From what you’ve written, I wonder if you’re approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Rather than asking "How can I make money without a network or VC backing?" maybe the more useful question is:

- Who exactly are my users? - What painful, urgent problems do they have?

If that’s unclear, it doesn’t matter how technically great your product is or whether it’s built with AI or rocket science — it likely won’t stick.

Most users don’t care how fancy your tech is; they care if it makes their life easier, saves them time, or HELP THEM MAKE MONEY. If you can't pinpoint that user pain and address it clearly, even pivoting to another domain might lead to the same frustration.

One founder I spoke with recently built a job search platform. The space is totally dominated by big names like LinkedIn and Indeed, but their insight was super niche: they focused on foreign job seekers who needed H1B sponsorship. That tight focus helped them grow fast, even without VC money or big marketing budgets. It wasn’t a flashy idea — just solving a specific, urgent pain for a specific group.

Marketing is another area that often gets overlooked by technical founders. Maybe try strategies like: content marketing, Product Hunt launches, engaging with communities, even open-sourcing parts of your stack because it helps with visibility and credibility. Open source can definitely help attract users — but it still needs a strong value prop and ideally some paid tier or enterprise offering to make it sustainable.

One more insight: some of the best early adopters for AI tools right now are… other AI teams. They understand the value and are quicker to pay for solid infrastructure or automation tools. If you’re thinking of building “software for software,” maybe that’s a niche to explore more intentionally.

You're obviously capable builders. If you're going to give it one more shot, I'd say zoom in hard on the problem and the user. Get out of “build mode” and into “discovery mode” for a bit. Try talking to 10, 20, 50 people in a space where you think you can help. It might open up clearer paths than trying to guess from the outside.

Hope this helps, and best of luck — respect for sticking it out this long.

1) Your VC is not the main issue

VC can cause a lot of harm. They often give bad advice and it's your job to decide when to ignore their advice. But if you're counting on your VC to drive your business, then I think you've gone into the relationship with the wrong assumptions. VCs provide capital. They sell cash for a stake in your company. Once they sign the cheque they've delivered 80%-90% of their value. They don't really have any significant insights into problems, simply because they're not really exposed to customers. VCs hear a lot of hypotheses from startups, but most of them are wrong/bullshit and difficult to interpret in context of what you're building. A VC's network may be useful if you already have something that works, have a sales/marketing strategy, and need warmer intros to potential customers/partners. But VCs are not there to discover problems for you ...

So I think it's important for you to readjust your expectations from VCs and investors in general. If they were good operators they'd be building their own companies ...

2) You are lost

I think it's good to have a candid conversation with your co-founder on not understanding any problems well enough to build a company. In this scenario, it's important to go into discovery mode, if you still want to build a company, and use your engineering skillsets to work on temporary measures for cashflow (like consulting, dev contracts, etc). You'll also need to manage your personal expenses to survival levels. Given your prior experiences at large tech companies, and the compensation associated with them, it'll be really hard to do mentally but not insurmountable.

3) Startups may not be your thing

I generally encourage people to try starting their own companies, but it's not for everyone. You really have to enjoy the "multi-hattedness" of being a founder and the early-stage experience. If you're not enjoying the company-building process, and would rather just build products, then you're likely better off going back to working at a more stable startup/company. You likely learned a lot of skills in trying to build a new company, and other startups will look favourably on that.

So I think you have to re-evaluate whether you'd want to keep going. The problems you're dealing with only gets worse as the startup grows. Pivoting at your current stage is the easiest it'll ever get. But the main question is whether you want to be in the game, so to speak, to begin with.