute will eventually try to own what you built. That is the pattern.
The questions I should have asked earlier: What has this person shipped without me? What do they do when nobody is watching? When something is unglamorous and hard do they show up?
I knew the answers. I just did not want to see them because I liked these people. Or thought I did.
Where I am now
Building something new. The architecture is cleaner. The unit economics actually work. I have benchmarks this time rather than descriptions of what a system conceptually does.
The job market is difficult. A few things are in progress. But I am not starting from zero. I am starting from a much clearer picture of what real contribution looks like versus performed contribution.
The $5,000 is gone. The five months are gone. Some friendships took damage they probably did not deserve.
The most expensive thing I lost was the time I spent second-guessing myself because people who had contributed nothing kept telling me I was not thinking big enough.
I was thinking fine. They just needed me to feel small.
If any of this sounds familiar:
Document everything now. Keep your receipts. And when someone who has never shipped anything tells you that you lack ambition, that is not feedback.
That is a person who needs you to feel less than you are so they can feel like they are building something.
Trust what you are seeing. Get out before the stamp paper arrives.
