In my case, the pay was never phenomenal, and in fact was way, way below my salary at megacorps on a per-hour basis. But we kept saying that things would get better. It was OK for a while, but our business was in a high-tech field that was fast evolving, and we needed to constantly redesign to keep up with competition. Thought we were smarter and had a better initial design, but they were bigger and had more resources. We could not continue to fund new developments if we were barely able to pay bills, and the founding members of the business including myself worked for free for a while at the end.
I am no longer in that field and have not followed it. But I occasionally wonder if our customers, who were big businesses, missed us. Now that we are gone, our competition can jack up their prices. Well, maybe, maybe not. It could still be dog-eat-dog as it was. I am just glad I survived it, even though I still have emotional scars. Not too many financial scars though, thank heaven.