What you keep

The venture ends; almost everything you built inside it does not. You can now run a customer conversation that produces evidence, build a price from a floor you can defend, read a set of numbers and say what they mean. Those are the things an employer interviews for and cannot easily test, and you have them whether or not the business worked.

What matters is that the evidence survives in a form someone else can read. Keep the artifacts: the problem file, the pricing working, the numbers, the post-mortem. "I started something and it did not work out" is a sentence that helps nobody. "I ran twelve customer conversations, priced it three ways, took it to market for nine months, hit my own stopping criterion in month eight and closed it in a fortnight without leaving anyone unpaid" is a description of a competent person, and the second version exists only if you wrote things down as you went.

And then the honest question this track has been building towards, which is not whether the idea was good but whether the working life suits you. Self-employment means irregular income, doing the parts of the job you dislike because nobody else will, and holding decisions on your own. Some people find that better than the alternative and some find it worse, and both answers are respectable. Having tried it and concluded it is not for you is a genuinely useful thing to know at twenty-two, and it is not a failed venture — it is a resolved question that most people carry unresolved for years.