[gfodor]

You can def be typing while your startup dies. Maybe it's the exception not the rule though.

My last startup was firing on all cylinders, with addicted early adopters, and our team literally shipped features the last day we could pay them because they loved the project and team so much. It didn't matter much to the VCs who declined to invest further. If you can't pay your people, they can't eat, and they can't work on the startup any further. So if you're not profitable, you're always subject to investor sentiment and calculus to survive, and that can often be a totally separate question of if you still have the drive to push further and continue to reply to emails.

In those scenarios where you have investors, you can't just go into 'hibernation mode' and get the founders back on the ramen lifestyle to keep going if you are hitting the trough, because on the way down you will be forced to sell or liquidate all the existing IP and other assets to help existing investors and debtholders recoup their losses. So you're left with nothing but the idea, and insofar as you want to continue to pursue similar ideas you run the risk of getting sued since you've sold the IP.

So, its certainly possible for the market to 'correct' you out of existence, even if you have the deepest will to keep going and are willing to sacrifice almost anything to do so. The best thing you can do at this point is to move on and try to leverage what you've learned or the networks you've built into something you're similarly interested in.