[cabinguy]

I appreciate this post but I disagree with it. I started my company in 2003. There were hundreds of times that we should have "folded." Last year we did $500k. This year we will do $1M. Turns out we were just too early, but because we were too early we made all of our mistakes before the market caught up to us. It was a tough road but now we are sitting in the catbird seat.

My advice to others is: never give up.

[DevX101]

What specifically do you disagree with?

I think the startup ecosystem is woefully lacking in negative outcome posts like these. It's fun to write about your awesome traction, your latest funding round, but it's painful and bitter to write about failure. As a result, many new entrepreneurs get a highly distorted perception of the probability of success.

These new entrepreneurs look around and see guys/gals of comparable intelligence and think to themselves, if Jimmy can build a $500M company, I surely can build a $50M company. After all, he's not 10 times smarter than me, and I see everyone winning on every post I read.

What this assessment belies is that for every Jimmy, there are hundreds, if not thousands of other startup attempts that have acheived moderate results or outright failure.

So I welcome the author's post and ecourage more to do more self-reflection, if only to give a more balanced views as to really how hard this road is.

[cabinguy]

Specifically, I disagree with giving up.

[ajmat]

Timing is always an issue, and it's awesome that you were able to grind it out and stay solvent while the market was able to catch up. We aren't proud of 'giving up' but we stand by our convictions. Every situation is different and our decision came down to a multitude of factors. We're not applauding our unwind, but more so trying to convey a little transparency into our decision.

[georgemcbay]

Your story is inspiring but you're making the very common mistake of assuming because you did X and were successful, X is the key to success.

I'm sure there are many others like you who had a "never give up" attitude and put it all on the line for their business and then still drove their companies through the ground, entering financial ruin and perhaps destroying relationships (marriages, etc).

"Never give up" is a good mantra to have, but in reality sometimes you should give up... for now. If you're giving up your current company because the model is unworkable and the brand has no intrinsic value, that's a perfectly valid thing to do.

Sometimes you need to "pivot" more than you really can within the box you've built for your current small company. Regroup in the working class and then start a new thing later... that isn't really "giving up" and sometimes it is 100% the right thing to do.

[mgkimsal]

There were hundreds of times that we should have "folded."

Was one of those times being, oh, I dunno, $180k in personal debt? Just pulled that number out of thin air (didn't happen to me personally), but I would disagree (as would your bankers/financiers/investors) that there is never a time to 'give up'. You could perhaps mask it as a 'pivot' (or whatever term is in vogue at the time) but "giving up" is something some people eventually have to do.

Congrats on doing $1M in business. Realize that you didn't get there solely because you didn't give up, though. There were other factors involved beyond just "keeping on keeping on". I don't even know what those factors were, but they existed.