How have you made money?

By providing word to latex conversion service via https://thelatexlab.com/ and also by getting paid for building custom theme for the other two businesses.

I haven't had any issues like that. Maybe your system is some kind of bad state?

Are you on the latest version?

Don't worry about title inflation, it doesn't matter. In lots of companies, everyone is called an executive.

Google killed my startup in a similar way many years ago. In my case, they turned quota on services I needed down to 0, refused to tell me why, and closed my appeal. I never figured out what went wrong.

I'll never again use a cloud service where I'm not big enough to get quality customer service, which rules out the big clouds. It's too much of a business risk.

What's your marketing look like? A bad product that gets put in front of a lot of people will gain more traction than a great product only a few people see.

A competitor with funding may simply be able to kickstart product awareness with lots of lost spend on advertising. Whereas a bootstrapped company will have a much more difficult time getting off the ground.

Presumably being able to influence their roadmap is worth it

I haven't even looked at your idea because it doesn't impact my answer. Starting something is harder than having a good product. You also need marketing, growth, etc which I have no idea if you're capable of doing.

Zooming out a bit. How do you feel about the possibility of quitting your job, spending 1-2 years working on this, failing, and looking for another job? You'd lose income but also have a very interesting life experience. I'm doing something similar and I legitimately don't mind failing because I'm glad I get to have the experience regardless of whether the startup works or not.

I have a lost wallet with about 300 Bitcoin sitting in a landfill somewhere. I tried out Bitcoin really early on and mined those over a few weeks. But they were worthless back then and I was burning electricity for "nothing" so I stopped. This was before that 10k Bitcoin pizza purchase happened. I have some regrets lol.

Don't worry, we were also giving out millions (or more!) of dogecoin as tips on Reddit. Can't really get hung up on crypto shit.

have you tried to get the city to excavate it ? lol

Why not just pass through charges for them? Let them pre-buy credits or charge them for usage. Seems like a huge hassle for users to setup.

Technology is very cool and certainly has value in improving our lives. That being said, I have realized that I'm generally happier the less time I spend looking at screens. I opt for paper maps when I can. I read physical books. I'm just bored with nothing to do when I stand in lines. I don't really want to tech-ify stuff that much anymore.

A random example. They now make bird feeders with cameras and AI detection to tell you what type of bird you're seeing. But it's so much more satisfying to sit outside watching the bird feeder and then flip through a book to identify the bird. It's slower and old fashioned but it's a calm, satisfying thing to do.