Ethereum scaling for our game ate our entire seed round and we had nothing to show investors

Raised a small seed round last year to build a blockchain game. 12 months runway and a decent team. Spent the first 4 months deploying our own custom rollup because we thought we needed full control. Hired devops, spent probably $50k just on infrastructure and tools. Got it working but kept breaking. Database corruption, sequencer crashes, bridge exploits. Every week a new critical issue taking days to fix. Meanwhile, our game wasn't getting built. Our artists and designers were waiting for infrastructure so they could test. We had concept art and design docs but nothing playable. On month 4 our lead investor asked for a demo. We had basically nothing and he was rightfully frustrated. That's when it hit me. We were treating infrastructure as our competitive advantage when it should've been the game itself. So pivoted to caldera, and deployed in 3 days so the team could focus on building the game. Shipped a playable prototype 2 weeks later. Burned 4 months and $60k learning this. Unless you're an infrastructure company, use existing tools and focus on what makes your product unique. Users won't care what rollup you use, they'll care if your product is good.