?My startup collapsed abroad, visa expires in 11 days, I have $0 — what do I actually do today?

From a recurring observation across startup post-mortems and Indie Hackers crisis threads: Get a job anywhere to meet your basic survival needs at the moment. Forget the startup. This is the consistent advice survivors give. Pattern: the OP is mixing two clocks — visa (11 days, hard) and platform (already collapsed, soft). Treating them as one decision creates paralysis. The order of operations today: (1) survival money — gig work, freelance dev, paid trial — anything that produces $200-500 cash this week so you eat; (2) visa clock — talk to an immigration lawyer about emergency extension options TODAY (some countries have humanitarian / financial-hardship pathways that aren’t obvious); (3) only after 1 + 2 are stabilized, look at the platform. Marketplace is dead, but the user list (200) and the $20K transaction history are recoverable assets — see next try.

From CB Insights’ database of 483 startup failure post-mortems and the Indie Hackers selling dead startups thread: failed marketplaces have three classes of salvage value — (a) the user list / contact database (200 verified marketplace participants is a real asset for a competitor or acquirer), (b) the domain + brand recognition (people searched for and signed up to it), (c) the codebase / technical IP. From the Startups.com piece: The Hidden Treasure of Failed Startups — there’s often a buyer who wants the data, the name, or the position even when the operation has stopped. Pattern: this isn’t a path to immediate cash (sales take weeks to months), so it doesn’t solve the 11-day visa clock — but listing on Acquire.com / MicroAcquire and reaching out to direct competitors before going home converts a dead asset into a 3-6 month financial cushion that changes what you can do from your home country. The deadline isn’t before visa expires; it’s before the user list goes cold and the domain lapses.

From Try Alma’s analysis of visa options for marketplace founders: 60% of America’s top AI companies on the Forbes AI 2025 list have at least one immigrant founder, yet the US still lacks a dedicated startup visa. For marketplace founders whose equity is spread across multiple funding rounds, the right visa choice can mean the difference between building in America or watching from abroad. Pattern: there’s no single startup visa but there are multi-path options (O-1A for extraordinary ability, E-2 if the country has treaty, IEP, even student visa for skills programs) that immigration lawyers route founders through. The 11-day hard deadline is the wrong deadline to plan around — what matters is whether you can stabilize lawful status for the next 6 months while you do (1) survival income and (2) marketplace salvage. The order matters: lawyer consultation today, not after I figure out what to do with the platform.