Does it make sense that someone I met 10 years ago, was using my open source project as part of their startup and was having conversations with me every couple of months throughout the whole 10 years (they even let me log into their production system with 30K concurrent users to help fix a bug) and then went on to make millions won't even support my project with a $2000 a year contract?
Probably something weird going on. This is not just about one example, it's every now-successful founder I've ever met. Nobody talks to me and I did nothing wrong except build some products that work really well.
When I study people who succeeded, the main difference I can see is that they got very lucky because they knew people who helped them get attention.
Most successful people seem to have this rosy perception of how things work; unfortunately, I cannot go back to that point. Once you've seen nasty stuff, you cannot un-see.
I've been trying to raise $20K for the last 10 years and never managed though one time someone took pity on me and gave me $20K in cryptocurrency as a gift. I managed to stake that on a crypto project in such a way that it was soon generating me around $35K to $70K per year and I used the money to fund myself to work on a Decentralized Exchange for 3 full years which is now operational.
Still nobody will invest in me.