Despite substantial research on job satisfaction in self-employment, we know little about the consequences for the venture when job satisfaction declines after an external shock. Taking the pandemic as an example of an external shock and drawing on 7,000 self-employed in Germany, we investigate how declines in job satisfaction are related to their investment decisions. Having separated job satisfaction into its financial and non-financial aspects, we build in our analysis on two perspectives to predict how reductions in financial and non-financial job satisfaction relate to investments in venture development. Our results show that decreasing financial job satisfaction is positively related to time investments, providing support for the performance feedback perspective. Negative performance, in terms of reduced financial job satisfaction, induces higher search efforts to improve the business situation. Moreover, we observe that reductions in non-financial job satisfaction are negatively associated with both time and monetary investments. This supports the broadening-and-build perspective in that negative experiences narrow the thought-action repertoire, thus hindering resource deployment.