← The graveyard

The heaviest tolls

Ranked by hours, not money — so a solo founder’s six months of evenings can outweigh a funded team’s sprint. Which is the honest comparison.

People who register their own death say how hard they worked. For the entries gathered from public threads we use the intensity the author themselves described — “four years trying to get my startup to revenue” is counted as full time, “a year of side-project evenings” is not — and where they described none, nothing is counted at all, which is why most of the wall is not on this list. Every row links to what its author actually wrote.

Nobody has told us what any of this cost in money. A figure marked ≈ is our estimate and not theirs: the hours above, priced at contract rates for the year the work happened. Where a story gave no duration to work from, there is no figure at all rather than a made-up one — which is most of them.

323 full-time weeks buried across 7 of 23 features weighed, and $2,000 on top.

  1. 14 years on a startup with no buyers4 years trying to get a startup to revenue, building for a niche audience that turned out not to want it. Burned out badly enough to stop for the sake of their own mental health, and took a normal job 3 years ago. Says life got dramatically better afterwards: new sports, a house, and no constant sense of having to work more and spend less. The technology was impressive enough that the job search took a couple of months and paid better than anything before it.no demand · 1 × 208 weeks · chrisaycock · NO. 0004208weeks≈ $1,000,000
  2. 218 months building for users they never metAbout 18 months on a product that was impressive in a lot of ways and ended up with almost no users. The mistake, on reflection, was not understanding the target users well enough — and the conclusion drawn from it was that the work needed was closer to journalism or anthropology than to software: understanding a particular group of people and their problems before building anything for them.no traction · 2 × 78 weeks · onagengast · NO. 002359weeks≈ $350,000
  3. 3A cap table calculator, 1 year of eveningsA year of side-project evenings on a vesting and cap-table calculator. It never got anywhere on adoption and was abandoned. It surfaced again years later in the comments under somebody else's launch of the same idea — wishing them well, saying the world really needs this, and pointing out that their vesting calculator was giving 50% at the one-year cliff instead of 25%.no traction · 1 × 52 weeks · calcsam · NO. 0020780hours≈ $100,000
  4. 42 years on a SaaS with zero salesA year building a SaaS, then a second year looking for customers for it. Not one sale in either.no demand · 1 × 52 weeks · jcadam · NO. 0021780hours≈ $100,000
  5. 5A hosted SaaS built on the strength of 1 pollPut a poll on an existing site. Some people said yes, they would like a hosted version of the tool. 6 months of building followed, without speaking to anyone further. 6 months after launch it was cobwebs, and by then it was clear that nobody was actually willing to pay for it.no demand · 1 × 26 weeks · quaffapint · NO. 0022390hours≈ $47,000
  6. 6Subscription billing for a $10 upgradeA one-time $10 account upgrade sold steadily and had done for a long time, so the company decided to try the same thing as a subscription. A month of engineering to get the subscription code ready, then a deploy to a percentage of users, and the answer came back immediately: nobody wanted it.no demand · 1 × 4 weeks · jmathes · NO. 0013160hours≈ $18,000
  7. 7A personalized dashboardThe customer took another client.replaced · 1 × 6 weeks · antionmil · NO. 0061150hours$2,000

Not weighed

16 more, mostly gathered from public threads where the person never said how long it took. They are not ranked, because a figure invented to fill a table is worth nothing.