Does it make sense to start a software company: Our first-year expenses and reality check

We founded ours in 2022 with three partners. In the first 12 months, company registration, notary fees, accounting, and minimum Bağ-Kur payments alone ate up 180,000 TL. Two of us took zero salary. If you made it into year two debt-free without your bank balance dropping to zero, believe me, you're doing fine.

you're not alone, every engineer who jumps into this hits the exact same wall... like we always think 'we write great code clients will come to us', but that's not how it works. selling and pitching door-to-door is a totally different muscle. you billed your first client in month eight honestly don't beat yourself up.

Immediate tactic to implement: Put product R&D on ice and focus purely on outsourced development or maintenance work that brings in immediate cash for the next 6 months. Trying to build an in-house product without steady monthly cash flow will suffocate the business.

How did you prospect clients during those first six months? Did you do cold outreach, lean on your corporate network, or hit industry events? Were you able to reach the actual decision-makers on the SME side, or did your proposals just stall with middle management?

I will never understand why tech guys start a business by immediately jumping to form an LLC, rent a virtual office, and rush to prepay taxes to the state. Just register a sole proprietorship from home, bill your first client, get paid, and upgrade to an LLC once the business actually scales.

To sum up, technical expertise alone isn't enough to run a company; capital burns through fast without sales chops and an existing client base. Even so, breaking even in your first year is a massive milestone in entrepreneurship.

we set out with that exact same excitement, then fought with my partner and shut it down. watching your own savings drain when no invoices are going out riuns you mentally but if i ever start a second business i won't sign a single legal paper until i actually have clients lined up.

Back in corporate, I never understood what managers and sales reps even did and used to think 'we're the ones doing the real work.' Once I started my own company, I realized writing code is only 20 percent of the job. Chasing unpaid invoices, tax office paperwork requests, and endless client scope creep drain you way more than tech ever will. Don't give up though, once you survive that first year, the referrals start trickling in.

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Let me share my experience. Cutting your own salary is a temporary tactic; if it lasts more than six months, something will break.

Hope this helps.

I agree.

saved.

You're right.

I'm curious too. If you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong.

That's all, sorry if I went on too long.

We need to make a distinction here. When making decisions, write down the worst-case scenario too not just the best.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

Let's separate the concepts, they're getting mixed up. Pausing growth to breathe is also a strategy, nobody says that.

Of course, it varies if your situation is different.

There's a common mistake people make when doing this. When we decide without measuring, we always end up in the same place.

Good luck with that.

My questions are cleared up thanks. The moment you depend on a single client you no longer set the price.

Taking notes for two weeks yields better results than a six-month estimate. Good luck with that.