What job did you have while you were starting out and how old were you when you started?

Hi everyone,

I (27m) was just curious what jobs y'all did to make ends meet while you were exploring your startup. Do we have any bartenders / service industry folks in here? I've been pursuing my startup for a while and I haven't gotten true product-market fit yet. But we're getting good enough user feedback to warrant pushing a little further and working on it some more. We are in the nightlife industry.

What did you do to pay for everything when you were in the early days? How old were you? What did you do?

I'm in an awkward spot where I don't really need a lot of money to build my startup (which is awesome) but I need time to go out and talk to clients / users and market. I actually just quit my job as the General Manager of a fast food restaurant because I was working 70-80hrs (mostly nights) and just didn't have the time to spend with our users and clients who work during the same time.

Job hunting right now. I have degree in CS, lots of experience as the GM of family style and fast-food service, large scale event planning (1000+ attendees events for Fortune 500 companies) and contract development. I've been looking for contract development jobs because honestly I'm just not getting hits on any programming roles, like I'll get interviews and then the interviews get cancelled. That's actually why I took the fast-food GM job, just needed something because I don't have a ridiculous amount in savings to just not do anything and focus on the startup.

Anyways, now I'm looking around and was just wondering if anyones related to this. I'm sure a few have. Any other service industry people here? Or people who have kinda gotten stuck in the service industry? I have to find a job to pay my personal bills but I need the time to dedicate to my startup evenings / weekends. Trying to stay out of food service but its where a bulk of my experience has been in the past two years. Programming roles haven't been getting hits, and I'm only 27 and the business roles I've found just don't pay enough (my bills are $3,990/month - I don't really go out / spend money on myself. This includes my startups expenses).

I guess I'm just feeling discouraged with job prospects and looking for connection through experience.