[khanm]

A very good video on project plateaus: http://vimeo.com/13399691 which addresses exactly what you speak of.

But from what I've seen it seems there are a few in a startup who are creators and innovators as they get excited at the fact of generating ideas and talking about them but when it comes time to follow through, things get tough and interest wanders.

Having a few partner as you have is ideal as there is some accountability. Everyone should be motivating everyone else. Also try to keep building from small iterations and tasks instead of having a very large goal. Break it up into small cycles and most importantly get feedback on each of those cycles from potential users outside of your family.

this has been asked before on HN located here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185359

[amaranand]

I think my situation is pretty different from the one in the other thread. My team and I have put 3-4 months of actual code in our last project. Last project we got a working (albeit slightly buggy)prototype working of a pretty technical (hard) project.

When it came time for the stretch run to add polish and really get the project stable, we lost focus and motivation.

Unfortunate really, but I want to avoid the situation in the future