yikyuk

Anyone else in this situation, and how'd you get out of it? My gf was previously a successful PM at several big SF companies. She joined a startup for great pay but they went bust after about year. I had hoped she'd go back to a more stable company again but she is now living her dream of founding a tech company.

Her and her also non-technical cofounder tried building their site through webflow, but couldn't get any real functionality working. They asked me to "just hook up a booking calendar". I made my first mistake here by dumping webflow and rebuilding them an mvp from scratch in React, and spending all my spare time for the next 3 months building out stripe/sendgrid/twilio integrations, admin dashboards, and redoing the landing page 3 times. All this time I was working (for free) under the assumption that either: a) my gf would get tired of not having income and get a real job, or b) they'd do some kind of soft launch, get a few customers, find some funding, and hire their own developer.

But neither has happened so a month ago I quit. No matter what I added they wouldn't ship anything, they just keep asking for "one more change". Since quitting I've been much happier to have my free time back, but the poor bastard they found to replace me is a python dev and gave up on doing react so now they've come back asking for just 1 more set of updates so they can finally launch, get investors, and have him rewrite the whole thing in Python.

The thing is, they aren't serious people. They're freaking out over the landing page background color, but neither of them have ever logged into the stripe dashboard to see what the transaction flow and checkout process will look like. And I know for a fact that "one more thing" just leads to "one more thing".

So my situation now is that my girlfriend is/was great, we're actually engaged, and besides these last few months she's been wonderful. But this whole process makes me resent her lack of respect for my time (I have an actual job). It's also made me seriously question her judgement for leaving $200k+ salaries on the table so that her and her cofounder can rub their last two brain cells together trying to get this thing off the ground. Unfortunately for me, she's so successful that she has the savings to pay her bills, but she doesn't have the common sense to see that this is making me hate her. (yes, I communicated a kinder version of this to her when I quit the first time).